The Jupiter Theft Part 32

In a split-second glance, Jameson saw that Gifford's feet had made contact with the slope about two hundred feet down. He was running desperately, trying to keep on his feet, unable to stop because of his momentum. He'd have to keep running, faster and faster, all the way to the bottom, hoping that he wouldn't take a tumble. If he survived without broken bones, he wouldn't be back up here in a hurry.

With the whirling hammer gone, the other Chinese were closing in on Jameson. One of them was almost on top of him, raising an ax over his head with both hands. Jameson reached for the wrench in his belt, with the sickening realization that he wasn't going to get it out in time, wasn't going to be able to dodge out of the way, before the ax blade came cras.h.i.+ng down on him.

But then, in a slow-motion dream that was partially pumping adrenalin and partially low gravity, he saw Ruiz scrambling the last few feet to the top and thrusting with his spear. The Chinese screamed as the lashed butcher knife slid into his liver, and the ax went spinning out of his grip.

Then Dmitri was there, wading into the fray with the fire ax. His face looked white and determined.

Chopping people up wasn't in his temperament, but he'd made himself realize that any hesitation, any flinching, could be fatal. He swung the ax two-handed at the nearest Chinese, his eyes closed. The Chinese dodged the ax easily, and one of his friends brought a steel bar crunching down on Dmitri's shoulder with a force that lifted his feet off the ridge. Probably he'd been aiming at Dmitri's head, but the blow disabled Dmitri anyway, smas.h.i.+ng his clavicle. Dmitri, with a surprised expression on his face, slowly crumpled. He landed in a sitting position on the metal slope and began a toboggan slide back down where he'd started from.

Ruiz was trying to fend off an angry-looking opponent with his fibergla.s.s pole. The knife had broken off in his victim's body. Jameson crouched, the wrench in his fist, keeping his eye on the other two surviving Chinese.

Where the devil was Maggie?

The question was answered a moment later when a Molotov c.o.c.ktail came soaring up from the cliffside below. She'd aimed too high. Instead of shattering at the feet of the Chinese, the bottle, trailing a flaming wick, arced high over their heads and began to fall slowly down on the other side of the ridge. It hit about a hundred feet down and exploded in a puff of bright flame. Fiery rivulets coursed their way down the incline.

Shouts and movement came from below. All she had succeeded in doing was to attract attention.

Jameson caught sight of her, clambering up the cliff with a knife in her teeth, her red hair billowing, her skinny knees sc.r.a.ped and b.l.o.o.d.y. And then he was ducking under a blur of metal as a bandy-legged fellow with an earnestly murderous expression swung a pry bar at him. Jameson thrust with his crescent wrench and caught the man under the chin. There was a sickening crunch, and the man folded, choking to death on a crushed larynx.

Ruiz's opponent got past the fibergla.s.s pole, club raised. Ruiz was still tough and smart, despite his age.

He was a graduate-or survivor-of the duckboard streets of the New Manhattan refugee camp, after all. He resisted the natural impulse to back away and give his enemy a clear swing at him, and instead got under the club and started hugging him. The man struggled to stay on his feet as Ruiz began gleefully to bite, gouge, and use a bony knee where it would be most painful.

The remaining Chinese had frozen, club in hand, to look at his dying friend. His image had a snapshot clarity to Jameson as he crouched there with the bloodied spanner still in his hand. The missile man was a big fellow, with a jaw like a pelican's pouch and a spare tire around his waist. Perhaps they'd chosen him for his size. He didn't seem to have much stomach for fighting. Jameson reached under his s.h.i.+rt and threw a handful of chisels at the man's face. The man threw up a thick forearm to protect himself. Jameson unfolded like a jackknife and pushed him heartily in the chest. The man yelled, "Aii!" and lost his balance.

He rolled like a barrel down the slope toward his comrades. He was going to be a ma.s.s of bruises when he reached bottom.

A couple of people were coming up, scaling the slope. Jumping did no good; you were likely to find no handhold and have to start all over again at the bottom. It would be a while before they got here. There was a movement of blue ants toward the colossal clockwork down at the end of the cave; there must be an alternate route there.

He hurried to Ruiz on one hand and two feet. Ruiz and the missile man were doing their best to strangle each other. The Chinese had dropped his weapon; Ruiz had given him no choice with his gouging and biting. Ruiz was getting the worst of it now. The man was pressing his thumbs into Ruiz's larynx. Ruiz lost his grip and weakly tried to break the man's little finger-an old New Manhattan trick. Jameson laid his wrench along the missile man's skull. Ruiz got up, rubbing his throat. Together they tumbled the stunned Chinese down into the metal valley.

Ruiz tottered unsteadily on his feet. He turned to face Jameson.

"Thanks, I-"

He never finished. There was a sputtering sound from the shadows at the end of the ridge, and Jameson was spattered with Ruiz's blood.

Ruiz's body began its nightmare drift down the slope. Jameson went flat and with a convulsive twist levered himself below the opposite side of the ridge. A stream of angry mosquitoes zzzz'd overhead.

"Get down!" he yelled to Maggie, just in time to keep her from sticking her head over the peak.

Before he could do anything, Klein's thin face rose above the metal rim, about twenty feet away, where the shadowed hugeness of the Cygnan machinery overhung the cliff. Klein aimed his nasty little gun at him.

"Stay where you are, Jameson," Klein called. "Stay alive a minute. McInnes, move away from him."

"Do what he says, Maggie," Jameson said.

Jameson weighed the situation. He could launch himself in a hopeless scramble toward Klein as soon as Maggie was out of the line of fire. He might as well die trying. Or he could stay where he was and wait for Klein to rake him with automatic fire. There was no cover on that featureless metal slope.

He threw the wrench at Klein, not too fast.

Klein unhurriedly moved aside a couple of inches, and the wrench went sailing lazily past him. The aim hadn't been good.

Klein seemed to be enjoying himself. "Got anything left to throw, Jameson?" he asked.

"As a matter of fact, I have," Jameson said. "Here, you can have it."

He reached around to the back of his waistband and drew out the Cygnan cattle prod. His thumb found the recessed stud in the bulbous handle and, with a metal-bending strength impossible to Cygnan fingers, jammed it full on.

He tossed the instrument in a slow underhand pitch toward Klein, setting it spinning. His aim was better this time. Klein, with a ferret's grin, batted it aside contemptuously.

The prod's center of gravity was somewhere in its three inches of bulbous grip. The slender p.r.o.ngs spun round it with a radius of fifteen inches. Naturally, whatever it was going to hit, it would hit p.r.o.ng end first.

Klein howled as a thousand wasps stung him. The hand holding the gun jerked upward spasmodically, sending the weapon flying toward the shadows. Klein's senses were gone, erased by fifty thousand volts.

Jameson launched himself along the ridge in a flat dive and caught Klein's twitching body before it could fall. "Maggie!" he yelled. "Get the gun!"

Klein was moaning in his arms. He was limp, paralyzed. Jameson could appreciate the pain the man was feeling. He had felt it himself. It was like sticking your finger into a light socket.

He saw Maggie working her way along the rooflike slope toward the looming shapes of machinery.

There was a service platform there; the gun would be somewhere on it. With the gun to hold off Chia's gang, and with Klein as hostage, there would be a chance to throw a monkey wrench into the mad plan to bomb the stars.h.i.+p. Eventually a Cygnan would happen along, even in this uninhabited housing for the gigantic mechanism that folded the arm of the s.h.i.+p.

"Maggie, hurry up!" he called.

He could see the little forms of Klein's reinforcements, halfway up the slope now. Klein stirred in his arms. He'd require another touch of the prod soon. Jameson could see it, just a few feet away. Klein's convulsive spasm had slammed it against the slope, where it rested in a shallow corroded groove.

"You... b.a.s.t.a.r.d," Klein said weakly.

There was movement in the shadows. Jameson turned his head to see Maggie standing there under the fifty-foot teeth of the gears. She had the gun.

She pointed it at him.

"Let him go, Tod," she said.

"Good work, MacInnes," Klein said.

Maggie stood where she was, very sensibly not coming any closer to Jameson. "Are you going to take me with you?" she said.

Klein moved away from Jameson to leave Maggie a clear field of fire along the ridge. "Yes," he said. "I promise you."

"What about a suit?"

"You can have Mei-mei's suit. I'll fix it up with Chia. You can run a computer as well as Mei-mei can."

"What's this all about, Maggie?" Jameson said.

"Go on, tell him," Klein said.

Maggie faced Jameson defiantly, her knuckles white on the gun. "I work for the Reliability Board too,"

she said. "You've been my a.s.signment."

Jameson's knees felt weak. "I don't believe it," he whispered.

"That's right," Klein said, amused. "Her first a.s.signment was your friend Berry. She turned in a good report on him-I don't know why they let him stay on the mission. Then she was told to watch you. You were a tough nut to crack, Jameson. She couldn't get you to make any Unreliable statements. You were a good little government boy. I told her to keep working on you. I knew you'd slip sometime. And you did. You were a Rad all along, weren't you?"

"You're crazy," Jameson said. He turned to Maggie. "Maggie, how could you do a thing like that?"

She tossed her head. "You wouldn't know!" she said bitterly. "You've had it all, right from the start.

Government family, government education, the right friends and the right opinions. How would you like to have a New England code in your pa.s.sbook, a grandfather who fought in the Secession, and a father who always got you into trouble by talking like a Rad?"

"She turned him in when she was sixteen, Jameson," Klein said. "That was what got her on our books.

We okayed her for the s.p.a.ce Resources Agency training program after that. She's worked for us ever since."

"That apartment!" Jameson said. "And the ski weekends at the MacDonald, and the concert tickets, and the collection of antique plastic bottles! No wonder you could afford them!"

The gun never wavered, but her eyes begged him. "You don't understand! You wereborn Government!

I had tofight for it! It was get into a government program or be a dirty Privie all my life!"

Almost, Jameson was moved. But then he remembered Ruiz's body tumbling down out of sight, and Boyle, crippled.

"You're right, Maggie," he said. "I don't understand."

Maggie's face had become ugly. "I'll tell you something!" she spat. "You're a bore and a fool, and you're lousy in bed, and I'm glad I'll never have to listen to that stupid Giles Farnaby music again!"

"Maggie," Jameson said steadily. "They left you behind. They wrote you off. Don't you realize that? Give me the gun."

Klein stooped and picked up the Cygnan prod. "Good-bye, Jameson," he said. There was a dreadful searing pain, and then Jameson, blind, deaf, and paralyzed, was falling into an endless abyss.

There was a red darkness with bright sparks of pain drifting through it. There was a hollow silence with the sound of distant surf booming behind it, and over that, the sound of a woman sobbing.

He stirred, and hurts stabbed all through a body that was monstrously stiff and swollen and raw-edged.

Presently he became aware that the sound of surf was within his skull, and the woman sobbing was outside it.

His eyes flicked open. He was sprawled, half sitting and half reclining, against the base of the metal slope. Through blurred vision he saw dim figures busily moving about on the floor of a metal plain that bulged with odd protuberances as big as glacial boulders.

The sobbing came from Maybury, a dozen yards to his left. She was huddled over the body of Dr. Ruiz, cradling his broken head. "Dr. Ruiz, Dr. Ruiz," she whimpered. She gulped air. "Her-Hernando..."

Chia was standing a little beyond, looking down at Maybury impatiently. Her smooth, exquisite face was smudged, dark hair straggling around it. She was wearing a quilted blue s.p.a.cesuit and had one of the cylindrical Chinese helmets tucked under her arm. In her ungloved hand she held a hand-laser.

"Get her into a suit," Chia said.

Numbly Maybury allowed herself to be led away and stuffed into a s.p.a.cesuit. Jameson's vision was clearing. He could see that almost everybody was suited up.

He tried to move, and discovered that he was tied up, wrists and ankles. He wriggled a bit. It hurt a lot, but nothing seemed to be broken.

Gifford came limping over, bent like an old man. "Awake now, you son of a b.i.t.c.h?" he said admiringly.

"I'll bet you have a sore backside. You slid down it like a playground slide and never bounced your head once. That's more than I can say for a couple of the poor b.a.s.t.a.r.ds you shoved over the edge. Five dead, all together. Chia wants to burn you, slow. She and Klein are still arguing about it."

"Why am I still alive?" Jameson said.

"You can thank Maggie. She told Klein there wasn't any reason to kill you now that it's over. Said it wouldn't look good on the report. Ruiz and Boyle-that's another story. They were shot while attempting to interfere with an arbee officer in the performance of his duty." He grinned. "Anyway, chum, there are too many witnesses."

He limped away to join the crowd of s.p.a.cesuited figures cl.u.s.tered around the air lock. Was one of those bulky blue dolls Maggie? She'd have had a time squeezing into Mei-mei's suit, even with all the slack that a Chinese s.p.a.cesuit provided. The Chinese, egalitarians all, didn't believe in custom fitting, but there were limits.

Jameson tested his bonds. There was no give to them. But what was the use of getting loose anyway?

He felt close to despair. They'd be gone-in minutes now. They'd already got through the hardest part of their obstacle course. The Cygnans, even if searching for them, had no idea precisely where they were.

Now all they had to do was cross fifty miles of s.p.a.ce on their suit jets. How long would it take them? An hour? They'd be spotted, of course. With luck they'd be halfway across by then. Then it would take time for the Cygnans to organize a pursuit. It wouldn't take long to get the missiles in firing order. They wouldn't even bother to compute orbits, probably. Just aim them, with a proximity fuse or a radio signal.

The Cygnans would snuff them out in short order, of course. But the damage would be done. How long would it take the Cygnans to repair the damage done by just one 100-megaton bomb? They'd have to jettison what was left of a pod, maybe even evacuate a whole s.h.i.+p if the central drive was damaged, and resettle a population of millions.

What had Ruiz said? A delay of a month in the Cygnans' departure would surely break up Earth's crust, flood it with radiation, tear it out of its...o...b..t, as the Cygnans sailed past with their Jovian trophy. Andthat would be by mere oversight! With ten million of their sisters murdered, they might decide to do that very thing on purpose!

Jameson watched helplessly as the first group filed into the air lock, which could hold four or five people at a time.

The air lock was simplicity itself. The Cygnans were profligate with their air, just as they were with other people's hydrogen. There was no lock mechanism, no vacuum pump. You grabbed a handle on that round door and pulled it toward you manually. It slid forward like a desk drawer on three greased shafts.

You had to duck under one of the shafts to get inside, but that didn't bother Cygnans. Attached to the back end of the shafts was another circular door. Once you were inside the lock, you pushed on it and squeezed through the outer opening into s.p.a.ce. When the outside door was projecting out into vacuum, the inner disk sealed the cylindrical lock. When the inner door was pulled inward, as it was now, the outer door stopped up the shaft.

n.o.body could possibly goof and leave both doors open at once. If you were polite, you pushed the door shut when you were outside. But, knowing Cygnans, Jameson doubted that they bothered. They just left it for the next fellow.

One of the Chinese was pus.h.i.+ng on the door now, sealing the people inside. He kept going, another six feet into the round metal tunnel, waited a minute, then pulled the door back out. It didn't seem to take much effort.

The next load included a couple of prisoners in American s.p.a.cesuits. Jameson wondered who they were. Kiernan was one of them, from the bantam size of the suit. The other was a woman-Sue Jarowski or Kay Thorwald. It wasn't Maybury. She was being half supported by Klein's girl friend, Smitty, while Fiaccone screwed her helmet on.

Jameson struggled for a better position. n.o.body paid any attention to him. He felt a faint breeze on his face and the nape of his neck; there was a movement of air toward the lock. It probably leaked around the edges-more Cygnan sloppiness. He-was sitting more or less facing the lock, a little beyond the place where it stuck out of the bulkhead, obliquely facing the rearward jumble of gigantic clockwork and the shadowed ramp up over the ridge that had allowed Klein to take him by surprise. All he could hope for was that some Cygnan maintenance worker might come through there, past the boulderlike protuberances embedded in the floor, in time to set off an alarm.

But it was already too late for that. They were all gone now, except for a final group of five and Klein, who was just getting into his s.p.a.cesuit. He evidently was going to leave last so that he could guard the rear with his machine pistol. If a Cygnanwere to happen along, Klein would simply cut her down and be out the lock a minute later.

Mei-mei was pleading with them. She'd been stripped to her underwear. Her low-slung figure looked dumpier than usual in a coa.r.s.e cotton singlet and baggy drawers. Maggie had taken the long-john liner the Chinese wore under their quilted s.p.a.cesuits; Jameson couldn't help thinking that she was going to have cold wrists and ankles out there.

"No!" Jameson heard Chia say loudly. "Go and wait with the Jameson person and do not bother me any more. You are ordered to stay here. The People's Coalition will rescue you in due course."

"Wo p'a te!" the girl wailed. "I am afraid!"

"You are stupid and counterrevolutionary!" Chia said. "The star-worms will not hurt you. They will take you back and put you with the others."

Mei-mei started whimpering again. Chia raised a dainty hand and gave her a ringing slap across the face.

"Go! Do you want to be punished for social contradiction?"