The Jupiter Theft

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 shivering 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 hell 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 God, 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.