Cuiller walked up to the main hatchway and stuck his head through. The smell was overpowering: a mixture of acids and ketones, spoiled plastics, burned metals, and what he could only describe as elephant vomit. Holding his breath against it, his eyes watering, he looked down the length of the interior, seeing with the light that came though the masked windows and the newly worn places. He looked for as long as he could, before the fumes drove him back. The hull was nearly cleaned out. A network of optical-quality glass fibers, apparently indigestible, had been discarded in one corner like a salt-encrusted fishnet. A few curling panels of fiberglass cloth, with the resins leached out, were all that remained from the sleeping cocoons. The hyperdrive engine, thruster pods, weapons pods, struts and bracing had completely disappeared—unless the sludge of reeking green bile that ran the length of the bottom curve were their only remains.
The General Products hull, of course, was not even scratched.
Cuiller beat his fist against it, just once, for no good reason.
“Where’s Hugh?” Krater asked.
They looked around. Cuiller actually hoped they wouldn’t—
“Up here!” the navigator called from a distance and dropped slowly out of the canopy, suspended in his climbing rig. His toes touched the ground and, favoring his stiff leg, he retrieved the grapple.
“Where did the Bandersnatch go?” Cuiller asked.
“South.” Jook pushed a thumb over his shoulder. “Right after lunch.”
“What did you manage to save from—all this?” The commander waved his hand around at the hull.
“Myself. A rifle. This harness.”
“Any food? Water?” Gambiel asked.
“No time.”
“Why didn’t you lift?” Cuiller asked. “As we agreed you would.”
“Again, no time. The thing was up on the hull before I even saw it. It had punched out the hatch and was chowing down on the infrastructure before I could get to the controls. Too late then.”
“You should have been watching for it. We called to warn you.”
“I was trying to repair the weapons module. And anyway, we both agreed Bandersnatchi wouldn’t harm the ship. What did you expect me to do?”
“All right. Conceded, we were both wrong.”
“Can we salvage anything?” Gambiel asked.
“See for yourself,” Cuiller gestured at the ship. “Take shallow breaths.”
“We’re marooned, aren’t we?” Krater asked as the Jinxian moved toward the hull.
“Yes. It’s almost as if the Bandersnatch wanted to make sure we couldn’t leave,” Cuiller said. “And we never did get off a position report. So no one will be coming for us, either.”
“I don’t—” Krater looked suddenly pale. “I mean, I didn’t—” She turned away and stood looking up into the trees.
“Not your fault, Sally,” the commander offered, but it sounded weak even in his own ears.
Cuiller went over to the abandoned cowling of the ion drive and started to sit down. He stopped and checked the surface for corrosive liquids. Finding none, he slumped on the bent metal.
“You’ve been up there, Sally,” he said quietly, waving at the treetops. “What do you deduce from your observations?”
“Oh! I took some samples.” She turned around and slipped the field kit out of her pocket. She opened it and keyed in a series of queries. The device beeped at her.
Jook drifted closer to listen. Soon he was sitting on the other side of the cowl, but with his back to Cuiller, looking away into the forest. His posture suggested depression and a sense of rejection by his companions. He’d snap out of it, Cuiller decided.
“There’s water up there,” Krater reported, “and the kit says nothing in it will harm us. The leaves—all that I got to test, so far—aren’t poisonous, but they’re no more nutritious than any other wad of cellulose and chlorophyll. There may be game up in the branches. At least, something played peek-a-boo with me up there. Whether it’s edible, or would find us so, I can’t tell. But the native ecology seems to be generally nonpoisonous. Bandersnatchi like it.”
“So we won’t die of thirst,” Cuiller summed up for her. “And we can hunt for long as the charges on our rifles hold out.”
“That’s about it,” she agreed.
Gambiel had come back from the ship. Cuiller noticed that when he joined their group he stood, not beside Krater, but across from her. The Jinxian glanced at her only occasionally while she reported, and he spent most of his time looking over her shoulder scanning the forest on the far side of the hull. When Cuiller thought of it, Jook’s chosen position—sitting behind and facing away from his commanding officer—was not a sign of psychological separation after all. He was watching Cuiller’s back.
Before, when the three of them had gone off into the trees, Cuiller and his crew had walked separately. They had raced off to look at sights that interested them, leapt freely up into the canopy, and generally acted like a cadet class on leave. Now they were more wary. That was good. It might save their lives—for as long as they might have on Beanstalk. It was time, right now, to give them some purpose.
“Daff, see what you can make from all the metal lying around out here. Cups or basins would be nice. A jar or canteen would be even better. But think twice before you do any cutting or pounding. Don’t attract visitors.”
“Aye, Captain.”
“Sally, take a rifle and get up into the trees again. See if you can bring down one of your ‘peek-a-boo’ critters. They might be intelligent and in communication with the Bandersnatchi down here—”
“I don’t really think—”
“But if one of them holds still long enough, shoot it.”
“Captain, we don’t need to worry about hunting for food just yet.”
“Noted. But I want you to test the indigenous fauna before we eat up all our pocket rations. Anything you see like fruit or green shoots, collect them, too.”
“Yes, sir.”
She turned away and readied her grapnel launcher.
“You have any assignments for me?” Jook asked.
“If your leg is solid enough—”
“I might mention that our situation is hopeless, Captain.”
“So?”
“Our long-term prospects are terrible. We are all alone on a planet that’s never been charted, let alone visited by other humans. No one knows where we are—or probably much cares, because our mission had such a low priority to begin with. We are on the marches of kzinti territory—technically unclaimed but not likely to be unknown to them. We’ve got Bandersnatchi prowling around here, and suddenly they don’t like us, either. The best we can hope for is mere survival, but not much more. And, unless I miss my guess, even that’s a long shot unless we find some kind of vitamin supplements. We won’t last more than a couple of months hunting the local game in the treetops. So why should we do anything but give up, lie down, and die?”
“Because I said so,” Cuiller said grimly. “And I’m still in command.”
Jook straightened up. “Oh, well then, that’s different. What do you want me to do?”
“Follow Sally when she goes up. Take station behind her, and anything that tries to kill her—you kill it first.”
“Easy enough.” The Wunderlander stood up, kneaded the bubble cast for a moment, and readied his rig. “What are you going to do, Jared?”
“Get some exercise by kicking myself for landing us in this mess.”
“Fair enough.”
An hour later, Gambiel called the commander over to sort out a collection of gear he had recovered from the ground around the ship and from a few protected corners inside the hull. The weapons officer had already arranged his catch by classification.
In addition to various pieces of bent metal, he had found three battery packs for the lasers; a bucketful of damaged circuit chips that might be reworked into some kind of transmitter, given time and enough optic fiber; and half of the autodoc. What remained of the latter provided them with some unlabeled vials that might be painkillers, antibacterials, growth hormone, or vitamin supplements. The tags were all electronic, for use by the expert system that ran the ‘doc. It didn’t need to know English equivalents.