The Jupiter Theft Part 27

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 s.h.i.+p 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-a.s.sured 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, w.a.n.g, 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d, 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 a.s.sistant, 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 ma.s.sive 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.

"Quent!" Mike bellowed as they approached. "What the h.e.l.l are you doing there?"

The boy broke off his recitation to Sue and turned to face Mike and Jameson. "Jeez, Mike, I mean what was I supposed to do? Klein, he told me Ihadda obey orders."

Klein's sleek head quested in Mike's direction, then paused to examine Jameson. "Thanks for bringing him over, Commander," he said. "It saves me from having to send someone to get him."

"Listen, Klein," Jameson began, fighting down anger.

"We're going to need him to activate the boron reaction. Quentin says he can't do it by himself."

"Berry's not going. And neither are those other people."

Klein lifted the gun and pointed it at Mike. "He's going. Berry, get over there with the others. That's an order."

"The h.e.l.l I'm going!" Mike said.

Klein said, "If you don't get over there in about three seconds, you'll take the consequences."

"Yeah? When you get back to Earth, tell them to come on out here and arrest me."

"You're a traitorous son of a b.i.t.c.h," Klein said tightly, "and if I can't use you, I'm going to-"

Jameson stepped quickly between Mike and the gun.

"This has gone far enough," he said, with as much force as he could muster. "Klein, didn't you understand a word Dr. Ruiz said? If you interfere with the Cygnans-if yousucceed in interfering with them-you're going to endanger the whole human species."

Klein's voice cracked, showing the strain he must have been under. "I've had it with you, Jameson! You and Ruiz keeping essential data from me, and then interfering-Step away from that man before I give you the whole clip right in your-"

Mike stepped from behind Jameson. "Hold it," he said. "Don't get yeasty. I'm going." He gave Jameson a ghastly grin. "Say good-bye to our lovely hosts for me, and try to drop a line now and then." He moved over to the group huddled against the wall. Quentin immediately began haranguing him, gesturing with both hands.

There was the screech of protesting ratchets, and the huge circular lock rolled in its slot, mounting an incline. "Wan pi te," Chia said, and gathered up her tools. Yao, with the help of a couple of muscular missile men, slid the great barred door open.

"Hurry," Yao called over his shoulder. He and Chia were pus.h.i.+ng their people through the gate into the vast empty exhibition hall outside.

Klein looked thoughtful. "Just a minute," he said. "We'd better have an astronomer."

Chapter 25.

"You can go straight to h.e.l.l," Ruiz said, "if you can find the place. I don't intend to give you the slightest help."

He stood facing Klein, his back stiff and straight and his stubbled chin thrust out, looking like an immensely dignified scarecrow. He was bad news now, and people were beginning to edge away from his vicinity.

Some of Klein's muscle, four or five husky missile men, had drifted over to fan out on either side of him, hefting their makes.h.i.+ft weapons. The girl, Smitty, was among them. Jameson had taken her for one of the men at first, with her broad shoulders and big frame, but now he could see her b.r.e.a.s.t.s like flat dinner plates under the man's unders.h.i.+rt she wore, solid as the meat of arm and shoulder. There was no question of Klein's leaving withouther .

"Don't make us drag you," Klein said. "You could get damaged and slow us up."

"Then get on with it and damage me," Ruiz said. "But I won't lift a finger to help you put Earth in jeopardy."

Klein lifted his gun. "I've seen your file, Ruiz," he said, his voice rising. "With your Reliability Index, I'm at a loss to understand why they trusted you on this mission in the first place. I'd give you summary termination right now if I felt like wasting ammunition."

Beefy hands closed on Ruiz's arms. Smitty was behind him, an arm crooked around his throat. Ruiz tried to scuffle with them. Klein looked around at the crowd with worried eyes.

Gifford, hauling a limp Kiernan through the gate, said, "We don't need the old crock. Maybury does all his figuring for him anyway."

"Leave her out of it!" Ruiz cried. He actually broke free for a moment, and then a lead pipe came down on his head. He crumpled to the ground. Smitty and one of the Chinese began methodically to kick him in the ribs.

"Stop it!" It was Maybury. She ran to Ruiz and cradled his battered head. "Dr. Ruiz, Dr. Ruiz, say something!" Ruiz's head lolled. He was as limp as an empty pressure suit.

They dragged her off him and hustled her through the gate, her feet off the ground. Jameson knelt beside Ruiz. "He's alive," he said. "Somebody go get Janet, quickly!"

Klein's troops and their prisoners filed through the opening in the gate, weighed down with their improvised weapons and bundles of supplies. Somewhere nearby, Jameson heard Liz say bitterly, "They took practically all the food we got from the s.h.i.+p's stores."

The delay with Ruiz had been a mistake for Klein. As the last couple of Chinese got through the gate, backing up and brandis.h.i.+ng their weapons warningly at the people left inside, somebody up front piercingly yelled: "Liu hsin, liu hsin!"

Dmitri was shaking Jameson by the shoulder. "An alarm," he said. "They must have set off some kind of alarm when they opened the door. The Cygnans are coming.

Jameson heaved himself to his feet and ran to the gate. Ignoring the threatening gestures of the Chinese in the rear guard, he sprang to the bars and hauled himself up for a better look.

Two Cygnans were skittering down the curving corridor of the hall of bipeds. One of them was down, snake low, on all sixes, the long tubular snout aimed like an arrowhead. The other trotted on four legs like some nightmare centaur, cradling a gleaming blunderbuss in its flexible arms.

It was Tetrachord and Triad, come to put the animals back in their cages.

The neural weapon had a short range, a cone of modulated microwaves that lost its efficiency at twenty or thirty feet. But when Tetrachord fanned it over the twenty-odd people in Klein's party, the floor was going to be covered with blind, writhing bundles of short-circuited nerves who would be kept that way until they could be hauled back to the cage.

Klein's group split in two and scurried to opposite sides of the hall. Basic military tactics. A pair of zookeepers wouldn't be much on strategy.

Jameson clung to the bars, taking in the scene. In the cusped vestibule that formed the intersection of the narrow ends of the five major habitats, the fleeing humans had spread out in two broken arcs that bent toward each other like pincers, some fifty feet apart. No matter which angle the Cygnans approached from, the neural weapon was not going to be able to sweep the nearer half of one of the two lines.

As if realizing this, Tetrachord veered first to the right, then to the left. Triad failed to change direction fast enough, and that was what saved her.

At a distance of about ten yards, Tetrachord, still running, reared up and shouldered his blunderbuss-or, rather, deployed it with the bulb-shaped grip braced in one rubbery claw. Jameson, seeing the whole thing in the slow-motion vision of stimulated adrenals, irrelevantly admired the unbroken rhythm of the Cygnan running pattern as he s.h.i.+fted from four legs to three to two.

And then the creature's long flexible head disappeared in an explosion of orange gore.

Jameson caught a frozen glimpse of Klein picking himself off the floor, where he'd thrown himself for a p.r.o.ne shot. Then he realized that Tetrachord's headless body was still running, and he remembered that a Cygnan's brain was somewhere below the neck, a swelling of that central ganglion. He shuddered, wondering what thoughts might be going on within the blind, deaf isolation of the body. Klein was in no hurry to fire his explosive darts again; perhaps he enjoyed watching the creature's agony. Tetrachord dropped to four legs, then six, the neural weapon clattering to the floor, running more and more jerkily, then lowering the long sleek body almost deliberately, the legs still twitching. A great gout of orange fluid, thick as syrup, was spurting from the tattered stem of the neck.

A sound like a steam whistle split the sudden hush, and Jameson saw a golden flash streak between the two lines of humans toward the safety of the cage. It was Triad, chittering with fear, her six legs peddling in a feathery blur.

Klein had lost his chance to fire at her. He swiveled around, his gun held stiff-armed, and for a moment Jameson feared that the man was insane enough to hose down the humans cl.u.s.tered at the cagefront, and some of his own people, with a stream of microflechettes. The moment pa.s.sed, and Klein lowered the gun as the Cygnan oozed past the open gate and, flinching away from the humans, cowered against the wall, afraid to go farther.

Klein laughed. He strode to the cage and looked in. Jameson dropped to the ground. His eyes met Klein's.

"Stupid snakes!" Klein said. "Ruiz was right about one thing-their brains must have gotten frozen six million years ago. They don't look so tough now. We're going to make it, Jameson."

"Listen, Klein," Jameson said. "All right, escape if you can. But don't use the nukes."

Klein didn't bother to reply. He motioned Jameson and the others away from the door with his gun, then rolled it shut all the way. There was a solid-sounding thunk, then a series of clicks as ratchets fell into place. Klein tried the door with a tug of his powerful arms. It held firm. He turned on his heel and walked away.

Jameson followed him with his eyes as he walked the length of the vestibule toward the headless Cygnan body. It had stopped twitching. Klein bent and picked up the neural weapon. He handed it to Chia, and the little procession, with its herded prisoners, moved past the rows of cages down the hall and disappeared around a bend.

A circle of people were gawking at the huddled Triad, keeping well out of reach of the rasping snout. It hadn't occurred to anybody to try to harm her. Jameson went over to her. It was up to him to try to retrieve the situation.

The other people let him through. They looked at him expectantly. Perhaps they were wondering what the Cygnans would do to them in the morning. He bent over. "Careful, Tod," somebody said.

The Cygnan was s.h.i.+vering violently and uncontrollably. Her three eyestalks waved purposelessly around the central orifice at the tip of the flexible snout, like the tentacles of a sea anemone. Jameson doubted that the creature had distinguished him from the other suddenly dangerous animals that surrounded her.

He tried her name three times before he got her attention. Then her long head quested toward him like an elephant's trunk and she whistled the three tones that meant "Ja-me-son." It sounded a little like the call of a whippoorwill, and for some reason Jameson read pathos into it.

He looked her over carefully. She didn't appear to be hurt, but she was behaving strangely. A human being in the grip of some powerful and uncontrollable emotion might writhe the way she was now doing.

Was it grief over the loss of her mate? Fear? What the h.e.l.l was it that a Cygnan felt?

The rings of muscle were contracting in sequence down the whole length of her tubular body, like a species of peristalsis. She coiled and twisted with each successive wave, so that he was able to see her form all the way around.

The parasite was missing.

There was a lighter patch on her skin where it had clung, and he could see the six little wounds where it had dug in its feet. At the top of the oval patch, where the tiny head had been embedded, was an ulcerated sore.

Dmitri was kneeling beside him. "Is the creature sick?" he said. He cast a professional eye over the Cygnan. "Do you notice-there's a slight turgidity of surface tissue, especially around the mucosa of the eyes and mouth. That can't be normal."

Jameson took a closer look and saw that Dmitri was right. There were other changes. The gold-and-russet pattern of her reticulated hide seemed brighter, more vivid in color. Jameson had the nagging feeling that some important datum was just beyond his grasp. Why, when the alarm went off, had the Cygnan run off helter skelter after her mate without thinking to arm herself?

"Triad," he tried again, but the Cygnan was warbling to herself. The swollen eye polyps were waving at random again.

"Oh G.o.d, look!" a woman's voice said over by the bars.

"Go get a hoe or something," someone else said, and there was the sound of running feet heading toward Kiernan's vegetable garden on the other side of the enclosure.

Jameson straightened up and went over to the gate. A dozen men and women were staring, fascinated, at something in the hall beyond.

"What's going on?" Jameson said.

"Look!" Beth Oliver said, her voice filled with loathing.

Jameson peered through the bars. A soft pulpy thing the size of a large frog was crawling painfully across the floor toward the cage. It was one of the Cygnan parasites. It had detached itself from Tetrachord's cooling body and was inching along blindly on its weak little legs.

"Its host is dead," Hsieh said to Jameson. "It senses the presence of another Cygnan in here with us-like lice deserting a dead rat for the nearest warm body."

The thing pulled itself along with snail slowness. Jameson could see that it had no head to speak of-just a long thin sucking tube that probed the air like an antenna.

"My father told stories of the prison camp in Khabarovsk, where they kept him after the Yakut liberation, before the Americans agreed to take in Russian refugees," Dmitri said softly. "The prisoners were plagued by bedbugs-Siberian bedbugs, the size of dog ticks. When spring came, after the first thaw, they got permission from the guards to leave their infested bedding and sleep on the bare ground, fifty feet from their huts. They settled down-it was still light-and they saw a horrible brown tide spilling out of the huts and covering the ground like a carpet, coming toward them. It was the bedbugs. They can sense the presence of human blood even at that distance. In jungle warfare in the last century, American troops used them to detect guerrillas. They carried bedbugs in a special box, open to the air on one side, and when the bedbugs smelled blood-only human blood-they made excited little cries that could be picked up by sensitive microphones in the boxes..."

Jameson looked over at the writhing Triad. "Dmitri, could that be some sort of toxic reaction?"

Dmitri thought it over. "Maybe. We know too little about Cygnan physiology. It's possible immune reaction could rid host of parasite, leave host sick with its own antibodies."

The parasite had covered the distance to the bars. Everybody involuntarily pulled back out of its way as it squeezed itself through the bars.

"Ugh, disgusting!" Beth said.