“The damn things are heading right at us.”
“Then get out of their way.” She pulled him aside, into the cover of the trees, and Yuri and Lemmy followed.
The tripods ignored the humans. Seven, eight, nine of them, they descended on the fallen flyer, and whirred across its body, this way and that, efficiently cutting it to pieces. Yuri saw fine limbs—each multiply articulated, like a spacecraft manipulator arm—pluck at bits of the disintegrated carcass and tuck them into the mesh-like structures that were the cores of the tripods’ own bodies. Yuri had seen beasts like these out on the plains and around the lake, but these were smaller, compact, faster-moving.
“Messy business,” Martha murmured. “Like butchering a carcass by running at it with chainsaws. Bits flying everywhere.”
“Yeah, but look,” Onizuka said, pointing.
From nowhere, it seemed, smaller creatures were appearing, some ground-based spinners like the larger scavengers, some flapping flyers like the downed canopy beast, though much smaller. They were all put together from rods and sheets of webbing, as far as Yuri could see. They fell on the big corpse, a cloud of tiny workers processing the remains of the flyer in smaller and smaller fragments.
“They didn’t break off when they came running towards us,” Lemmy said. “Maybe they don’t see us.”
Martha said, “We must look strange, smell strange—if they can smell at all. They don’t recognise us as a food source. And not as a threat either.”
“Not yet,” Onizuka said, hefting his crossbow. “Give them time. You know, I’ve got some experience of the deep ocean. No rich daddy for me, Martha. I made my money from the reclamation trade, deep-diving for precious metals and such from the drowned cities of mainland Japan. I got a taste for the ocean… When you get down deep enough, you go beneath the layers where light can reach and stuff grows, plankton and so forth. If you live deeper than that, down in the dark where nothing can grow, you spend your whole life waiting for stuff to come sailing down from above. Scraps, whatever. And when something big comes down, a whale carcass or such, you get a feeding frenzy.” Onizuka glanced up at the canopy, the huge static leaves. “Same principle here. Down on the ground you must get years of darkness, no light to grow. That’s why there’s no undergrowth to speak of, no saplings. Most times it’s just like the deep ocean. And so you get these very efficient scavenger types, just waiting for their moment when something comes falling down from the light.”
The cluster of scavengers was breaking up now, those big waist-high spinning-tripod types departing first with a hum of whirled limbs, and then the cloud of flyers and the little runners polishing off the scraps, before fleeing too. When they had done, Yuri saw, you’d never have known the fallen flyer had been here at all, save for some scuffed forest-floor debris, and a few patches of hardening marrow.
The group pressed on.
Chapter 16
They reached the forest fringe, pushed through a last screen of skinny saplings—some of which, barely grown, looked just like the stems back in the Puddle—and emerged into a clearing, centred on some kind of big rock-jumble hollow in the ground, with the forest continuing as a drab green wall on the far side. Out of the forest’s shade the air was hotter, more humid, and Yuri felt sweat prickle.
They moved forward more cautiously, some instinct, Yuri supposed, prompting them to stick together in the open. Both Martha and Onizuka hefted their crossbows. Yuri had expected to find evidence of fire, something that would produce a clearing like this—the aftermath of a lightning strike maybe, and there were plenty of those on this stormy world.
Instead the land fell away into the hollow, its edge ragged, the floor littered with boulders. As he climbed down Yuri found himself walking on life: a green undergrowth of what looked like lichen, something like mosses, a kind of crisp furry grass-analogue that was like lots of skinny stems crowded in clumps, and a few young trees, none more than a few metres high. The green was the green of the different photosynthesis of Per Ardua, duller than Earth’s palette.
At the lowest point of the hollow they found a mud pool, bubbling, smeared with purple and green—bacteria perhaps. Around the inner slopes Yuri made out more stromatolites, a bunch like huge toadstools over there, another crowd like slim pillars, all with greasy-looking carapaces but in a variety of colours, green, golden-brown, even crimson. To Yuri it was as if they had walked into a lost world, where everything familiar was distorted.
“Sulphur,” Martha said, wrinkling her nose. “Smell that? That’s why this clearing is here, the trees can’t grow. Maybe this is some kind of volcanic caldera.”
Yuri said, “Or it might be another of those collapsed features, like the Cowpat.”
Onizuka snorted. “What does it matter? Who cares about geology?”
“We should care, bonehead,” Lemmy said sharply. “We know there’s some kind of geological uplift going on here. The ColU’s been measuring it. Like a volcano waiting to blow. If this becomes a live caldera not five kilometres from the camp—”
“ ‘Bonehead’?” Onizuka raised the crossbow and again pointed it at Lemmy’s face. “You don’t get to speak to me like that, you little prick.”
“Hey, hey.” Martha moved in, standing between them, glaring at Onizuka. “Take it easy, hero.”
But Onizuka glared at Lemmy, who returned his stare more or less bravely, and Yuri thought he could see the shadow of Pearl Hanks standing between them. Yuri turned away. If he got involved it would only increase the tension.
Onizuka backed off. “Christ, I could do with a drink.” He shucked off his pack. “Let’s take a break.”
They sat, opened their packs. As they ate, Yuri saw movement on the far side of the bowl. He got up, food in hand, and walked forward to see better.
More tripods were moving over there, more structures of stem-like rods centred on densely woven basket-like core bodies. But these were huge, heavy, graceful creatures, very tall, maybe three, four metres, and they towered over the stromatolite garden through which they glided. They were much slower-moving than the kite flyer, or the scavengers that had consumed it, and Yuri had a chance to see how their bodies worked. They were like construction kits made up of those stems, of all lengths it seemed, from twigs shorter than his own fingers to big stout pillars like elephant bones, combined at joints that allowed them to move in a variety of complex ways. And the joints were being made and unmade in a fluid fashion as the beast progressed, as if the creatures were being rebuilt on the move.
Yuri watched one particularly large beast approach a stromatolite, impossibly balancing on its three fat legs.
Lemmy came to stand beside him. “Quite a sight. The stromatolites standing around like that, like a rocket park, like one I saw at Hellas once, on Mars, the big Chinese base there. And these critters—wow. Look at that.”
That big beast had now produced a kind of appendage, curling over the top of its upright body, like a scorpion sting—and it plunged the sting into the carapace of a stromatolite; Yuri could hear the crack. Evidently the big tripod started to feed, sucking out mushy material from the stromatolite.
Now Yuri saw another creature of a different kind, a bundle of stems that moved with a stealthy roll rather than the usual spinning-stool movement: smaller, more graceful, faster, quietly approaching the big feeder—quietly watchful, it seemed to Yuri, though he could see nothing like eyes.
“Food chain,” Lemmy said. “The stromatolites grow in the light of the sun, like vegetation on Earth. Those big slow things with the stings are herbivores, browsing the stromatolites. And then—”