"Aye, sir."
* * *
"Ouch!" came a low sound in the utter blackness.
"What was that?"
"I hit my head on a branch."
"Again?"
"Can't we slow down?"
"Still three kzinti out there. Behind us."
"One, you mean."
"One that we saw."
"The others are working on their ship."
"Yes—last time we looked."
"We'll kill ourselves, swinging through these trees in the dark."
"You want to walk? And put both feet through a hole?"
"We could stop for the night."
"The kzinti would find us."
"In this jungle, I couldn't find us."
"You don't have their sense of smell."
"Ow!"
"What now?"
"I barked my shin."
"Well, do it quietly. They have ears, too."
* * *
Nyawk-Captain aimed the locator up into the trees. The refinements Weaponsmaster had made in its circuits were amazing: they reduced the light bloom of any hardened return to a pinpoint, while stepping up the return image from woody branches and trunks into a ghost map of the tree world.
"I detuned everything else and made it selective for carbon," Weaponsmaster had explained, the first time his captain had used it. "Carbon is a component in cellulose," the kzin added.
"Very creative," Nyawk-Captain had said.
Now, two kilometers from the ship, he aimed into the treetops again and took a reading. The artifact was right above them, almost aligned with the tree by which they were standing.
Nyawk-Captain turned his helmet light up the side of the tree. "The artifact is approximately ten cubits out from this trunk in—" He oriented himself against it and pointed. "—that direction."
"Shall I climb for it?"
"Do so."
In five minutes, the kzin returned with the storage box under his arm.
"It feels light, sir."
"We'll open it at the ship."
* * *
"When they find it's empty, what do you think they'll do?"
"Come after us."
"They're already doing that."
"So? Did you expect them to stop?"
"No, I guess not."
* * *
Excitement overcame Nyawk-Captain. Rather than shed his armor and climb into the ship, he called on Navigator to come out with a strong worklight.
"Should not someone stay inside, sir? To guard against—"
"Come out here!"
Before Navigator could negotiate the airlock, Nyawk-Captain had the box on the ground and, in the light of their helmet lamps, had found the actuator stud.
The box turned from flashing mirror-brightness to a simple, luminous gray. A crack appeared along its top. Nyawk-Captain forced it apart with his hands. Navigator brought up the light and angled it down inside.
Nothing.
In all the records collected by the Patriarchy concerning Thrintun boxes, none had mentioned an empty box. Preserving fresh air was not a priority with any species.
Nyawk-Captain put the beak of his helmet into the space and inhaled deeply, with suit enhancers at full power. His own nose told him that some animal had once—briefly and forever—inhabited this space. The suit's flicker display began cataloging a long list of organic chemicals: oils, hormones, enzymes, pheromones.
He inspected the interior with optical enhancers, and found three hairs—finer than those on any kzin's pelt—and all without pigment. In daylight, they would be white.
"Is this a billion-year-old joke?" Navigator asked.
"No. The box was inhabited by a live animal," Nyawk-Captain replied. "Too small to be a Thrint. Unlikely to be a Tnuctip."
"But now we have nothing to show for our effort . . . and for the delay."
"Do you have a problem with that?" Nyawk-Captain asked pointedly.
"No, sir. But now we should give full attention to repairing Cat's Paw and resuming our flight to attack Margrave. The mission has not yet become problematical."
"We still have time to find the contents of the box—and the humans who stole it."
"Not with the sensory equipment we have at hand."
"Then use your skills as Navigator. Plot me a course. Use the Leaf-Eaters' stripped hull as a starting point. One vector is defined by our first sighting of this box, now a burned-out hole in a tree. The second sighting point, where we actually found the box, yields another vector. Assume, to begin with, that the humans have no means of transport nor any logical destination other than the hull. Then give me their probable locus within those limits."
"Right away, sir."
"Narrow the field for me, Navigator, and we'll find the thieves by using our native hunting instincts." He turned to Weaponsmaster. "Can you readjust the circuits of that homing radar for a slightly different concentration of carbon?"
* * *
"It's almost dawn."
"How can you tell?"
"I think I can see my feet."
"The brush does seem lighter."
"Ouch! Damn it! I give up."
"It's probably safe to rest here."
Without answering, Sally Krater released enough of the monofilament to allow her to sit on the branch that had tripped her. She let the rest of it float around her face—and didn't care if it snagged on anything and cut off her nose.
"We may not be as far ahead of the kzinti as Jared and Hugh now are," Gambiel said.
"How do you figure?"
"When we stopped to take bearings—"
"And open the box, remember."
"—and open the box," he agreed, "we lost valuable time. And we haven't been making it up in the dark."
"What can we do about that?"
"Listen!"
"How's that going to—?"
"Hush!"
Krater cocked her head and listened. Faintly, through the brush, she could hear a crashing and snapping of the greenery. It was behind them, coming along their back trail.
Gambiel thrust the flute-thing and the white dog into her arms. Before she could stop it, the dog jumped free. It started to run off in the opposite direction, then turned and looked back at her. A long, hard stare that seemed to be full of meaning.
"Go along, now," the Jinxian told her.
"But you—?"
"I'll delay them. Go."
Krater stood up and took in the slack monofilament. "Come here, Fellah!" she called in a low voice.
The dog came up to her and stood on its hind legs, putting a paw on her knee. She scooped up the animal and hit her winder's clutch. In less than a minute, she had gone twenty meters higher and thirty meters farther into the jungle canopy.
* * *
Gambiel turned about-face, called upon all his inner strength, his chi, and began his patient preparations. After a lifetime of training and development, he was finally going to
