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.
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.