Time to begin thinking like a soldier, he told himself, instead of a tourist.
The first problem was to coordinate his team without radio transmissions or—given that the walking kzin’s armor was probably enhanced—too much shouting. He dropped cautiously down through the leaf screen into the clear space below the canopy. The whirr of his winder motor must have signaled the others, for first Krater, then Gambiel and Jook, also dropped into view.
“Now what, Boss?” Jook asked conversationally.
“We’re going to keep out of the Big Guy’s way, aren’t we?” from Krater.
“Not if we want to get that stasis-box,” Cuiller answered, trying not to whisper.
“Get it—and take it where?” Krater asked. “And how?”
“First things first.”
“What I can’t figure,” from Gambiel, “is why the Bandersnatchi on this planet are so hostile. It’s not their pattern. And they can’t evolve.”
“You’re assuming we’ve seen more than one specimen,” Cuiller said. “The one the kzinti blasted down there may be the same that ate Callisto, coming back for dessert. Anyway, that’s something to think about later. Right now, we’ve got a fully armed and alerted kzin on the loose…Did anyone see climbing gear on that body armor?”
“He doesn’t need it,” Gambiel replied. “With his power-driven claws, he can go up one of these tree trunks at a dead run.”
“How much does that suit weigh?” Cuiller asked.
“Seventy-five kilos.”
“That means kzin and suit together mass almost three hundred kilos.” Cuiller experimentally flexed his knees and pumped his back sharply—and bobbed like a toy on his almost invisible thread. “He won’t have much mobility among these springy branches and vines, will he?”
“Then he’d better pick exactly the right tree to climb,” Gambiel agreed.
“I have a decision to make,” the commander announced. “Do we all follow Kzin One and try to find the stasis-box ahead of him? Or does some part of our force stay here, to keep an eye on Kzin Two and the ship? Opinions?”
“Kzinti Two and Three,” Gambiel corrected.
“I thought this interceptor class was a two-man affair.”
Gambiel shrugged, and started his own bobbing dance. “Someone had to fight off the Bandersnatch from inside. It wasn’t done by automatics.”
“All right, then it’s three kzinti and a ship to divide among four pairs of eyes,” Cuiller noted. “I think we should stay together;” Krater said. “And go for the box.”
“Reasons?”
“The other two kzinti wouldn’t be going anywhere except to follow the first,” she answered. “And the ship is staying put, too.”
“How do you know that?” Jook asked. “The kzinti might know a lot more about this world than we do. Those two could have a dozen interesting places to visit and things to do. After all, Beanstalk might be their private hunting preserve, or something.”
“Then the kzinti would have found the stasis-box long before this,” Krater countered. “And they wouldn’t have let the Bandersnatch surprise them. Anyway, that explosion damaged their ship.”
“How do you figure?” Cuiller asked.
“Wouldn’t that big a bang have knocked some widgets loose from our hull? And that kzinti sphere isn’t even from General Products.”
“Circumstantial evidence,” Jook scoffed.
“Besides which, from where I was sitting, I saw some pieces hanging loose.”
“I hate to interrupt this,” from Gambiel, softly, “but while we chatter, Kzin One is getting away.”
“Right,” Cuiller said. He made his decision. “We’ll all go. Fan out in line abreast, keeping a space of just one tree between each person. Stay hidden in the lower branches, if you can. And stay ahead of the kzin.
“We’ll follow our original vector. At half a klick out, everyone start sorting through the branches around your assigned tree grid. The first to find the stasis-box, takes it. If Kzin One interrupts while you’re doing that, kill him—if you can. Any questions?”
“Why don’t we just shoot Kzin One from up here?” Jook asked.
“That’s ablative armor,” from Gambiel.
“Oh, right.”
At Cuiller’s nod, they all wound up on their lines to get a foothold in the canopy. Alone among the greenery, the commander readied his grapple in the launcher and fired forward along their path—which was also the kzin’s. Around him he could hear the muffled chuff, flutter and thunk of similar activity.
Could Kzin One hear it too?
Swinging through the trees like a goddamn monkey! Trying to find the Slaver box by beating the bushes!
Angry thoughts swirled in Sally Krater’s head as she balanced her feet on a leaf-cloaked branch and got ready to fire her launcher. She held it tightly, aiming along the course that she and the others had been following.
She could hear them around her, moving quietly through the overbrush, each making no more sound than the wind or any other animal up here. Now and again, she did hear the prolonged whirr of a winder as one of them dropped into the lower layers and peeked out to make sure Kzin One was still on track.
Everyone was trying to move quietly—except Jook. With his bad leg and his natural clumsiness, he bumbled through the leaves, missed his footing on branches, snagged his line and cursed softly while freeing it. Not softly enough to remain unheard by his fellow crewmembers, but maybe softly enough to go unnoticed by the pair of augmented kzinti ears moving ninety meters below them.
After a kilometer of travel, Krater knew Cuiller had angled his track to intersect Gambiel’s and assigned the Jinxian to watch Jook’s movements and help him be quiet. Krater herself, veteran of too many biologists’ observation blinds, not to mention an early life in partial gravity, knew she was more graceful than any of them in this floating greenery.
But that did not keep the angry questions from buzzing about in her mind.
For instance, just how was any of them to know when they’d traveled the full two and a half kilometers to the Slaver box? Really! Cuiller was asking them to track accurately through the jungle while swinging around tree trunks and through shallow arcs, covering anywhere between twenty and fifty meters with each set of the grapple. In all that confusion, he expected them to stop within one or two trunks—a deviation of no more than fifty or seventy-five meters—from a predefined point. It couldn’t be done! And that was just one sign of how badly this expedition had gone to hell. Ever since Jook had lost the ship…!
Krater angled her launcher at forty-five degrees above the horizon—or where she thought the horizon might be, much as she was bouncing around inside a blob of green leaves. She fired.
Chuff-CLANG!
The grapple had flown five maybe six meters, stopped dead, and recoiled. Now she could hear it slithering, falling through the branches, its monofilament cutting a vertical slice through the jungle before her. She jigged frantically with her upper body—as much as she could without falling off her branch—trying to jerk on the grapple’s friction brake. If it failed to set, the grapple would fall all the way to the forest floor, signaling her presence to their clawed and armored shadow below. The monofilament caught and twanged on a stout branch. Krater could feel by the tension on the line that the brake had activated. She began winding in, breathing again.
What had the grapple hit up there? she wondered. Vine, branch, trunk, or “peekaboo” body part…anything in the projectile’s flight path should have absorbed the point and snagged its tines. Only a rock or—
Krater wound the grapple up into her hand and reloaded the launcher. This time she aimed higher and shot.
Chuff! Flutter, THUNK!
She jerked the brake and began reeling in, walking off her branch, skimming the vines around the slash her line had made, touching the next branch with her tiptoes. Soon she was rising almost vertically, walking with hands and the points of her knees, up the side of the nearest main trunk. When
the angle that the monofilament line made with the bark wall of the trunk began to shorten, she slowed the winder.
A woman’s face, her own face, stared back at her in a pool of distorted greenery. As her head moved or a breeze rippled the leaves around her, she saw a flash of bright silver. This reflection of the floating world and her own face peered out from a collar of encroaching bark in the side of the tree. Like a knot of polished metal buried in the wood.
She touched the mirror and quickly drew her fingers back. It was cold—colder than any metal would normally be, in this mild climate. Its inherent temperature was not low enough to freeze sap in the wood embedding the knot. Still, it was a chill so deep that the shock felt, to her probing fingertips, like unexpected heat. She thunked the surface with her knuckles and listened for any echo of a cavity beneath the silver skin. No sound came back. So either the object was solid—more than solid, because she could sense no resonance at all—or its insides were lodged in another dimension. A dimension turned by several degrees away from her local reality.
She had found the stasis-box.
Now, how to alert the others? Krater wished they’d worked out, in advance, a series of whistles or bird-calls to address this situation. As communications officer she suddenly realized that should have been her responsibility. Hmm…Well, how could she fix it up at this late date?
Sally Krater fingered the radio at her wrist. If not for the kzinti, she might try using that. But if their enemies were monitoring the electromagnetic spectrum, a radio call would be as damning as a shout. More directional, too. But perhaps…Krater clicked the unit off standby and tapped her finger lightly against the microphone in a rapid and ancient dance: dit, dah, dah, dah, pause, dit, dah, pause, dit, dah, dit…
“What is it?” from the speaker, before she could go on. She recognized Cuiller’s voice, low and guarded.
She brought the microphone to her lips. “Krater. I’ve found it.”
A pause, then: “Converge on Sally.” And that was all.
Krater held her breath, waiting for an energy bolt to tear through the foliage below her. None came, but the chuff of launchers and whirr of winder motors was dosing in from either side.
Gambiel was the first to appear from her right, with his weapon at the ready. He saw the mirror in the tree and slowly strapped the rifle back over his shoulder. He touched the surface and did not draw back at the chill. “That’s it, alright,” he said.
Jook and Cuiller appeared from the left. They, too, examined the alien artifact.
“If that thing’s a billion years old,” Jook asked, “how did it get up in a tree? It should have been buried under layers of geological strata, then turned over two or three times by plate tectonics.”
“We’ve already figured out that this world doesn’t have ’em, Hugh,” Gambiel said. “Plate tectonics, that is.”
“This rainforest ecology must be very old,” Krater observed. “As old as the Bandersnatchi and the other Slaver biota. The Bandersnatchi will have been tending this planet for a long time.
“It’s just possible,” she went on, “that the stasis-box was picked up by a young, growing tree. Those saplings back there looked strong enough to do it—if whatever’s inside the box isn’t too heavy. Then the box was absorbed into the tree trunk as the branches sprouted and spread out. Eventually, when the tree died, the box fell to the forest floor. And the next tree to rise in that place took it up again. Maybe the stasis-box did spend a million years or so underground, pulled down by the root structure. But sooner or later it always comes up.”
“Why?” from Cuiller.
“Because roots and other burrowing life turn the soil over. And in any scatter of small, loose stuff, the larger and heavier objects tend to rise…Have we seen any sign of streams yet, let alone rivers or lakes? Those are the forces that make sedimentary rocks—what you call ‘geological strata.’ But we haven’t seen them.”
“Well, not around here,” Jook said.
“And around here is where the box is, right?”
“I give up,” the navigator said. “You found it in a tree, so it must be possible.”
“We’d better get it out of the tree if we want to keep it,” Cuiller said. “Daff, can you cut it out with your rifle?”
“Not if you mind the top of this tree coming down.”
“Alternatives?”
“None I can see.”
“Start cutting.”
The Jinxian unslung his rifle and took aim two centimeters from the side of the mirror. The others, dancing on their monofilament tethers, swung back from the tree trunk.
Nyawk-Captain pulled the three claws of his left foot free from the firm wood as he touched the ground again. He shook them instinctively before remembering that it was sap, not blood, on his toes. Then he arched his foot in the special way that retracted the steel hooks into their sleeves. No sense in clogging them with dirt as he walked around.
He angled the navigational tool up into the trees again and pressed the improvised trigger. The tiny readout screen blossomed with a solid return. Somewhere above him was the Thrintun artifact, but his locator—modified from a missile’s ranging warhead—was too powerful for this close work. Nyawk-Captain sighed and turned toward his third and final tree trunk for climbing.
Both times before, he had gone up as far as the first heavy branchings. Then he had released his hold on the trunk and stepped out into the green world of the elevated rainforest. The foliage beneath him had been uniformly limber, sagging fearfully under the weight of his body and armor. He had made his way a few cautious steps in this treacherous environment—so unlike the rolling veldt of his ancestors. Every step bad required careful placement of all four paws on a firm bough, to avoid falling through. When he was fully clear of the trunk, he had raised his torso, balanced, and aimed his locator in the four cardinal directions.
By gauging the strength of the various returns, he had determined the general direction of the artifact. And by keeping his path down the last tree all along one side, without deviating around the intervening branches, he had maintained his sense of that direction. He was reasonably sure that the way to the artifact was up the tree he now addressed.
And if it was not, then he would start over again—right up until the time his crew had the Cat’s Paw repaired and he must continue with his mission to Margrave.
Nyawk-Captain extended the powered claws and began climbing. In his previous forays up into the canopy layer, he had perfected the technique, digging in with his hind claws for lift and using his front claws for balance. It was easier going up than coming down.
A stutter of blue-light pulses, of short and penetrating wavelength, flashed from the muzzle of Gambiel’s weapon. In a second, their original impact point in the tree trunk was obscured by smoke and steam.
“Don’t worry about touching the box’s perimeter;” Cuiller advised.
“I’m riding on it,” Gambiel replied. “The reflection helps.” He swung the rifle in a slow circle, keeping ahead of the billow of steam.
After about thirty seconds, he had made two circuits of the mirror’s face, going deeper each time. After the third pass, he shut off the weapon.
“We can pull it now.”
Gambiel gripped the outer circumference of the box, which was shaped like a keg with its flat end facing them. At first, Krater expected Gambiel to draw back his hands from the residual heat, but of course the stasis-box absorbed the laser energy into another dimension. The Jinxian did, however, try to keep his knuckles away from the charred and smoldering wood surrounding it. He worked the box left, then right He drew a slender knife and began digging around it. Krater saw the blade make a long drag against the side when his knife slipped, but it left no scratches and made no sound. Like cutting against glass with a feather. He worked on swinging the end with his hands again. It came free suddenly, like a stopper from a bottle.
“Light,” he said, surprised. “Must weigh about ten kilograms.”
/> “Empty?” Jook asked.
Gambiel started to shake it, then stopped in mid-motion with a frown.
Jook stifled a laugh. Whatever the box held, it held in stasis. The contents would not be rattling around in this time-frame.
“Not much mass, anyway,” the Jinxian said. He had been staring at the box in his hands, but in a flash his attention shifted to the tree trunk at the point his knee rested against it. He stuffed the keg under one arm and placed his free palm against the bark.
Krater tried to read his face and couldn’t. She swung closer to the tree and felt it, too.
A dull, rhythmic pounding was transmitted through the wood. She looked up, expecting to see the weakened top section bending over, dragging against branches as it started to topple on their heads. But, despite the deep wound in its side, the trunk wasn’t falling.
Still the pounding came.
“Kzin One has found our tree,” Gambiel whispered hoarsely.
“That’s him climbing?” asked Cuiller, who had also put a hand on the wood.
“Yeah. But slowly. Methodical.”
“Right. Daff, you keep the box. Sally, stay with him. The two of you go east.” Cuiller pointed to establish direction. “Hugh, you and I go west to provide a diversion for them. Everybody try to keep out of the kzin’s way for at least a full day. Reassemble at noon tomorrow by Callisto’s hull—or, if the kzinti are still around, one kilometer south by the sun. Questions?”
They shook their heads.
“Go!” he hissed, pushing Krater’s shoulder.
The reel motors whined as they each rose away from the burn mark, toward the scattered anchor points of their own grapples.
Once he was inside the lowest levels of the green layer, Nyawk-Captain boosted the gain on his aural enhancers. He was listening for anything that might attack. On the ground, he could trust his senses of sight and smell to detect an enemy at great range. And his armor could deal with anything short of another rampaging Whitefood. Up in the foliage, however, screened by leaves and baffled by random breezes, those senses were next to useless. Only his steel ears would save him now.