Cuiller itched to get down and begin taking measurements.
Gambiel returned with a length of spare optic-fiber cable in which he’d tied small, tight knots at half-meter intervals. He anchored it inside the open hatchway and dangled the rest across the smooth curve of the hull. They all heard its trailing end thump on the ground.
“We might be needing that cable to make repairs,” Cuiller observed quietly.
The Jinxian stared at him. “We won’t. I checked with Jook.”
“Well,” he went on, “you might have brought up a spider rig from the EVA equipment.”
Gambiel turned to show his left shoulder, where three of the rigs hung like loops of uniform braid. “We have one each. And we’ll all need them.”
“What for?” Krater asked.
“Climbing.”
“Climbing where?”
Gambiel pointed over his head. “Deep radar was your station, Sally. You saw the return image. Whatever made it, it’s still up there.”
“In the treetops? But-”
The Jinxian turned toward his commander. “That was why you tried to land in the canopy. You were watching the deep display instead of the navigationals… Keeping your eye on the prize.”
“Well, yes…“ Cuiller hesitated. Was that the cause of his error?
“Honest mistake,” Gambiel offered with a shrug.
Climbing down was not as easy as Cuiller had thought it would be. They had to go one at a time, walking backwards and paying out the knots hand over hand, until their bodies were laid out almost parallel to the ground. Then they rappelled from the ship’s side, slipping cautiously down the knotted cable until they were under the overhang. Finally they dragged their feet on the hard-packed ground to kill the final swing. Climbing back up was going to he harder and take longer.
With his heavyworld muscles, of course, Gambiel went up and down like a monkey.
Krater, who had the advantage of height and not much mass to go with it, seemed to step from the ship to the ground.
Cuiller, despite Beanstalk’s lighter gravity, still found it a workout.
“What’s wrong with this picture?” Krater asked, looking around when they had assembled under the bow. Gambiel scuffed the soil with the side of his cabin moccasin. The ground was smooth and crusted, like a section of sun-baked clay in exposed terrain. He turned over no ground cover, no dead leaves, no animal droppings or pieces of bark, nothing. They found no undergrowth, either, not even around the tree trunks. None of the vines that wove through the canopy reached down to the forest floor.
Cuiller walked over to the nearest trunk. It was at least two meters in diameter with a hard, scaly bark. He pried at the bark with his fingers but could not break off a piece. No room for invading insects, small birds, or snakes.
He looked up. The overhead leaves were as still as the underside of a green cloud. Of course, if any wind were stirring in the treetops, the sound and movement were cushioned by 30 meters of netted foliage.
Cuiller squatted down to examine the trunk’s base. The bark was scraped and scarred raw there, at least on the side facing him. The wounds went a third of the way around the bole and extended more than a meter up from the ground. They wept a thick, ruddy sap. He duck-walked along the trunk’s circumference and discovered that the cuts faded out into white, scraped wood, which looked almost dead. Beyond that, by another third of the circumference, was a patch of new, green bark-but even there he could see a pattern of parallel scrapes and gouges. Areas of sap, clean wood, and new growth alternated around the trunk.
Something had been abusing this tree on a regular basis, coming at it from all sides.
Cuiller stood up and walked toward the next tree, counting his paces as he went. He knew his stride was just less than a meter. Factoring the correction into his count gave him a distance of twenty-five meters between the two trees. He examined that base and found the same pattern of abuse.
He walked on to a third tree-again, covering just twenty-five meters-and saw the same thing. And he confirmed that the three trees were growing in a line.
On a hunch, he walked back to the second tree and sighted to the third. A patch of white wood there matched a similar patch here. In the same way, running sap faced sap on a tree sighted 120 degrees around the trunk’s circumference. Green bark matched green bark on yet another facing tree.
Cuiller went from tree to tree, always twenty-five meters, and found the same pattern of parallel scars.
Logic said that something 25 meters wide was being dragged through the forest here like a rake. And whatever it was, it swept up leaves, scored the tree trunks, clipped any undergrowth, and scoured the soil bare, compacting it to the consistency of a mud brick.
“Did you bring radios?” he asked Gambiel.
The weapons officer handed him a palm-sized unit Cuiller tuned and spoke into it.
“Hugh?”
“Right here, Jared. I can even see you through the window, sometimes.”
“How’s the knee?”
“Painkillers are kicking in.”
“Can you get up to the deep radar?”
“Not without a climb, but I can work the repeater at the comm.”
“Right. Give us a bearing to the return image, would you?”
“Just a sec… Ten degrees off the port bow, still at a range of two and a half kilometers. And, Captain-it’s above us now.”
“I know. In the treetops, right?”
“Well, the angle is right for it, anyway. But how would “I think we’re going to find that everything interesting on this planet-which Sally has named ‘Beanstalk,’ by the way-is up in the forest canopy.”
“Alright. You’re leaving me with the ship?”
“Can you lift if you have to?”
“So long as you all are clear of the area, I can punch up the main ion engine, have her hot in ninety seconds, and scoot.”
“Do that, if you see anything.”
“What am I going to see, down here?”
“Somebody’s keeping the grounds swept nice and clean. Watch out for whoever it is.”
“Sure thing. Do you explorer types have weapons?” Gambiel overheard that. He turned his right hip toward Cuiller, exposing three hand-fitted variable lasers clipped to his belt. Over that same shoulder he carried a brace of laser rifles, which had a wider aperture and a longer beam pulse.
“We’ve got them.”
“What about food, water, thermal-”
“I’ve got my field test kit,” Krater spoke up. “And we’re all carrying a foodbar or two for snacking. Quit nagging, Mother-Hugh. We’ve only got two klicks of ground to covet”
“Okay. Be back soon.”
“In two shakes,” Cuiller agreed and clicked off.
They headed out, walking easily between the trees on the bearing Jook had given them. After half a kilometer of parklike open space, they came upon their first patch of undergrowth. Green shoots, bushes, and saplings grew up in an uncleared area that was shaped like a pentagon. Cuiller noticed immediately that its points were anchored by five of the mature trees.
“Wait here,” he ordered, and began to wade into the greenery.
“Captain?” Gambiel called. When Cuiller turned, the Jinxian checked the charge on a hand weapon and tossed it to him.
Cuiller accepted it with a nod.
He pushed his way into the secondary growth, bending stalks and branches aside and wishing they had brought along a few simpler weapons, like machetes. Twenty-five paces in from the nearest tree, he found what he’d been expecting: a broken stump two meters wide and a fallen section of trunk. He looked straight up, hoping to find a patch of sky. The green vault was thinner here, perhaps lighter in color, but still unbroken. Most of the
