He fell over on his bad leg and cried out—then looked up to see if the Bandersnatch was interested in falling on top of him.
It wasn’t. Instead, it rolled back and forth over the hull, driving the bow down and bending out of plumb the trees that had wedged it right and left. The Bandersnatch worked its rasp deeper and deeper into the main hatch, and Jook could faintly hear the screech of breaking metal inside.
Still, he didn’t trust the white beast’s absorption in its task. As soon as his breath was back, Jook picked himself up and hobbled into the next pentagonal clearing. There he set the line cassette in his grapple, loaded the gun, and fired up into the trees. After the few seconds it took to anchor and set the grapple, he was soaring up into the green vault.
“I can now give you more detailed information, sir on the hardsight contacts.”
“Good, uff, Navigator. Uff. Continue.”
Nyawk-Captain ran full out, stretching his long muscles. At full extension, his forward-reaching claws just grazed the rack that held the brainbox of their long-range starfixer; his hind claws ticked against the panels of the weapons locker. He was exercising in a variable gravity field that could be rippled to simulate ground passing under his pads. At present, the field was going under him at twice his own body length every second. He had to stretch to keep up—or be shoved back into the locker.
“We are definitely seeing two contacts, not one with a reflection,” Navigator said. “The brighter return is the smaller—an absolute return of all radiation. That would indicate an infinite density, which I cringe to propose to you.”
“How big is this infinitely dense source?”
“Small, Nyawk-Captain. No bigger than a kzin’s torso.”
“And it orbits a star—is it dead star matter itself?”
“No, sir. It does orbit a star, but on a planet. I now have a layered return shadowing this planet’s lithosphere and iron core. The object is on the surface, or near to it. The second contact—”
Nyawk-Captain growled him to silence. He then reached out in his stride and killed the gravity field, ending his run on a single, four-footed pounce into the middle of the exercise area. The cabin steamed with the heat of his exertions—but neither of his crew members would dare complain.
Navigator held the thought and obeyed silence while his captain stretched in place and considered the implications of that hard return.
Infinite density. Small volume. But not enough mass to push the object deep into the planet’s gravity well. Those observations could lead to only one conclusion: a Thrintun storage container, protected by its own time-warping field.
Honor and glory a full name and heirs, the personal friendship of the Riit, all would go to the discoverer of such a box. The artifacts concealed in those few that the kzinti had found in the past often yielded good weapons—or the clues to improving their own armaments.
Navigator and Weaponsmaster would be having similar thoughts, Nyawk-Captain realized. It was time to distract them.
“Continue,” he grunted.
“The second contact is bigger, but not as dense. It presents a volume suitable for a ship’s hull—a small one, but still capable of supporting a crew, drive systems, and weapons. I hypothesize it is a Leaf-Eaters’ hull, such as they make as gifts to the humans.”
“Is it near the other object?”
“Almost on top of it.”
Nyawk-Captain casually ran a foreclaw into his mouth, probing the gaps between his teeth. It was a habit his father would not approve of, but it relieved stress while he thought.
“Shall we alter course, sir?” Navigator prompted.
Nyawk-Captain growled him into silence.
The Last Fleet followed Cat’s Paw with a lag of ten days and a leeway of two days. Those two days were calculated to allow Cat’s Paw to make minor course corrections, take evasive action, and conduct a brief survey of Margrave’s defensive positions before Nyawk-Captain began his attack run against the system. The ten days would allow the human forces time to reach their maximum dispersal, following the near-simultaneous attacks by Paw and the other outriders, before the fleet struck behind him.
Timing was everything—but Nyawk-Captain knew he operated within a window of opportunity, not under split-second coordination…And what an opportunity was now presenting itself!
He could, of course, contact the Last Fleet and request a delay in the planned attack. He would ask for enough time to allow him to alter course, stop, and retrieve the Thrintun box. A few days at most. But then, Nyawk-Captain would be honor-bound to explain his reasons to Lehruff, who was the commanding admiral. And Lehruff would want to share in the discovery.
Of course, if he could move in and get out quickly enough, Nyawk-Captain might retrieve the box and still make his rendezvous with Margrave well ahead of the fleet. All honor and glory would then come to him alone, when he eventually produced the Thrintun artifacts. His two crew members, being subordinates and inferiors in rank, would defer to him on the discovery. He might even share with them for form’s sake—a sixteenth of the value for each would be a graceful gesture.
Of course, if Nyawk-Captain contacted Lehruff, he would also have to report the General Products hull that lay in close proximity. It was one hull only and not a large one; such a vessel had low probability of preceding and leading a massive attack by the Leaf-Eaters and their human puppets. Yet that was how Lehruff might read it. He would then want confirmations. Analyses. Councils of war. He might even send other ships to investigate the contact. Reason for delay. And an excuse to take the prize from Cat’s Paw.
More likely that hull belonged to a lone prospector. Some renegade Leaf-Eater or human looking for wealth, mineral or otherwise, far beyond human Space. And finding it. Nyawk-Captain had to allow for the possibility of a fight. But it would be a short one. It would be over and Cat’s Paw would be away in less than two days—their established margin for error and reconnaissance.
He would chance it.
“Alter course, Navigator…Let us investigate this Leaf-Eater’s hull which stands between us and victory.”
“Jared!”
Cuiller raised the radio to his mouth without even breaking stride. “Right here, Hugh.”
“It’s eating the ship.” The voice was so faint and breathy that Cuiller thought he must have missed part of the transmission.
“Say again, please.”
“The Bandersnatch is eating our ship.” Jook’s words were louder and more distinct that time. Still crazy, though.
“Wait one, Hugh,” the commander said, He turned to his weapons officer. “You hear that?”
Gambiel shook his head. “Heard it, but I don’t believe it.”
“How would a Bandersnatch eat the hull?” Krater asked.
“It’s got a rudimentary mouth scoop,” the Jinxian answered, “with a pretty solid rasp inside, like a snail’s tongue. It can secrete digestive juices, too. But I don’t know why it would want to.”
“Eat a General Products hull?” Krater repeated.
“Not possible,” Gambiel ruled.
“All right, stand to,” Cuiller ordered. “Ah, Hugh,” into the radio. “We’re coming back now. Take care of yourself and…don’t disturb the Bandersnatch, whatever it does.”
“Not on your life, Captain.”
“Let’s go,” Cuiller told his party. “And at the first sight of one of them—getup into the trees.”
They nodded and turned back on their trail. Without a word passing, they all broke into a jog.
As they went by the patch of young undergrowth with the fallen trunk in the middle, Cuiller began to understand it better. The “groundskeepers” were Bandersnatchi, which fed by cruising between the trees and scooping in whatever vegetable and animal matter fell from the canopy. They were intelligent enough to understand the ecology that supported their existence. They would be wary of a dead tree and leave space for a new to grow and continue the life of the forest. From that perspective, a B
andersnatch might attack the ship as a threat to the ecology—or even, marginally, in retaliation for any damage Callisto had done when it tried to land in the branches and fell through.
But Bandersnatchi were not known for immediate aggression. Rather, they had often exhibited heroic patience, dying in large numbers at the hands of less perceptive sentients before they would make their hurts known. On some planets they had even agreed to be hunted for human sport, accepting a calculated loss for the stimulation of the chase.
On the other hand, Bandersnatchi were a living relic of Slaver times, with germ plasm too massive to mutate and needs too simple to allow their race to die out totally. As possibly the galaxy’s oldest living intelligent species, they could well have purposes and prejudices wholly unknown to humans. Defense of territory might be one of their hidden prerogatives.
But still, an aggressive and vengeful Bandersnatch just did not fit the profile.
Yet the evidence which confronted them when they arrived at the landing site could not be talked away. Callisto lay fully against the ground, with two broken trees squashed under her bow. The ceramic outer coating was scuffed and abraded in long swathes and ragged patches. The paired metal horns at her tail, which had been fitted for external weapons and the ion drive, were now broken off and scattered in pieces over the forest floor. Every hatch cover and through-hull fitting had been knocked out.
Cuiller walked up to the main hatchway and stuck his head through. The smell was overpowering: a mixture of acids and ketones, spoiled plastics, burned metals, and what he could only describe as elephant vomit. Holding his breath against it, his eyes watering, he looked down the length of the interior, seeing with the light that came though the masked windows and the newly worn places. He looked for as long as he could, before the fumes drove him back. The hull was nearly cleaned out. A network of optical-quality glass fibers, apparently indigestible, had been discarded in one corner like a salt-encrusted fishnet. A few curling panels of fiberglass cloth, with the resins leached out, were all that remained from the sleeping cocoons. The hyperdrive engine, thruster pods, weapons pods, struts and bracing had completely disappeared—unless the sludge of reeking green bile that ran the length of the bottom curve were their only remains.
The General Products hull, of course, was not even scratched.
Cuiller beat his fist against it, just once, for no good reason.
“Where’s Hugh?” Krater asked.
They looked around. Cuiller actually hoped they wouldn’t—
“Up here!” the navigator called from a distance and dropped slowly out of the canopy, suspended in his climbing rig. His toes touched the ground and, favoring his stiff leg, he retrieved the grapple.
“Where did the Bandersnatch go?” Cuiller asked.
“South.” Jook pushed a thumb over his shoulder. “Right after lunch.”
“What did you manage to save from—all this?” The commander waved his hand around at the hull.
“Myself. A rifle. This harness.”
“Any food? Water?” Gambiel asked.
“No time.”
“Why didn’t you lift?” Cuiller asked. “As we agreed you would.”
“Again, no time. The thing was up on the hull before I even saw it. It had punched out the hatch and was chowing down on the infrastructure before I could get to the controls. Too late then.”
“You should have been watching for it. We called to warn you.”
“I was trying to repair the weapons module. And anyway, we both agreed Bandersnatchi wouldn’t harm the ship. What did you expect me to do?”
“All right. Conceded, we were both wrong.”
“Can we salvage anything?” Gambiel asked.
“See for yourself,” Cuiller gestured at the ship. “Take shallow breaths.”
“We’re marooned, aren’t we?” Krater asked as the Jinxian moved toward the hull.
“Yes. It’s almost as if the Bandersnatch wanted to make sure we couldn’t leave,” Cuiller said. “And we never did get off a position report. So no one will be coming for us, either.”
“I don’t…” Krater looked suddenly pale. “I mean, I didn’t—” She turned away and stood looking up into the trees.
“Not your fault, Sally,” the commander offered, but it sounded weak even in his own ears.
Cuiller went over to the abandoned cowling of the ion drive and started to sit down. He stopped and checked the surface for corrosive liquids. Finding none, he slumped on the bent metal.
“You’ve been up there, Sally,” he said quietly, waving at the treetops. “What do you deduce from your observations?”
“Oh! I took some samples.” She turned around and slipped the field kit out of her pocket. She opened it and keyed in a series of queries. The device beeped at her.
Jook drifted closer to listen. Soon he was sitting on the other side of the cowl, but with his back to Cuiller, looking away into the forest. His posture suggested depression and a sense of rejection by his companions. He’d snap out of it, Cuiller decided.
“There’s water up there,” Krater reported, “and the kit says nothing in it will harm us. The leaves—all that I got to test, so far—aren’t poisonous, but they’re no more nutritious than any other wad of cellulose and chlorophyll. There may be game up in the branches. At least, something played peekaboo with me up there. Whether it’s edible, or would find us so, I can’t tell. But the native ecology seems to be generally nonpoisonous. Bandersnatchi like it.”
“So we won’t die of thirst,” Cuiller summed up for her. “And we can hunt for long as the charges on our rifles hold out,”
“That’s about it,” she agreed.
Gambiel had come back from the ship. Cuiller noticed that when he joined their group he stood, not beside Krater, but across from her. The Jinxian glanced at her only occasionally while she reported, and he spent most of his time looking over her shoulder, scanning the forest on the far side of the hull. When Cuiller thought of it, Jook’s chosen position—sitting behind and facing away from his commanding officer—was not a sign of psychological separation after all. He was watching Cuiller’s back.
Before, when the three of them had gone off into the trees, Cuiller and his crew had walked separately. They had raced off to look at sights that interested them, leapt freely up into the canopy, and generally acted like a cadet class on leave. Now they were more wary. That was good. It might save their lives—for as long as they might have on Beanstalk. It was time, right now, to give them some purpose.
“Daff, see what you can make from all the metal lying around out here. Cups or basins would be nice. A jar or canteen would be even better. But think twice before you do any cutting or pounding. Don’t attract visitors.”
“Aye, Captain.”
“Sally, take a rifle and get up into the trees again. See if you can bring down one of your ‘peekaboo’ critters. They might be intelligent and in communication with the Bandersnatchi down here—”
“I don’t really think—”
“But if one of them holds still long enough, shoot it.”
“Captain, we don’t need to worry about hunting for food just yet.”
“Noted. But I want you to test the indigenous fauna before we eat up all our pocket rations. Anything you see like fruit or green shoots, collect them, too.”
“Yes, sir.”
She turned away and readied her grapnel launcher.
“You have any assignments for me?” Jook asked.
“If your leg is solid enough—”
“I might mention that our situation is hopeless, Captain.”
“So?”
“Our long-term prospects are terrible. We are all alone on a planet that’s never been charted, let alone visited by other humans. No one knows where we are—or probably much cares, because our mission had such a low priority to begin with. We are on the marches of kzinti territory—technically unclaimed but not likely to be unknown to them. We’ve got Bandersnatchi prowling around
here, and suddenly they don’t like us, either. The best we can hope for is mere survival, but not much more. And, unless I miss my guess, even that’s a long shot unless we find some kind of vitamin supplements. We won’t last more than a couple of months hunting the local game in the treetops. So why should we do anything but give up, lie down, and die?”
“Because I said so,” Cuiller said grimly. “And I’m still in command.”
Jook straightened up. “Oh, well then, that’s different. What do you want me to do?”
“Follow Sally when she goes up. Take station behind her, and anything that tries to kill her—you kill it first.”
“Easy enough.” The Wunderlander stood up, kneaded the bubble cast for a moment, and readied his rig. “What are you going to do, Jared?”
“Get some exercise by kicking myself for landing us in this mess.”
“Fair enough.”
An hour later, Gambiel called the commander over to sort out a collection of gear he had recovered from the ground around the ship and from a few protected corners inside the hull. The weapons officer had already arranged his catch by classification.
In addition to various pieces of bent metal, he had found three battery packs for the lasers; a bucketful of damaged circuit chips that might be reworked into some kind of transmitter, given time and enough optic fiber; and half of the autodoc. What remained of the latter provided them with some unlabeled vials that might be painkillers, antibacterials, growth hormone, or vitamin supplements. The tags were all electronic, for use by the expert system that ran the ’doc. It didn’t need to know English equivalents.
“So, that’s our inventory,” Gambiel said at last, corralling the glass vials.
Cuiller told him to hang on to them. Maybe Krater, with her background in biology, could tell the vials apart by smell or taste or something. He supposed she also knew enough basic anatomy to deal with sprains—like continued attention to Jook’s knee—and other manual medical techniques. If not, Cuiller had a little knowledge of first aid and could make do with bandage and splits in a pinch.