"Then he's within twenty feet of a lock if he's still alive. But he hasn't answered us. So what d'you want to do? We're all that's left and they're almost alongside."
"They'd get us either way. If only we could get aft that lock's on the port side, away from 'em—"
Jon let the words make sense. Port side. Twenty feet away—THERE!
In seconds the inner port was open, and then he was waiting for the outer one, not even bothering to cycle the lock down. He'd be blown a little, but a running start out would help. He wanted to communicate with the men he'd heard talking, find out what the numbers meant that the dead man Zetterman had mouthed, but the Tinkers would be monitoring everything, and they'd pick up even a helmet set at this range.
The outer lock cracked slowly open, and what little pressure there still was in the lock held him gently against the widening opening as it dissipated entirely with a low howl into the black infinity of space. He popped out, and it was like stepping from an invisible mountainside into a night that was too dark, with stars that looked too close. Only crazily, you didn't fall—
He drifted on the slight momentum the spent air pressure in the lock had given him, the telltale flicker of his power pack this close to the huge gray shape that loomed less than a hundred yards to the other side of the broken ship he was leaving would mean the end of him. He thought at top speed. Of course their screens would pick him up but he gambled that he'd be discounted as simply another chunk of wreckage smashed by the Tinker guns.
Jove loomed hugely, fantastically, slightly above him. Soon his drift would become free-fall, but he must wait until the last possible moment to use the pack. Yet if he waited too long—
He clenched his teeth until they hurt, willed his arms to his sides, his hands away from the pack controls. The multi-hued bands of the great planet were alternately dark and bright, undulating slowly, as though readying to seize him, devour him, freeze him. The Gargantuan mass seemed but yards away rather than well over a million miles. Yet it was too close, and it was slowly moving in upon him.
He turned his body, tried to watch the Tinker ship. It had closed with the shattered wreck which he'd escaped, grappled to it. A port opened, and there was a pinprick of fiery light from the dark maw. Boarding in suits. But there was no orange-violet flash of a spacetender's exhausts, so perhaps, then, he had been unnoticed.
But he must still drift and he knew now that he had started to fall. Ever so slightly, but he was heading straight for the great mass of Jupiter, and his initial direction had been almost tangent to its orbit. The massive orb seemed even more flattened at its poles than usual, and its satellites were orbiting erratically, due, he knew, to the Geejay failure that had rocked the whole system.