of seconds until photon excitation reached the critical point; then a spurt of energetic light was going to drill him clean through.
He floated relentlessly toward her, powerless to change direction. With the light of Jupiter on her, she was limned sharp and clean in his vision. Behind the square visor her face was a blushing peach, distorted by fury. The half-naked apparition before her had ruined her plans, probably beyond salvage. Only five members of the bomb crew were left, without Yao to direct them.
Jameson was but a dozen feet from her now. He wondered if it would hurt.
A thread of violet light stretched past him and winked off. Maybury, floating forgotten behind Chia, had come out of her daze of grief. Or perhaps she had only been waiting. She had Chia’s wrist in a small gloved hand. The laser flashed again. Then Maybury’s other hand in its stubby-fingered gloves was spread over Chia’s faceplate, unscrewing the fastenings. Chia struggled, like an overstuffed doll in her spacesuit, but she couldn’t get her am back far enough to dislodge Maybury. The faceplate blew off and the peachlike face behind it burst with running juices.
Jameson collided with the tangled bodies. Gently he pried Maybury’s hands loose and pried the laser from Chia’s grasp. He gave the body a little push to disengage it, and made Maybury understand that he wanted to keep holding on to her for the use of her suit jets.
No more than fifty feet away, Gifford’s wide form blocked the stars, the screwdriver still clasped in a mittened fist. He was conferring, helmet to helmet, with one of his Chinese allies, his other hand gripping the man’s sleeve. Jameson tensed, waiting to see what the two of them would do. The laser in his hand was very comforting.
The helmets came apart. Gifford still was steadying himself with a grip on his friend’s arm. Then, with a swift, savage motion, he plunged the screwdriver into the belly of the man’s suit. Jameson couldn’t tell immediately if it had penetrated. Gifford reversed his grip and smashed the weighted handle of the screwdriver into the Chinese faceplate. He kept hammering until the visor went frosty. The blue suit had become floppy. Gifford held the screwdriver up, letting Jameson see it, then tossed it away.
Jameson nodded.
Gifford swam over to another white suit, which had to be Fiaccone, and the two of them went over to get Smitty. Jameson could tell that it was Smitty because he could see a glint of golden hair inside the helmet; it had come undone, filling the bowl. They all put their helmets together for a minute, conferring. Then they waved their hands outward toward Jameson in the universal gesture.
Other white suits were drifting toward Jameson on short bursts of thruster: the prisoners; nobody among the remaining ten Chinese was bothering to keep any of them under guard. One of the Americans—an undersized suit that had to contain Kiernan—had gotten hold of some kind of floating tool, and he was shaking it threateningly in the direction of the Chinese. It must have massed considerable because Kiernan was bobbing up and down at the end of the handle almost as much as the tool was.
The clustered Chinese had turned to watch something. Jameson looked in the same direction.
A pencil of light was drawn against the frosty void—the broomstick coming back. The American who had chased it was bringing it back. Jameson could see the white doll-like figure hunched over the shaft. The bubble with its curled-up Cygnan and fetal humanoids was still snubbed in place.
The figure, swung the shaft under, climbing for a moment on a pillar of fire, then did a complete backflip, rising on arms and legs like a jockey. The searing beam of light traced a large circle around the scattered swarm of people, then died out as most of the riders’ forward velocity was canceled.
It had been an expert braking maneuver.
It also had been an object lesson.
The Chinese went into a quick conference by radio. Jameson could tell they were talking by the amount of nodding and gesturing that went on.
The broomstick rider drifted in Jameson’s direction, using suit jets to damp out the remaining momentum. As he came close, Jameson saw that it was Mike Berry, with a big grin on his face.
The Chinese finished their discussion. They made ostentatious palms-outward gestures and floated over to join the Americans. What was left of the Jupiter expedition was united again.
A last blue-clad figure, awkward in a spacesuit that was too small a fit, had been left behind. That would be Maggie in her borrowed suit. After a moment, she followed. She had nowhere else to go.
Chapter 30
“Where are the six-legs?” Li asked, sweating inside his helmet. He’d removed his faceplate and mittens so that he could work faster, even though the Callisto landing module wasn’t fully pressurized yet. “They must know for long time now that we here in ship.”
“I don’t know,” Jameson replied tightly. “I just hope that they don’t come after us for at least a couple of hours. By then we ought to be far enough away and moving fast enough so they’ll figure it isn’t worth the bother of chasing us.”
He continued working with his screwdriver on the guts of the dismantled control panel. He’d torn the plastic bag off his head as soon as he safely could. The Cygnan spray-on spacesuit already was starting to flake away in white scales that looked like dead skin—evidently a consequence of being exposed to atmosphere after being in vacuum. When his job in the lander was finished, somebody was going to have to come out with a spare spacesuit to ferry him back to the ship.
Maybury was wedged uncomfortably against him, crouching in front of the luminous squiggles of the lander’s computer console. The cockpit wasn’t really big enough for three people. She had been plotting escape orbits through a radio link to the Jupiter ship’s data banks, but now she was looking through a telescope out the bowl- shaped port.
“Commander, you’d better have a look,” she said.
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.
