“Looks — what is the right word to use? — parched?’
“Sure is. Dry as a bone, almost all of it. It’s a desert world in the Eta Cass system — that’s where the Pipe-Rillas come from. Barchan is two worlds sunward of S’kat’lan, their home planet.”
“Can I live there without a suit? Is it — what is the word for that?”
“Habitable. Yes, you’ll be able to breathe the air — just — but it’s so hot you’ll wear a suit almost all the time. Want to take a look at it from ground level?”
Chan shook his head. “Later.” His eyes were already fixed on another image and his fingers danced across the board.
Tatty caught Flammarion’s eye. Get a load of that.
When Chan had no more than an infant’s mentality, there had been nothing wrong with his coordination. Now he was operating the control board faster than Flammarion.
The older man scowled and shook his head. It didn’t fool Tatty. Kubo Flammarion had no children, and never expected to. He could not conceal his pleasure and parental approval when Chan did something new and impressive.
Here’s another one that’s been flagged,” said Chan. “Where is it?”
The screen showed a verdant world, one where even the oceans were covered with a dense carpet of vegetation.
“That’s Dembricot, in the Tinker system.” Flammarion moved closer. “Move over a bit, and I’ll show you why the training supervisors flagged it for you.” He leaned across, linked in to a surface camera, and zoomed across to take a close-up view of a building nestled among tall, spiky ferns. “See that? Main training center for Team Alpha, before they headed out.”
“Team Alpha? Did you tell me about that?” Chan was worried.
Flammarion glanced questioningly at Tatty.
“Don’t worry, Chan, you’re not forgetting things,” she said. “I never mentioned it. My fault — but there s been so much to pack in.”
“Team Alpha is the first Pursuit Team to complete training,” said Flammarion. “Leah Rainbow is part of it, along with three aliens.”
“What does the name mean?”
“Nothing much.” Flammarion shrugged. “Just that it’s the first team to go out. Leah hates the name, says she’s going to change it soon as she gets the chance.”
“So Leah was right there, in that building.” Chan eyed it hungrily. “I wish she was there still, so we could use your — comm-un-i-cator? — and I could talk with her.”
“Sorry. They left Dembricot days ago. You see, Chan, they’re all done with their training. Leah came through it in fine shape, just the way you will when your time comes. Now it’s the real thing. The team’s in high orbit around a planet called Travancore. The Morgan Construct is supposed to be hiding away there, so at the moment they re not allowed closer than a million kilometers. You know, maybe I can link us to their ship — at the very least I should be able to get the one-way visuals they’re sending back to base.”
Flammarion rattled at the controls with black-nailed fingers, cursing as a mystifying succession of grainy images fled across the screens. “Rotten cheap equipment,” he said, as the picture finally steadied. “Rotten tight-fisted politicians. That’s probably as good as we’ll get. Low signal bandwidth, see.”
“Bandwidth?”
“Take too long to explain now. Just remember that low bandwidth usually means we get only so-so voice communication and a lousy picture or no picture. Like that.”
A flickering black and white image filled the display.
“No color either,” said Flammarion. “Can’t get realtime color with low bandwidth. Make the most of it. That’s a long shot of Travancore, coming from the pursuit team’s ship.’
They were again seeing the surface of a planet under high magnification, but this time from a ship far away. At first sight it was a repeat of Dembricot, a dense, horizon-to-horizon carpet of vegetation. A closer look showed differences on the speckled screen. Instead of being flat and uniform, the surface of Travancore pushed up into millions of small hillocks and hummocks, each one only a few hundred meters across.
“See ’em?” said Flammarion. “Whole planet’s like that. Pretty odd place, and I’ve seen some. Those hills are solid plant life. Surface gravity is low, but not all that low. Somehow, though, vegetation can grow six kilometers deep.
Vertical jungle, layer after layer after layer of it. Don t ask me why it doesn’t all come crashing down.”
“How can a ship land there?”
“Very fair question. It can’t — not in the usual way. There’s no solid surface to put a ship down on, and no way it could stay in one place if it tried to land. It would sink down and down, Lord-knows-how far before packed vegetation could hold up the weight. So a ship has to hover at the top layer, and drop off people and cargo, and then hit right up again.”
“I never heard of a ship doing that,” said Tatty.
“So you’re learning something as well as Chan. Flammarion was fiddling with another part of the control board as he spoke. “You can both see why Travancore makes such a hell of a good hiding place — we can’t see much with a space survey, and we can’t do a mechanized ground survey. But somewhere under all that mess, if you believe the Angels, there’s a surviving Morgan Construct.”
“Leah will go there?”
“Not until they know the planet a whole lot better — maybe in another week or two. But eventually Leah and her team have to find the Construct and destroy it.” A series of clicks came from the communicator, while a pattern of red squares appeared in the upper left corner of the display.
“Virtue rewarded,” said Flammarion. “I put in that tracer, but I didn’t really expect success. That s the signal I.D. from Team Alpha itself — we’re in contact with the ship, not just tapping the data stream they’re sending back to base.”
“You mean I can talk to Leah?”
“If our luck holds.” Flammarion started to complete the sequence. “I told her that you’d be on-line at this end.”
“Wait a minute.” Chan stood up and stared at the screen. He began to breathe very rapidly.
“And here she is.”
Flammarion had taken no notice of Chan’s request to wait. He had just managed a pretty neat trick of realtime signal patching, and he was rather pleased with himself. He turned to explain to Chan what he had done, and found himself looking at a rapidly retreating back. “Hey, where are you going? I’ve got her on the line with me right now.”
“Chan?” Leah’s dark countenance flickered onto the screen. “Chan, is that really you? This is wonderful.” The camera panned across the room and she looked increasingly puzzled. “Chan, where are you? I’ve been longing to talk to you ever since the moment I got the news.”
Tatty came forward and stood in front of the scanning camera. “I’m sorry, Leah. This is Tatty. I ought to have guessed that this might happen. Chan’s here, and he’s doing fine. But he finds it hard to talk to you.”
“Hard to talk to me?” The picture quality was too poor to read subtleties of Leah’s expression, but her voice was bewildered. “Tatty, I’ve been talking to Chan since he was practically in diapers. I can talk to him and understand him better than anyone else breathing.” The voice hardened. “What have you and Flammarion and Mondrian done to him? For all your sakes, he’d better be all right. Because if he’s not, I’ll come back from this place and scrag every one of you.”
“Calm down.” Tatty knew better than to smile and joke when Leah was in this mood. “I told you, Chan is all right. Better than all right, he’s so smart now he frightens us. And I can tell you exactly what’s wrong with him. It’s you. He finds it hard to talk to you — really — because he’s embarrassed.”