Svetz went up.
More fire was coming down at him from four heat cannons on the crater’s vast rim. The astronomers had gotten organized. But only the big wok ship was in flight. He had cut them a new rocket nozzle, and that was blowing flame.
He was rising fast now, spiraling to avoid the mounted heat cannon. He was above them now. He saw no point in attacking fixed installations or astronomers in general.
The big ship ripped through a line of mirrors.
Svetz kept rising.
* * *
“Zeera? Miya?”
He should have them in line of sight now. He’d risen into near vacuum. His suit was tight around him and he’d tightened the belly band so he could breathe. The planet’s wimpy gravity was pulling him down toward what seemed a fuzzy white dot from this height. He’d placed it in relation to the octopoid’s skullcap.
“Svetz calling—”
They both cut in at once. “Hanny!” “Svetz!”
“Are you all right? Are you together?”
Miya laughed. “Yes and no—”
Zeera: “I’m down. I saw the sailcar too late to do anything about it. I set down in shadow, over against the south edge of the canal.”
“Tell Miya where you are!”
Miya: “It’s all right, Hanny, I have the Minim in sight. The wind’s died on me, but sailing is still faster than running. Ten minutes. How are you doing?”
Svetz said, “I went up to the Observatory and shot down everything that flies. Now I’ll take out whatever’s around the Tanker.” He was giving it way more confidence than he felt.
Zeera said, “You won?”
“So far. There’s still the Tanker. Now, if you’ll work up a ballistic course to the Lander—”
“Already done, Svetz! I’m just waiting for Miya!”
Miya cried, “Hanny. Hanny, I can see two flying woks coming from the east!”
“Oh, futz! East?”
“Everything that flies, eh?” Zeera.
“Futz. I should have … it wouldn’t have made a difference. Miya, how close are they?”
“Just two dots if I don’t zoom. I only just sighted them. They’re not very close, and I don’t know how fast they are.”
Svetz mulled it through. He’d shot down the little escort ship. The big cargo craft must have told the Observatory: Our escort was shot down by an unseen enemy somewhere along the old canal. They’d sent two ships to search for the bandit, and here they were coming back.
A blurred dot had become an asterisk: the landing pad above the Lander.
“Miya, I’d say they flew right past your old sailing craft without finding it interesting.” Which meant … “Zeera, if the wok ships get too close, take off. Take off without Miya. Miya, they’ll have to follow Zeera. They don’t know what she’ll do, they don’t know what she can do, and some hysterical Softfinger astronomer is telling them about me right now. Zeera, I’ll clean out the area around the Lander before you get here.”
Miya said, “Hanny, the big cargo ship—”
“I shot it down. There was a wok ship overlooking the Minim and I blew that up too. I couldn’t find any others. Just gun emplacements.”
He was decelerating hard. The asterisk came up. Big flat area. Why hadn’t the Lander come down here six years ago? He saw the answer in fused rock. Astronomers found the Lander, then used those heat cannon to melt a bigger landing field above it.
A cannon swiveled to look at him. He blasted it, then the other, then played his flame over the big beehive storage shed.
The explosion was actinic white, less like dynamite than lightning. He hugged the flight stick. The shock sent him spinning. He got straightened out before he hit anything, and watched a fireball rise where the storage shed had been.
So much for stealth.
Then again … Svetz lifted and coasted around and down with not much to hide him. There might be no more defenses. He dropped below the level of the Lander, around and up.
He was looking into man-built prefab houses. Twenty … more like thirty octopoids were in view, most of them in motion. A few were struggling into pressure armor that had arms like a drain-cleaning device and a centered transparent dome like Svetz’s own bubble helmet.
Nobody saw him. Every Softfinger was looking up at the landing field and its dissipating cloud.
Svetz felled two dozen octopoids with his sonic, dropped and swung ’round the slope and came up again nearby. More houses. Had anyone heard anything? How would he tell? They weren’t agile, these octopoids: they didn’t run about screaming incoherently. They did have eyes beneath the skullcap shell.
He circled, pouring silent sleep on the Softfingers, then floated into a street between two rows of houses. Several octopoids saw him and pointed before they slumped. One must have reached a phone.
He dipped between two houses and plasma flame lashed out behind him.
He hadn’t seen where it came from. He was reluctant to make himself a target, but he didn’t see a choice.
He popped up just above the roofs. There were only two beehive buildings down here, and Svetz fired on the one in view. Dropped back and scooted. The return blast almost fried him, but he saw a general direction.
Not from the octopoid-built beehives. From one of the houses.
Svetz ran down the line of houses, firing. Another blast placed the right house. He flew toward it, lifting, firing. The house melted out from around the gun. The gunner must have melted too, or fled.
He could see octopoids fleeing downhill like so many wheels with no rims, skidding and catching themselves, their low center of gravity compensating for their clumsiness. He let them go. But he took the time to blast every dwelling. No hidden thing would emerge later.
He floated high. There were no octopoids in sight. Was there anything he’d missed? Oops. “Zeera?”
“Coming down, Svetz. Two minutes.”
“I don’t think they left you a landing spot.”
“Blast me one!”
He opened up with the blaster again. The half-cremated beehive he’d taken for a lab blazed again and slumped further. Ash remained, and something solid and massive, one of the Lander’s rocket nozzles. He fired onto it at close range. It slumped and was gone … and something hot and bright was coming down at him.
He zipped away from under the falling Minim. It settled gently in the ash pit, not far from the Lander.
26
“Where’s Miya?”
Zeera descended from the Minim in a long jump. “I left her a flight stick.”
Miya spoke in his helmet. “I’m on my way. Altitude twenty klicks. I have you in sight. I’ve lost one of the wok ships. The other’s following me, but it’s slow, hasn’t caught up yet. Shall I try to lead it to the Observatory?”
Zeera ordered, “Stay and protect the Tanker.”
Softfinger astronomers had dismounted two of the motors, one to disassemble, one to test fire. They’d disjointed a landing leg. The Tanker sat tilted, too low and wide to fall over. They’d ripped off a sheet of the superconducting reentry shroud. They’d opened every hatch cover. They’d pulled hoses out in long coils, and spilled methane and liquid oxygen (Svetz could see where puddles had turned martian dust to patches of dried mud) and let the compressors replace it (the readouts read FULL). Then they’d tied off the hoses and cut off the nozzles and taken them somewhere.
“Could be worse. We’ll have to make nozzles,” Zeera said.
Svetz held a severed tube in each hand. He felt somewhat emasculated. “What’s it take?”
“Not much. Anything watertight. We’ll use the spare pressure suit. That and some stickstrips.”
“Here comes the wok ship,” Miya reported.
Zeera said, “We’re busy. Can you hold?”
Miya said, “I’ll get above them and hit them before they get here.”
“I’ll send Svetz up when I can.”
He helped Zeera lift the methane hose into place and wrap the join.
It sprayed fluid, but most of it was going in. Svetz took to the air.
Eastward was a flying silver button. He saw something fluttering around it. He said, “Miya, don’t bother shooting at the underside. That’s a reentry shield.”
“Thanks,” Miya said. A tiny shape darted and flickered around the wok ship … and he dared not watch. Where was the other ship? If Miya was patrolling high, he’d go low.
The Minim and Lander made good targets. They’d shed Softfinger heat rays without harm, but spilled fuel would burn.
Zeera’s voice: “Svetz, give me some help. I need to change hoses.”
“Miya can’t fight two ships, Zeera.”
“I’m disconnecting the fuel. Why isn’t the other ship in your face right now?”
“Don’t know.” They split up, he thought. One ship to track and kill Miya. She’s riding a flight stick; they must think she’s me. The other ship went to the Observatory to protect what’s left.
He could help Miya now. They’d kill that first one quick, then double-team the second. But if he was wrong?
He hovered low above the Tanker and Minim.
Fire speared down, its origin too high to see. Above and about the Minim, a thin mix of fuel and martian air puffed and tried to catch.
Svetz lifted. He’d been lucky. Miya couldn’t hold off two! But the second ship had spotted him instead. While the other’s heat cannon recharged, he could act.
Here it was, lower than he’d guessed.
Svetz fired up at its belly, just to make the Softfingers wary, and drew nearer. The aperture came around. He swerved, fired, swerved out of the fringe of their return blast and fired again. The wok ship couldn’t turn fast enough. He played his blaster on its upper surface and saw a runnel form, and then the wok ship was rising, trying to disappear in the sky. Svetz followed, up, up, above the wok ship and holding the trigger down hard, but his blaster was dead.
“I’m unarmed,” he reported. “I can buzz around them until you get here, Miya.”
Zeera shouted, “Get down here and help me pump oxygen!”
Miya said, “My target’s falling. Zeera, take cover. It’ll hit near you. Hanny, I can’t see your target yet.”
“I’ll get them to shoot.”
The second ship would fire on him no matter what he did! He dropped wide of the Lander on a wiggly path. Make them choose their target. The thing he must not do was hover.
Flame seared past him. He cursed reflexively.
“I see it! Hanny, go help Zeera.”
He set down next to the Minim. There was no problem matching the severed oxygen hose to its intake, then wrapping it with the spare suit and then with stickstripping. It only took four hands. They started the pump and watched oxygen boil out around the join.
Svetz asked, “Was the leak this bad…?”
“Don’t worry. We were supposed to have extra for exploring.”
They watched the sky.
A bright star appeared, and drifted down.
They both began shouting at once, and Miya had to bellow into her suit mike. “Got them! Futz, they nearly fried me! You hurt them, Hanny, I only finished it. I’m coming down. How are you doing?”
“Near done,” Zeera said.
The voice from the sky said, “Feed me!” An instant later Miya dropped beside them.
* * *
They had to get out of the pressure suits. Then Zeera laughed and waved a hand in front of her nose, and the Minim’s air system howled. It was futile to think about baths.
Miya’s mouth was full, and Zeera was trying to tell her about Svetz’s suggestion. “It’s so easy! We just turn on the Fast Forward and wait!”
Miya swallowed deliberately. “You’re for this, Hanny?”
“I’m not for it. I just haven’t thought of anything better.”
“We’d be aborting the mission. We only have seeds for the anchor grove.”
Zeera exclaimed, “It’s something to show Ra Chen and Willy!”
“We don’t have what it takes to grow an orbital tower. That is what we came for!”
Svetz asked Zeera, “Think that tank is full?”
She glanced at her board and nodded. They went outside, pulled the oxygen hose loose and sealed up the Minim, all in silence.
“Ready to launch,” Zeera said, “if we can figure out where to go.”
Svetz said, “We have options. Go back to Hangtree Town. Stay and be natives. There are things we can teach them, if we find someone who wants to be taught. We might learn something too. How to grow a Hangtree.”
Miya’s voice in their helmets: “You favor this?”
“No. I’m just thrashing around.”
“Well, I’ve got a plan,” Miya said.
“Leader, speak to us!”
“Trust me? Come in and button up the Minim. I’ll show you.”
27
Dead of night. The stars were ablaze, seen through no trace of cloud and only the barest trace of atmosphere. The Hangtree had fallen below the horizon days ago.
“FFD,” said Miya. “On.”
Sunlight blasted their eyes.
Day and night strobed. Zeera cursed and clenched her eyelids tight. Miya looked out, grim and squinting. Svetz pulled his helmet into place.
Now the sun was a dark spot hurtling east to west, over and over, but the light-dark-light landscape was still uncomfortable. Pressure tents and vehicles appeared in a pattern not quite centered on the spot where the Minim moved through time, all built in the fashion of the red humanoids. The Tanker disappeared in sections. A few minutes later all the activity on the plateau went away. The temp housing began to decay and collapse.
Miya switched off on a day in late afternoon.
The Hangtree was high in the sky, east by south. Bouquets of tremendous silver flowers bloomed at both ends. The splintered bottom end had healed: it was pointed like a stem emerging from a silver corsage, ten thousand klicks above Mars.
Miya asked, “How far did we come?”
“There’s no gauge for the FFD,” Zeera said. “Just an on-off switch.”
“Futz! Give me a guess, then. Three years or so? The Martains must think we just disappeared. Now the tree’s higher, but it took forever to get there. So the Hangtree is leaving Mars, but it’s taking its sweet time—”
“Miya, what’s your plan?” Zeera demanded.
“Launch.”
“We can’t reach Earth!”
“Rendezvous with the Hangtree. It’s not in geosynchronous orbit anymore, it’s higher than that, but we can still reach the midpoint. The midpoint will still be in free fall.”
“We can do all that,” Zeera said carefully, “but why do we want to?”
“Launch us. I’ll tell you on the way.”
“Are we in a hurry? Miya, what you need is sleep!”
“I want to get moving. Hanny, get into your suit. You too, Zeera. If I’m wrong I want to know it.”
“Midpoint of the tree, aye aye,” Zeera said. “Check my work.”
They were pilots, he wasn’t. Svetz watched them, and presently said, “The telescopes in the crater may be up again. When they see us in flight, the party’s over.”
Miya murmured, “Launches are finicky, Hanny.”
Zeera said, “I’ve got the Minim in low orbit. We circle half around the planet and do a second burn—”
Svetz reclined his chair and watched for double-wok ships in a navy blue sky.
He snapped out of a sound sleep when the floor roared at him and gravity doubled. The ship rolled. The biggest mountain in the solar system dwindled behind them.
The motors went quiet. Zeera said, “We’ll make another burn to close with the tree. Twenty-five minutes. Miya, are you planning to moor us to the trunk?”
“Right. I think I’ve worked out the Hangtree life cycle.” Miya closed her eyes and said, “We don’t have fuel to reach Earth, right? But we can get on the Hangtree and ride it. Anchor to the tree. We’ll get there with a reserve of f
uel. Then Fast Forward until we see where it’s going. If I’m wrong, we abort. Reentry and Fast Forward, land at Mars Base One and call Willy. Start over.”
* * *
Mars was a vast black curve beneath black sky. Fuzzy light was just peeping over the horizon: not the sun, but the Hangtree’s upper cluster of mirrors.
Zeera started her second burn.
Svetz was able to make out a vertical line, almost invisible against the black sky, motionless and infinitely distant. It didn’t look threatening.
“What’s that?” he asked, and it was suddenly far too close. Zeera yelled and fired attitude jets. The Minim twisted viciously and surged.
The intruder whipped past. They craned around to see it recede: a silver-brown cable hanging unsupported in space, there for an instant more, then gone.
Miya said quietly, “The Hangtree’s dropped a sapling.”
A juvenile Hangtree? “That’s good, isn’t it?”
“Might mean I’m not crazy.”
Zeera said, “I’m correcting course now. That cost us some fuel.”
The parent Hangtree rose; become large; vast; a world in its own right, coming up too fast as Zeera turned the Minim for a final burn. Thrust pulled them into their seats, then eased. A vertical bar on the displays stretched, lit up in red, kept stretching, turned yellow.
Svetz asked, “What’s that?”
“Hull temperature,” Zeera said. She turned the Minim, and they looked into a hot pink glare.
“Heat rays. Futz ’em,” Zeera muttered. “Did either of you see any kind of projections on the mid-trunk?”
“Sail struts,” Svetz said. “Down the trunk by no more than twenty klicks. Sail material harvested, struts still in place.” The glare of Softfinger heat rays washed out all detail, but he’d seen. “We can moor to those. Zeera, what about the heat cannon?”
“Can’t hurt us, but projectiles can. I need to moor us now.” Another puff of thrust sent them downward, still closing with the trunk.
The heat rays touched wood. Red fog boiled out of the bark and closed around the Minim before the Softfingers turned their weapons off. Svetz looked for double-wok shapes in the red murk. What he saw was a man-built dirigible airship moored below them, much too close.