Now, as Tom Rom descended through Vaconda’s atmosphere, he caught a strange echo on his sensor map, but lost the flicker again when he reached the lichentree forests.
The thick spiky treetops did not mesh into a solid canopy, and the forest floor was too dense and cluttered for him to land his ship there. Rather, he dropped a pontoon tarpaulin that self-inflated and expanded, anchoring itself to the lichentrees. This gave his ship a tough temporary spot to land.
Settling down on the suspended tarpaulin, the craft swayed, then stabilized. He collected specimen cases and extraction tools, filled the fuel tank in his torch gun for clearing underbrush. Wearing a headlamp and two shoulder-mounted lamps to penetrate the murk, he strapped everything to his back, emerged from the hatch, and looked around the pale and silent forest. After activating the locator beacon on his ship, he strung his cables and rappelled down the hollow-sounding trunk of a lichentree all the way to the forest floor.
The lower levels were lit by ghostly sunlight filtered through a mist of fine spores. The ground was a chaos of deadfall. Large-eyed salamanders scuttled away, leaving faint trails of phosphorescent slime behind. Mushroom globules jittered and wobbled as if in secret laughter as Tom Rom crashed past.
The lichentree forest seemed to be closing in around him, but his locator gave him his bearings. Down here in the gloom, everything looked the same, but he knew where he was going.
He unshouldered his torch gun and began blasting. A large blue slime mold tried to slump away, shrugging and rolling at glacial speed. Tom Rom played bright flames over the area, igniting the lichentree deadfall and the squirming mosses. He continued to focus the torch, burning the vegetation, then burning the ash. The heat itself activated the prisdiamonds, which made them easier to find.
Putting on a breather mask and thick gloves, he cleared away the powdery residue to reveal sparkling clusters like geological ice crystals bursting out of the rocks. He struck them with a rock hammer, snapped off the valuable gems, and scooped up the glittery debris until he had filled his satchel.
The torch gun’s fuel chamber was empty, and Tom Rom discarded it, not wanting to bother carrying it back up to the treetops. Tired and sweaty, he stripped off his heavy protective gear and dropped it on the ground so he could make good time back to the ship. He followed the signal from his locator.
When he reached the rope at the base of the tall lichentree, he could see the bright fabric of his pontoon tarpaulin high above and the shadow of his waiting ship. He secured his satchel of prisdiamonds, clipped onto the rope, and activated the climber, which scrolled him back up to the treetops.
Reaching the spore-hazed daylight above, he blinked in disoriented surprise. Another ship had landed adjacent to his own vessel. It was a battered, disreputable-looking craft without any markings. Tom Rom reached for his torch gun, but he had left it down on the forest floor.
Four men in ragged jumpsuits were waiting for him, two had Roamer clan markings that had been scuffed and covered. He did not recognize the men. He did recognize their type. They might well be Roamers but they were definitely outcasts, better labeled as pirates. The men crossed a metal gangplank from their own ship to his pontoon tarpaulin.
“See? Told you he’d come back,” said a thin man with sideburns so long he clearly had poor judgment in shaving.
“And I told you it was better just to wait here than to go looking for him,” said a second man.
All four withdrew hand jazers.
Tom Rom regarded them. “I think I saw you at Ulio. You must have gotten lost on your way here.”
“No, we followed you just fine,” said the man with the sideburns.
“I should be more careful, then.”
The men chuckled and kept the weapons trained on him. “Yes, you probably should.”
Tom Rom did not like to feel so helpless. He could fight, but he had no weapons. They would cut him down.
“Let’s just see what he’s got in that case,” said the quietest man, who seemed to be the leader. He had a head of thick red hair combed back away from his forehead. He looked at Tom Rom. “We ransacked your ship, but didn’t find much of value. So we figured there must be something more important here.”
“Yeah,” interjected the man with the sideburns. “Who ever goes to Vaconda?”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have come here,” Tom Rom said.
They relieved him of his case, and when they opened it to reveal the prisdiamonds, they nearly fell off the pontoon tarpaulin. “Prisdiamonds! Where the hell did he get those?”
“Obviously down there.” The quiet leader pointed toward the forest floor.
“We could each buy two starships with this load,” said Sideburns.
Probably three, Tom Rom thought, but he kept the comment to himself.
“This will be very satisfactory,” said the leader. “Well worth the trip.”
“We’ll have to remember this place,” said Sideburns. “We should just kill him now and get it over with.” The other pirates muttered in halfhearted agreement.
Tom Rom looked at the quiet leader without blinking. “You’ve already proved yourselves to be thieves, but not all thieves are murderers.”
The leader apparently wasn’t. “Go inside his ship and wreck the control panels, smash the engine conduits. He won’t be going anywhere.”
“You mean you’re just stranding him here?” said Sideburns, as if that were a more horrendous fate.
“I can survive,” Tom Rom said in a quiet voice, stating a fact.
“Good enough, then,” the leader said. He turned his comrades loose inside Tom Rom’s ship, where they destroyed the systems. When they came out, their expressions were aglow with the satisfaction of vandalism.
The quiet leader held the satchel of prisdiamonds, pleased with the haul. “I assume there’s more down there?”
Tom Rom didn’t nod, but the answer was clear enough.
“We’ll be back, maybe rescue you. If you survive that long.”
“I’ll survive,” Tom Rom repeated.
Carrying the prisdiamonds, the four Roamer outcasts walked back across the makeshift gangplank and pulled it up before climbing aboard their battered vessel. Sideburns gave Tom Rom a taunting look before sealing the hatch.
He didn’t wait for the pirates to leave before ducking into his own ship. With a fast glance, Tom Rom scanned the damage: a few smashed power blocks, a peeled-off circuit film, a navigator control overlay, cracked instrument plates, two shattered viewscreens. His engines were quite durable, and he doubted they had sustained serious damage. The men had no organized sabotage plan, simply let loose with random destruction. Good, that would be easier to fix.
As he heard the Roamer ship priming its engines to leave, Tom Rom opened a locker, rummaged around, and withdrew a boomerang limpet. He’d never had occasion to use one before, but he came prepared. It seemed simple enough.
He stepped back out onto the uncertain surface of the pontoon tarpaulin and watched the battered pirate ship lift off. It accelerated into the sky, curving south as it climbed above the tops of the lichentree forest.
Tom Rom gripped the curved handle of the boomerang limpet, bent over to coil his muscles, and hurled it up into the air. It spun with a soft whistling sound, gathering speed until its motivators fired up. The limpet’s sensors cast a wide net, then the device altered its trajectory, accelerated, and rose up to strike the bottom hull of the pirate ship. It clamped on to the metal plates and started its timer.
Tom Rom had set the countdown for forty seconds, which should allow the ship to fly high enough and far enough away that he wouldn’t be bombarded with debris.