“Kzinti Two and Three,” Gambiel corrected.
“I thought this interceptor class was a two-man affair.”
Gambiel shrugged, and started his own bobbing dance. “Someone had to fight off the Bandersnatch from inside. It wasn’t done by automatics.”
“All right, then it’s three kzinti and a ship to divide among four pairs of eyes,” Cuiller noted. “I think we should stay together;” Krater said. “And go for the box.”
“Reasons?”
“The other two kzinti wouldn’t be going anywhere except to follow the first,” she answered. “And the ship is staying put, too.”
“How do you know that?” Jook asked. “The kzinti might know a lot more about this world than we do. Those two could have a dozen interesting places to visit and things to do. After all, Beanstalk might be their private hunting preserve, or something.”
“Then the kzinti would have found the stasis-box long before this,” Krater countered. “And they wouldn’t have let the Bandersnatch surprise them. Anyway, that explosion damaged their ship.”
“How do you figure?” Cuiller asked.
“Wouldn’t that big a bang have knocked some widgets loose from our hull? And that kzinti sphere isn’t even from General Products.”
“Circumstantial evidence,” Jook scoffed.
“Besides which, from where I was sitting, I saw some pieces hanging loose.”
“I hate to interrupt this,” from Gambiel, softly, “but while we chatter, Kzin One is getting away.”
“Right,” Cuiller said. He made his decision. “We’ll all go. Fan out in line abreast, keeping a space of just one tree between each person. Stay hidden in the lower branches, if you can. And stay ahead of the kzin
“We’ll follow our original vector. At half a klick out, everyone start sorting through the branches around your assigned tree grid. The first to find the stasis-box, takes it. If Kzin One interrupts while you’re doing that, kill him-if you can. Any questions?”
“Why don’t we just shoot Kzin One from up here?” Jook asked.
“That’s ablative armor,” from Gambiel.
“Oh, right.”
At Cuiller’s nod, they all wound up on their lines to get a foothold in the canopy. Alone among the greenery, the commander readied his grapple in the launcher and fired forward along their path-which was also the kiln’s. Around him he could hear the muffled chuff, flutter and thunk of similar activity.
Could Kzin One hear it too?
Swinging through the trees like a goddamn monkey! Trying to find the Slaver box by beating the bushes!
Angry thoughts swirled in Sally Krater’s head as she balanced her feet on a leaf-cloaked branch and got ready to fire her launcher. She held it tightly, aiming along the course that she and the others had been following.
She could hear them around her, moving quietly through the overbrush, each making no more sound than the wind or any other animal up here. Now and again, she did hear the prolonged whirr of a winder as one of them dropped into the lower layers and peeked out to make sure Kiln One was still on track.
Everyone was trying to move quietly-except Jook. With his bad leg and his natural clumsiness, he bumbled through the leaves, missed his footing on branches, snagged his line and cursed softly while freeing it. Not softly enough to remain unheard by his fellow crewmembers, but maybe softly enough to go unnoticed by the pair of augmented kzinti ears moving ninety meters below them.
After a kilometer of travel, Krater knew Cuiller had angled his track to intersect Gambiel’s and assigned the Jinxian to watch Jook’s movements and help him be quiet. Krater herself, veteran of too many biologists’ observation blinds, not to mention an early life in partial gravity, knew she was more graceful than any of them in this floating greenery.
But that did not keep the angry questions from buzzing about in her mind.
For instance, just how was any of them to know when they’d traveled the full two and a half kilometers to the Slaver box? Really! Cuiller was asking them to track accurately through the jungle while swinging around tree trunks and through shallow arcs, covering anywhere between twenty and fifty meters with each set of the grapple. In all that confusion, he expected them to stop within one or two trunks-a deviation of no more than fifty or seventy-five meters-from a predefined point. It couldn’t be done! And that was just one sign of how badly this expedition had gone to hell. Ever since Jook had lost the ship…!
Krater angled her launcher at forty-five degrees above the horizon-or where she thought the horizon might be, much as she was bouncing around inside a blob of green leaves. She fired.
Chuff-CLANG!
The grapple had flown five maybe six meters, stopped dead, and recoiled. Now she could hear it slithering, falling through the branches, its monofilament cutting a vertical slice through the jungle before her. She jigged frantically with her upper body-as much as she could without falling off her branch-trying to jerk on the grapple’s friction brake. If it failed to set, the grapple would fall all the way to the forest floor, signaling her presence to their clawed and armored shadow below. The monofilament caught and twanged on a stout branch. Krater could feel by the tension on the line that the brake had activated. She began winding in, breathing again.
What had the grapple hit up there? she wondered. Vine, branch, trunk, or “peek-a-boo” body part… anything in the projectile’s flight path should have absorbed the point and snagged its tines. Only a rock or- Krater wound the grapple up into her hand and reloaded the launcher. This time she aimed higher and shot.
Chuff! Flutter, THUNK!
She jerked the brake and began reeling in, walking off her branch, skimming the vines around the slash her line had made, touching the next branch with her tiptoes. Soon she was rising almost vertically, walking with hands and the points of her knees, up the side of the nearest main trunk. When the angle that the monofilament line made with the bark wall of the trunk began to shorten, she slowed the winder.
A woman’s face, her own face, stared back at her in a pool of distorted greenery. As her head moved or a breeze rippled the leaves around her, she saw a flash of bright silver. This reflection of the floating world and her own face peered out from a collar of encroaching bark in the side of the tree. Like a knot of polished metal buried in the wood.
She touched the mirror and quickly drew her fingers back. It was cold-colder than any metal would normally be, in this mild climate. Its inherent temperature was not low enough to freeze sap in the wood embedding the knot. Still, it was a chill so deep that the shock felt, to her probing fingertips, like unexpected heat. She thunked the surface with her knuckles and listened for any echo of a cavity beneath the silver skin. No sound came back. So either the object was solid-more than solid, because she could sense no resonance at all-or its insides were lodged in another dimension. A dimension turned by several degrees away from her local reality.
She had found the stasis-box.
Now, how to alert the others? Krater wished they’d worked out, in advance, a series of whistles or bird-calls to address this situation. As communications officer she suddenly realized that should have been her responsibility. Hmm… Well, how could she fix it up at this late date?
Sally Krater fingered the radio at her wrist. If not for the kzinti, she might try using that. But if their enemies were monitoring the electromagnetic spectrum, a radio call would be as damning as a shout. More directional, too. But perhaps… Krater clicked the unit off standby and tapped her finger lightly against the microphone in a rapid and ancient dance: dit, dah, dah, dah, pause, dit, dah, pause, dit, dah, dit…
“What is it?” from the speaker, before she could go on. She recognized Cuiller’s voice, low and guarded.
She brought the microphone to her lips. “Krater. I’ve found it.”
A pause, then: “Converge on Sally.” And that was all. Krater held her breath, waiting for an energy bolt to tear through the foliage below her. None came, but the chuff of launchers and whirr of winder motors was dosing in from either side.