“This isn’t going to be a walk in a park, I see,” Greg said, rubbing his sore arm.
“Don’t worry, ones that big don’t normally get this far inland. And they can’t eat humans.”
“Right. If they can tell we are human. With that, it was bite first, taste later.” Greg almost felt sorry for the big old springcroc—old and feeble and clearly blind, it had kept doing its jump and bite thing to the very end.
“We can always go back to the tower.”
Greg shook his head. “No. Let’s go. That way.” He pointed west.
Kanti shrugged and plunged into the pagoda tree forest. Greg noted how she kept her arms close to her body, and did likewise.
The sky started to become gray. Kanti stopped at a particularly low and broad pagoda with helicopter vines draped all over its base canopy, their ends twirling in the light breeze. “I need some sleep,” she said simply.
Greg, exhausted as well as worried, nodded. He had no idea of how far they’d come, his arm was killing him, and the whole enterprise felt futile. He worried about how crude his navigation was, and his only feeble hope was that the field of disguised Uther rockets was too big to miss if they were headed in anything like the right direction. He worried about whether they would get there in time to do anything.
“We’ll need about ten rocks and a giant roundleaf,” she said. A nearby stream provided the rocks, and a mystified Greg helped her lug them back to the pagoda tree.
It all became clear in a moment. Kanti pulled the vines down until the edge of the pagoda tree’s canopy touched the ground. Then she weighted it there with a rock. She did this all around the tree until she had turned the umbrella-like canopy into a kind of fluted tent that looked something like a furled umbrella.
With a sharp stone, they were able to cut off the top of a giant roundleaf nearby, and tear it in half. Each half made a sleeping pad. Kanti lifted one rock on the rim of her “tent” to make an opening, and pulled the pads in. Greg followed and closed the “door” by curling the lip of the canopy back under and weighting it down from the inside.
By midday, it was too warm to sleep any longer. Greg started to get out of the “tent.”
“The Uthers have sharp eyes,” Kanti said.
Greg looked up, involuntarily. “We’ve got to make some progress. They must be almost ready to launch their attack, D-flat Seege must realize he can’t keep a lid on this forever.”
“Right.” Kanti said, looking up as well.
“Well,” Greg said. “I think they’ll be looking for something from the air more than from the ground. Bach doesn’t know you, and it would expect me to try to get home instead of going for the rocket field. So maybe they won’t be watching too hard.” Greg moved carefully out of their tent.
“Maybe.” Kanti rolled to her feet and followed him.
They moved carefully under the forest canopy for about an hour. Judging by Taranis’s position, they were still headed approximately west, but Greg was beginning to mistrust his navigation, particularly when the terrain started rising again. It would, he thought, be best to wait for nightfall when he could get a look at the stars again.
“Greg,” Kanti whispered. She was at the top of the rise.
He scrambled up to her and looked. “What is…” He fell silent in awe. Even from this slight hill, the huge, blunt shapes towered over them, and there seemed to be hundreds of them, stretching right and left until distance blended them into the surrounding forest. From the average spacing of the rockets, Greg was able to confirm his original estimate. Probably a thousand of them. One Uther warship for every human being in the system, he thought. Even given the disparity in technology, if that fleet boosted without warning, it would be all over in hours.
The Fay D-flat Seege had made little effort to disguise their fleet from ground level, other than randomizing the placement of their rockets to simulate a pagoda tree forest. They had, however, taken the precaution of surrounding the rockets with an innocent looking belt of thin forest and meadow—anything in that belt would be very easy to spot from the air.
“Down, quickly, quietly. Sentries,” Kanti said.
Greg didn’t see anything, but moved quickly. They scrambled beneath the lowest leaf of a large pagoda tree.
“How did they do all that secretly?” she asked, her voice filled with quiet wonder.
He shook his head. “We screwed up. When your forces are inferior in weapons, skill, or position, your best bet to make up for that is with superior numbers and that was what we should have been looking for. They were more audacious than we realized and did a damn good job of camouflage.”
“I don’t think we’ll be able to just walk in there,” she said.
“No,” he agreed. “Let’s back off and try to think of something.”
They retraced their steps for a few hundred meters, and sat down near some exposed rocks. Finally Greg asked, more to break the gloomy mood than anything else, “Is there anything here we can eat?” The conventional answer was “no,” but Kanti’s field knowledge had surprised him enough so far that he wasn’t going to make assumptions.
Kanti shook her head. At length she said. “Maybe. The pentapods and their relatives are as poisonous to us as we are to them. In theory you could eat snail flesh, but you would have to cook it a very long time, or the digestive juices would bum your mouth, throat, and everything else. Springcrocs are full of other poisons. But…”
She stopped and went over to a small rock, then turned it over.
“They look like beetles,” Greg said.
“They are beetles.” Kanti announced. “Terrestrial insects—they can eat the moss here, and some of the dead Eponan life.”
It wasn’t supposed to have happened. The precautions against contamination had been immense, and draconian.
“Mom.” Kanti said. “She brought a sealed terrarium with her, a little glass thing the size of a baseball that had its own simple independent ecology. She didn’t declare it, and took it in her handbag. She bragged about getting it through. It disappeared when I was five. She told me to never say anything.” The pain of a broken promise was etched on Kanti’s face.
Greg could guess what had happened. An Uther juvenile had scavenged the little terrarium, then broken it open to see what was in it. In, what, eleven years, with plenty to eat and no natural enemies, in this hothouse… “Who knows about it?” he asked.
“Bach knows. And probably his wing leader’s file right up to D-flat Seege. They aren’t mad—they didn’t believe our promises of not trying to take their planet in the first place and expected us to try to trick them out of it—because that’s what they would have done. They thought it was kind of clever, sneaky. Now they’re going to try to get even.” She hung her head and stared at the loam and the alien beetles. “Greg,” she whispered, “will they kick us out of the system altogether?”
Greg shook his head. “Probably. If Knute doesn’t do it first. But I think it’s already too late.”
Kanti shrugged, and picked up a beetle about the size of her little fingernail. “In the meantime—” She popped it into her mouth and chewed ostentatiously, staring Greg in the eye.
With an extreme effort, Greg did the same. It wasn’t as hard the second time. In half an hour of turning up rocks along the stream bed, they managed a decent snack. It was mostly protein, he told himself, and better than nothing.
It was late afternoon now, and they found themselves by an idyllic stream, warm but not too hot. The leaf ribs of the tall pagoda trees that lined the banks reminded Greg of the vaulting of a cathedral—a translucent cathedral in unearthly shades of green. But for all the beauty around him, Greg felt the lead weight of responsibility on his shoulders. “How long do you think it would take us to walk out?”