“Let’s stick with ten thousand,” Ruiz said dryly.
Pierce stared wonderingly at his lightpad. “That would mean that there are more than two hundred million Cygnans out there.”
They all turned instinctively to look at the silhouetted shape on the screen. With nothing to give it scale, it resembled nothing so much as a collection of jackstraws.
Ruiz nodded. “Or, to take the lower and upper ends of Maybury’s scale, anywhere from twenty-one million to four billion individuals.”
“But why?” Pierce breathed. “What did they come here for?”
“An army!” Tu Jue-chen said, her eyes glittering. “A—a—” She hesitated. “Ch’in lueh che!”
“An expeditionary force,” Jameson said helpfully. She nodded.
“Colonists,” Pierce said. “We know they’re doing something to Jupiter.”
“Refugees,” Chu said, peering over his glasses. “They left their world because it was dying.”
“Maybe they are not leave their world behind,” Li said. “Maybe they take it with them.”
“The Cygnus Object?” Ruiz said.
Li nodded.
“Mizz Maybury,” Ruiz said, “let’s have a look.”
She moved to the instrument panel. The image on the screen shook. There was a blurry twitch as the telescope’s aim swept past the alien fleet, past the kidnapped moon it was circling, to the black void a million miles to the left of Jupiter.
The blurs resolved themselves into the Cygnus planet, a sooty ball which was crowding Callisto on the elliptical orbit which intersected the path of its own former moon. Now it too was a moon of Jupiter—the biggest of them all. It was making a mess of the orbits of its stepsisters.
“Bring it up to maximum, will you?” Ruiz said.
The ball sprang toward them, filling the screen. Jameson looked down through wisps of hydrogen clouds at the face of hell.
It was a bleak, rocky desert, split with deep cracks from the tidal forces which were trying to tear it apart. The cracks steamed with noxious gases being squeezed out of the interior. Some of the cracks looked to be hundreds of miles wide, and God knew how deep—canyons that dwarfed anything on Earth. When the Cygnus planet came to its final equilibrium—if Jupiter didn’t break it up first; the observatory computer was still trying to make up its mind about that—the shifts and grindings of these gravitational wounds would sculpt that world’s only features.
It had no others. There were no craters, as on other airless worlds, no sea basins or continents or mountain ranges. It was a world without geology, a world that had never been born. It had come out of the cosmos as smooth as an egg, and Jupiter had cracked it.
“Rock,” Ruiz said. “Bald rock and the traces of a hydrogen atmosphere. Nothing ever lived here.” He turned to Li and shook his head. “This isn’t the Cygnans’ home planet.”
“Why did they bring it along then?” Jameson said.
“Mizz Maybury,” Ruiz called out. “Swing the telescope back to Jupiter.”
Another million-mile twitch, and Jupiter was back on the screen, a vast marbled presence. The three-pronged shadow of an alien ship lay across it like an insect claw. The bands of colored clouds seethed and boiled, flowing visibly toward the equator. The familiar horizontal belts of Jupiter had been gone for some weeks now, replaced by these convolving streaks. Local eddies swirled in thousand-mile curlicues, a meteorologist’s nightmare. Jameson could barely make out the pale pink splotch that once had been the Great Red Spot. It had shrunk to a fifth of its former size, and it was leached of color.
Maybury panned slowly across the cloudscape till she came to the edge of space. The bracelet that Jupiter had been wearing lately showed as a thin bright line etched against the ebony void.
“I’ll tell you why they brought it along—” Ruiz began.
An alarm sounded stridently, and the ship lurched. Jameson felt his feet press against the observatory floor with about a hundredth of a g. He had weight now—about a pound and three quarters of it. Tethered objects in the room began to settle toward the floor. The ship had begun the final braking maneuver that would swing it past Callisto and put it in orbit around Jupiter half a million miles beyond the fringes of the radiation belt.
Ruiz opened his mouth again, but before he could speak, there was a shriek from Tu Jue-chen.
“Huo-hua!” she gasped, pointing. “Lights!”
Jameson turned with the rest to stare out the curved view window.
Out there in the blackness, a thousand fireflies glowed and pulsed: a swarm of small vehicles coming toward them. They were too far away for details to be seen, but they were moving fast. It was an enormous phosphorescent cloud against the deep of space.
Maybury got a telescope pointed at the swarm. Blurred shapes bounced back and forth on one of the overhead display screens. Jameson craned his neck, trying to make sense out of the irregular contours.
And then the image compensator had one of them pinned down, and Jameson caught his first glimpse of a Cygnan. It quivered on the screen, a sleek many-legged shape clinging to a stick, like a lizard on a broomstraw.
Ruiz was beside him. “They’ve decided to notice us,” he said.
Chapter 13
Half the crew was crowded two and three deep against the long, curving observation rail, with more men and women pouring into the bridge’s lower level every minute. The Chinese and American fusion/fission teams were still at their posts in the tail of the ship, and Brough and the rest of the medical staff had elected to stay with their patients in the ring, but it seemed that everyone else who didn’t have a station to tend had jammed into the ship’s command center, with Boyle’s and Hsieh’s tacit consent.
At a time like this, you wanted to be with other members of your species.
To the naked eye, the Cygnans were still nothing more than a cloud of campfire sparks in the void, but they were coming fast. The big observation screen forward occasionally fixed a brief glimpse of a blurred individual form; Pierce and Maybury had stayed below in the observatory to work the telescopes, and they were piping in their images.
“They’re traveling a quarter million miles on those broomsticks, without a ship around them,” Ruiz said. “They must be used to space.”
“How long will it take for them to get here?” Jameson asked.
“Three and a half hours for the trip. I don’t know when they left.”
“Three and a half hours?”
“They’re accelerating at a constant one g.”
Jameson turned back to the window in time to see the glowing patch of light suddenly flare up. A low murmur went up from the crowd along he rail.
“That was their turnover point,” Ruiz said, “They’ll be here in an hour and three quarters now.”
Jameson looked across at the big screen with its magnified image. The points of light were lengthening. They turned into lines that crosshatched the dark seemingly at random, making a net across the sky. Maybury managed to catch a fleeting close-up of one of the creatures. It was reversing itself on its stick, twirling it around in a sinuous six-handed grasp. Around it, its thousands of companions presumably were doing the same. The crosshatched lines of light shrank to points again. The glowing patch out the window faded.
Somebody tapped Jameson on the shoulder. He turned around and saw Caffrey.