They walked along, deviating from a straight line only to pass around any trunks in their way.
“Whoop!” Krater shouted.
She suddenly floated away from Gambiel’s other side. Cuiller caught a glance of her white jumper flashing past and in front of them as she soared into the trees. She covered the ninety vertical meters in about twenty seconds, moving so quickly that at the end of her arc Krater barely had time to cock her feet up to reach for a toehold. The lieutenant disappeared into the canopy with the barest rustle of leaves.
“Serve her right if she cracks her head on a branch,” Gambiel said. “Should we follow her up?”
The commander pointed ahead. “Our goal is over that way. We’ll reach it faster walking on the ground.”
“We might lose her”
“We’ve got visibility of what-?“ He looked around. “A hundred meters down here? And less than ten meters up there in the leaves. If she gets lost, she can always drop down and we’ll spot her.”
“If we’re looking in the right direction.”
“She’ll probably scream or something,” Cuiller said.
“Yeah, she probably will.”
The two men walked on through the trees.
The sound came from Navigator’s panel. It was a strange burring-full of enough sonics to make a kzin’s neck ruff stand out from his chin. Nyawk-Captain searched his memory for a sound like it and finally decided it was not part of normal ship’s operation. Perhaps a malfunction? A small, 1st motor vibrating out of its bearings? But coming from inside the solid-state circuitry of the panel…? Then a wrinkle of memory surfaced, a significant detail from his early simulator drills with the Vengeance-class interceptor.
“You have a return from the hardsight,” he snarled over his shoulder.
“Wh-what-sir?”
“Wake up, root breath! Your station is active-and signaling you.” “Ah, yes, Nyawk-Captain. I see that now. Sorry, sir.”
“Vigilance, Navigator. Now, describe the sighting.”
“It is still several light-hours distant…
“Wake up, damn you! Give me facts in the order I need to know them. Is the anomaly along our prescribed course? Or somewhere off in the starfields?”
“The sighting’s deviation is… fourteen degrees from our projected-”
“So we would not otherwise have walked across it. Describe the contact.”
“Contact?”
Navigator’s surprise was genuine, because kzinti battle referents were precise. Passive objects might be “sighted.” Enemy vessels were a “contact.”
“What does your training say?” Nyawk-Captain replied. “This ship was designed to cruise with its hardsight range detector automatically probing along our forward path. Why else-if not to detect the Leaf Eaters’ improbable hulls?”
“To seek out Thrintun boxes?” Navigator replied brightly.
“Fool!” Nyawk-Captain spat.
“A witticism, sir! I abase myself.”
“For a Navigator who sleeps at station, you should have no comedy available to your mouth.”
“I humbly abase myself”
“Describe the contact”
“The hardsight return is in close proximity to a star, but not within its photosphere. So the contact is either in orbit itself or lodged on a planet-although the surrounding return is too weak to show such a body. There is one object… No, correction. At extreme gain I observe two contacts. One is sharp. The other is fainter and… fuzzy. It may be merely a reflection of the first. It certainly is close enough for that.”
“What are the dimensions?”
“At this range, Nyawk-Captain…”
“Is either one big enough to be a hull?”
“One of the reflections may be, but the distance…”
“Very well. Bend your fullest attention to refining your observations.”
“Shall we alter course? If we could draw nearer..
“I will decide, when you give me further useful information.”
“As we move to pass that system, it’s possible that the two signals might show some degree of separation. From that we may learn-”
“Provide me with facts, Navigator.”
“Such is my only objective, Nyawk-Captain.”
“Very good. Be vigilant-and wakeful!”
Sally Krater hitched her feet up, pivoting about the liftpoint at her solar plexus, where the takeup reel whined and throbbed, After the soles of her moccasins broke through the leaf veils of the lower canopy, she slipped the clutch on the winding mechanism. The pull against her chest halted abruptly, but her mass continued to rise in a flattened arc. With Beanstalk’s reduced gravity, she slowly topped out, pitched forward to the length of her remaining line, and fell gently back through the leaves, swinging on the grapple anchored above her.
Krater suddenly realized that her back could be shattered against any heavy tree limb coming up behind het She immediately dragged with her heels through the leaves, trying to kill her momentum. At this level, the greenery was dense but not cloying. The leaves were flat and veined, each about the size of her open hand. They clustered in billows around her, supported on springy whips that were either tiny branches or vines-she couldn’t yet say which. As Krater swung, her head, arms, and legs batted through masses of these leaves, stinging where her skin was exposed but not otherwise hurting her. When she looked down between her feet she could see random patches of brown ground. At the end of her last rising swing, she glimpsed in one of these patches two pale dots that might be Cuiller and Gambiel, far below and looking up.
Once her momentum was stopped and she hung straight down, she began to reel in slowly, rising meter by meter through the canopy. Within five meters she had reached the grapple, which had fallen across the first stout branch she had seen-up in what she wanted to call the canopy’s mid-level. She twisted slowly on her monofilament, conscious that the invisible strand ran just centimeters from her face. Any sudden motion, she realized, might clip her nose or an ear. She wondered how close she had come to cutting her own head off when she topped out and pitched after that first upward rush.
Krater’s thighpockets held a rescue kit, and from it she took a packet of fluorescent dye, suitable for marking a water landing. She broke it open and ran the exposed sponge lightly up and down the line, until it became a bright purple steak before her, like an etching laser flashing through smoke. With the remaining dye she reached up and soaked the line spindled in the grapple’s socket, then the slack taken up on the reel at her chest. She made a mental note to suggest this to Gambiel, when they got together again.
As she hung there, her mass started to spin lazily, and she put a hand against the branch above her to stop it. The sudden pressure dislodged something up there, and a stream of liquid cascaded down. It splashed off her shoulder and struck a bunch of leaves below and off to her left. She carefully tasted the drops clinging to her uniform: water; sweet and cool.
From her other pocket, she took out her field kit. It popped open and she keyed up the gas chromatograph and amino acid analyzer. The only samples within reach were that water and the leaves around her. Although she had no immediate plans to eat the leaves themselves, they would provide a clue to the nature of indigenous life on Beanstalk. The flora would reflect any general tendency toward toxins, heavy metals, or wrong-handed molecules. Balancing the kit on her raised knee, she tore a nearby leaf into bits and pressed them against the first sensor mesh. She dabbed a few of the drops that remained on her shoulder into the second mesh.
Something moved. Out of the tail of her eye, off to the right, she detected a pattern shift. From her undergraduate biology, Krater knew that human peripheral vision worked best at perceiving motion-a relic of primate development, both as hunter and prey. So, if she could sense something moving, it was moving.
“Just the wind,” she whispered to herself. And yet she knew that the motion had been localized. If it had been wind, the whole canopy would be surging around her now.
She turned her head slowly, swinging her nose centimeter by centimeter to the right. She did not dart with her eyes, but shifted them only in slow blinks. But before she could begin facing the whatever-it-was, the radio strapped at her wrist crackled.