The Grad opened the doors. The twins were flying at him. He jetted flame to slow the carm; stopped just alongside them, backed and moved sideways. Then they were crawling into the carm.
Blue shapes crawled within the green sky. Armed Navy men, carrying jet pods and footbows and a massive thing that took three men to handle.
The reunion would have to wait. "Get 'em into chairs," he called back to Clave. Minya next. He was flying the carm like he'd done it all his life. He got a little careless; Minya thumped the hull, then came in with a bloody nose. "Sorry," he said. "Gavving, never mind that, get her to a chair! Who's the other one?"
"It's Ilsa," Anthon said. "They're shooting at her! Grad, get her!"
"I'm doing that. Do we need the food and other stuff'?" He was alongside Ilsa now, between her and the failing Navy men. Voy glared behind her. Footbow arrows ticked off the hull…but that thump had no place in his scheme. What-?
Ilsa's look of terror and determination faded into blissful sleep. He knew before he looked: the silver man was back, spitgun and all. He was on the dorsal surface, out of reach of the doors, and Anthon had thrown a line round Ilsa's waist and was pulling her in.
"Get her into—" The chairs were full. "Get her against the back wall and stay with her. Don't turn any fixtures. Debby, put a tethered bolt in that carcass and we'll pull it in."
Anthon said, "The silver man—"
"These are close quarters. if he gets through the door, swarm him. The spitgun doesn't kill, but if he shoots us all, he owns us."
Jinny called to the Grad, "We brought a stack of clean laundry and a water supply."
"We've got water. Laundry…why not? Hey, I told Minya to go up. You did it right, we'd never have found you—"
Minya said, "if you had the carm, you could find us in the sky. So we grabbed what we could and went down."
The Navy men had not left the branch's green underside. Hardly surprising. if they failed to capture the cam, how would they reach the tree again? They would have looked futile, the Grad thought, were it not for the bulky starstuff thing they handled like a weapon.
The salmon bird carcass was a black silhouette with Voy painfully bright behind it. Anthon and Debby had to squint…but their tethered arrows nailed it and they reeled it in. Maybe the silver man was hoping someone would show his head, none did. He tried to enter with the stack of ponchos, and the Grad almost managed to catch him in the closing door. That left the laundry outside top, and a red border around the yellow diagram. "I never saw red before. What's it mean?"
Lawri deigned to answer, contemptuously. "Emergency. Your line's holding the airlock open."
The Grad opened the door (the red warning disappeared) and Debby pulled the mass in. The silver man didn't try to follow. The door may have scared him. It was his last chance: the Grad closed the doors and sighed with satisfaction.
His sigh chopped off when his ventral view flared pure, diizzling red, then disappeared from the bow window.
From other displays he caught glimpses of painfully bright scarlet. "Can that thing hurt us?" Anthon demanded, while Lawri cried, "Now you'll see! They'll cut us in half!" and Clave said, "They're almost on us. We'll have them all over the hull if—"
"Feed it to the tree!" the Grad shouted at them all. He couldn't think. What could that light do to them? Neither Klance nor Lawri had ever mentioned such a thing.
We've got what we need. Forget the bread, forget the water. Get out! They'll never catch the carm.
Lawri saw his hand move and screamed, "Wait!" The Grad didn't.
He tapped the center of the big blue vertical bar.
Chapter Twenty
The Position of Scientist's Apprentice
THE AIR SIGHED OUT OF THE GRAD'S LUNGS. HE WAS BEING crushed flat. His left arm had missed the arm rest; it was behind him, being pulled gradually from the shoulder socket. The chair was too low to support his head. His neck hurt savagely. Above the muted shriek of the main motor he heard his passengers fighting for breath.
This must be killing the jungle giants.
London Tree dwindled like a dream in the aft view. They were in the storm now, and blind. The Grad tried to raise his right arm, to touch the blue bar, to end the force that flattened him. Up, up…farther his arm fell back across his chest with a jolt that smashed the last sipful of air from his lungs. His sight blurred.
Lawri's chin was tucked down against her collarbone. She was sure that if she relaxed her neck the tide would snap it.
She watched Jeffer trying to turn off the motor and knew he couldn't make it. And Lawri's arms were bound.
They will kill some mutineer, she thought with alloyed satisfaction. And I did it to them. The corn laser would burn or blind at close range, but almost certainly it would not have hurt the cam. She'd lied in hope that the mutineers would panic. She'd succeeded beyond her ambitions.
But it's killing me!
The screen of clouds swept past and away.
Gold was to left of center in the bow window. The Smoke Ring trailed left of Gold. They were accelerating east and a little out.
East takes you out.
They were leaving the Smoke Ring.
I knew it. That crazy Jeffer's killed us all.
With his head pulled far back, with the points of what should have been a neck rest digging savagely into his shoulder blades, Gavving looked along his nose and tried to make sense of what he was seeing.
The skyflowed away at the edges of the bow window. A triune family split and fluttered and were gone before they could move. A small, flattish green jungle drifted close, accelerated, whipped past. A fluffy white cloud showed ahead. Closer. White blindness, and the carm shuddered and rang with the impact of water droplets. Something tiny struck the bow window a terrific blow and left a pink film a quarter meter across. In a breath the rain had pounded it clear.
The cloud was gone, and the sky ahead was clear of further obstructions. Gold and the Smoke Ring showed like a puffball on a stem, against blue sky…a deep, dark blue sky, a color he'd never seen in his life.
He rolled his head to look at Minya. The agony in his neck shifted the pressure was easier to take this way. She looked back at him.
Lovely Minya, her face fuller than he remembered. He tried to speak and couldn't. He could barely breathe.
She sighed, "Almost."
The light of the CARM's main drive was back, and blueshifting!
A shift in its spectral line, and he'd caught it. Lucky. Kendy aborted his usual message. The CARM's time-eroded program would be busy enough without distraction. For the CARM was in flight. It must have been accelerating for some minutes already. By the frequency shift, it was building up enough velocity to take it out of the Smoke Ring… within a few thousand kilometers of Discipline itself!
When the light went out, Kendy began his message. The air was already thinning around the CARM. Reception should be good.
"Kendy for the State. Kendy for the State. Kendy for the State."
The sound stopped, the terrible tide was gone, all in a moment. Bodies bent like bows recoiled. Citizens who had not had the breath for screaming, screamed now.
As the reflexive screams died to groans, the Grad heard Lawri say, wearily, "Jeffer. Never use the main motor unless you're pushing the tree."
The Grad could only nod. He'd captured the carm, he'd. treefodder, everyone he knew, if he hadn't murdered him he'd put him aboard the carm! And then he'd touched the blue bar. He said, "Lawri, I'm open to suggestions."
"Feed it to the tree."
The Grad heard full-throated laughter aft…from Anthon. Debby swatted him hard across the belly. The blow snapped him into a U, but he kept laughing, and she joined him.