“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 ma pinch.
Gambiel had found nothing of the ‘cycler. So they had only the food in their pockets, unless Krater’s hunt was successful, or they figured out a way to bring down an adult Bandersnatch, or found a clutch of fresh buds.
“You want to try making a fire with that laser?” Cuiller asked.
“Burning what?”
“How much of a wedge do you think you could cut out of one of these trunks without knocking it down?”
“That’s green, sappy wood. give off a lot of smoke.”
“We can stand it. None of us is going to smell too good in a day or two.”
“I was thinking of our white friends. They might be sensitive to fire under the canopy.”
“You’re right. I -“
The sound was on them before they could hear it: the rippling crackle of tortured atmosphere parting before a heavy body traveling faster than air molecules knew how to move. What they consciously heard was the dap of a sonic boom-the air moving back in the wake of whatever had snapped it apart -followed by echoes of that first, searing push against the atmosphere.
Cuiller looked up, expecting to see a contrail in the sky and finding only the green gloom of the canopy above them.
“That was a ship,” Gambiel said. “In a hurry, too.”
“Of course. Have any idea what kind?”
“I didn’t hear any reaction thrusters. They could be on gravity polarizers.”
“And this close to the Patriarchy’s back door… Can kzinti detect a General Products hull at long range?”
“The same way we go about finding a stasis-box,” Gambiel said. “Keep probing with deep radar and study the return images. Our hull comes up cloudier than a Slaver box, but still defined.”
“Ouch! Let’s get up into the trees.”
“What about these?” Gambiel pointed to the hoarded supplies.
“You take the batteries and medicines. I’ll take the circuit chips. Leave the scraps-no one’s going to eat them.”
The Jinxian began filling his pockets.
“Captain, what was that?” Jook called on the radio. “Company. Daff and I are coming up to join you. Stay put and-until we know more-stay off the radio.”
In reply, Jook keyed the transmit twice. Two low bursts of static that could be read as “Aye-aye.”
Cuiller nodded silently at Jook’s quick and tactful thinking.
“The kzinti won’t be out of their ionization envelope yet,” Gambiel observed. “They can’t hear our radio transmissions yet.”
“Still…“ Cuiller took out his grapple and launcher, hooked up a line cassette, and took aim overhead. “When we get up there, Daff, go as high as you can. You’re our best at identifying kzinti ships by their silhouette. See if you can spot and evaluate the newcomers.”
“Do my best.”
They fired their grapples and swung up through the leaves, As soon as Gambiel was stabilized on a limb near his grapple, he released it, aimed higher, shot, and slithered away after it. Cuiller surveyed the local jungle. Radio would carry to the kzinti, but not voice.
“Hugh!… Sally!” he shouted.
Cuiller looked around, parting clusters of flat leaves to stare into the next meter-wide pocket of air. He called again, stepped over to another branch, recovered and reshot his grapple, and swung on a short arc toward where he thought his navigator and communications officer had gone up.
“Sally!…“
“Captain, you’re scaring the game.” It was Krater’s voice, but she was invisible, screened by the foliage.
“Belay the hunting, we’ve got visitors.”
“I know. If you keep shouting like that, you’ll scare them, too.”
“Well, just hang on, because-”
“Heads up, everybody! Coming through!” Small and distant, Gambiel’s voice drifted down to them. It was followed immediately by the groan of branches being forced aside-much like the first passage Callisto had made through the treetops-accompanied by the sizzle of wet leaves burning. Cuiller could smell hot iron and dying vegetation.
The question was, where would the mass of the ship come down? If it was right over their heads, they’d never have time to get out of its way before the kzinti ship knocked them loose and crushed them among the collapsing vines and branches. But if it was coming off to one side or another, then any step might move them to safety-or take them into the line of trouble. No way to know…
“Hang on!” Cuiller called out, and braced himself.
The wall of leaves that defined the edge of his vision bulged inward and then dissolved in a golden tracery of sparks and incandescent veins. Beneath the fire was the scorching flank of a kzinti warship. Cuiller thought at first it was red-hot metal-or some ceramic, equally heated. Then, from the uniform coloring, he guessed the hemispheric section was simply painted red. It disappeared below before he had a chance to make up his mind. His one glance left the impression of a globular hull. From its chord, it seemed small. He guessed it was only fifteen or twenty meters in diameter. Then the gap in the trees closed on a blackened twist of branch and a fume of smoke.
Cuiller reset his grapple and lowered himself into the feathery bottom layer of the canopy to watch the kzinti ship land. From the whirr of winding motors that came to him through the leaves, he knew the rest of his crew had the same idea.
At this close range, the Leaf-Eaters’ special hull showed clearly on a radar scanner working at normal intensities. The spindle gleamed and sparkled under the weakly graded return of the foliage layer covering the planet that Navigator said was chart reference KZ-5-1010. Nyawk-Captain made an estimate of the hull’s size- more than 200 cubits in length- and, from this, confirmed the vessel type with Weaponsmaster.
Nyawk-Captain piloted an entry through the green layer, sliding among the interlaced branches and through the nets of vine. He counted on the residual heat in Paw’s hull to burn through, where the gravity polarizer could not break through, the entangling vegetation.
He wanted to place his ship at visual inspection distance from the strange hull. Among these closely spaced tree trunks, that meant landing practically on top of it-too near for evasive maneuvers. Cat’s Paw went down with every weapon fully charged, ready, and aimed. Yet his greatest weapon against the Leaf-Eater hulls, Nyawk- Captain knew, would be the gravity polarizer itself. At the first sign of hostility, he would use an acceleration forty times the pull of the kzinti homeworld to stomp anything inside that ship into paste.
When the last branches between him and the enemy ship had burned away, Nyawk-Captain focused his optics. The first thing his eyes registered were holes in the hull material. Then scrapings on its surface and the litter of metal pieces all around it. Finally, the trees that bent under its weight and the odd angle at which it lay among them. All of this, plus the total lack of reaction to his coming, gave Nyawk-Captain pause.
