They had discussed simply landing on the far side of the Forest and launching the flitter, but the far side was nomad country, and several tribes were active in the area.
"Well," Cale said, "I bet we'll give their priests and witch doctors some powerful heavenly signs to interpret!"
"Fine, as long as they don't interpret them to mean, 'kill the spacers'," Dee replied
******
Dee's hand crept itself into Cale's. Sitting in a flitter staring at a piece of hull that soon would be open to the sky was unnerving. Time dragged as Tess took Cheetah suborbital to cross Jumbo's ocean, and then descended to a mere 1000 meters as they approached North continent. The huge trees of the Giant forest swayed in her wake and trembled with the impact until she could slow to subsonic speeds. But none of that disturbance penetrated to the cargo hold, where Cale and Dee sat in nervous silence.
With great relief, they heard Tess's voice over the transceivers attached to their heads over the mastoid bone. The tiny transceivers were nearly invisible, and permitted two-way conversation up to several miles away.
"Get ready," she said. "I have reversed, and nearly shed sufficient velocity. As soon as I assume a vertical attitude, I will open the hatch; but I won't eject you until I am virtually hovering. Timing will be critical. Hovering is not normally a feature of starships, and I will be seriously shaving safety margins. So, I may not be able to warn you before ejection.
"Commencing rotation now!" Tess said, and the hatch slid quickly open, leaving Cale and Dee staring at cloud-strewn sky. A moment later, there was a click as the magnetic grapples released, and then the partial vacuum sucked their flitter into space, spinning end over end in the turbulent air before falling toward Jumbo.
Cale wrestled with the flitter's rudimentary steering and repeller controls. After a few frantic seconds, the little vehicle straightened, but it took several long minutes before Cale could turn their fall into a glide. The flitter's repellers were only effective to 450 meters, (500 on Jumbo), so Cale's efforts were concentrated on maintaining a smooth glide down to the level at which its repellers would become effective and it could fly. When the glide finally leveled and the repeller gauges began to register, Cale breathed a huge sigh of relief, prompting Dee to release her own pent-up breath.
Cale turned to her with grin composed of equal parts excitement and relief. "What a ride!" he exclaimed. Dee simply rolled her eyes, shook her head, and tried to stop trembling.
Cale turned the flitter west, toward the ruins of Nirvana. Tess confirmed they were just over 1300 kiloms east of the old city, some twelve hours' flight time for the flitter.
Mindful of the dangers of the forest below, Cale planned to hide the flitter less than a kilom from a human habitation. He was well aware that moving the loaded cart through the undergrowth would be no easy feat, especially since they would have to be on constant guard against predatory animals and even dangerous plants. He turned his attention to finding a break in the sea of green that made up the canopy of the giant trees below.
Two hours later, they had still not located a break in the green monotony that was the canopy of the forest giants. Cale called Tess.
"My high-def cameras do not show fine enough detail to locate a flitter-sized opening," she said. "But my sensors show a river about two miles south of your present position. If you follow it, the chances approach certainty that such an opening will be located before you reach Nirvana."
"It had better," Cale muttered under his breath. He swung the flitter to the left, hoping they would be able to spot the course of the river.
In the event, it was dead simple. The river's course was revealed by a "seam" in the unbroken carpet of the canopy. In less than an hour, they located an opening large enough to admit the flitter, and they dropped into the pervasive dimness of the forest itself.
It was like dropping into another world. The bright sunlight above was instantly replaced by a gloomy dimness. Their eyes took a few seconds to adjust, but finally the filtered sunlight lost some of its gloominess, became less threatening. But the change was still shocking. Before, they had been in clear blue sunlit skies above a carpet of endless green; now massive tree trunks surrounded them on nearly all sides.
Cale set the flitter to hover while they absorbed the changes in their surroundings.
There was plenty of undergrowth, but this was a temperate climate; it did not approach the density of a jungle. The tangled growth stretched only about three meters from the ground, though thick vines climbed high on the massive trunks of the forest giants. Many of the plants displayed very large leaves, to capture every bit of the filtered sunlight. Clearings and game trails were abundant. Zant had added a sensor suite to the flitter's nose on Santiago, and it had leapt to life, showing heat signatures of dozens of creatures in the immediate area. Some were running away, disturbed by even the nearly silent flitter. Others were still, apparently sleeping nocturnals. Others ignored the flitter and simply carried on with the day's routine of life and death.
The river flowed lazily through the underbrush, its surface dotted with floating leaves and sticks. Like everything else on low-gravity Jumbo, the river was large, over a hundred meters wide here, forming an aerial highway for the flitter.
"We can't afford to be seen," Cale told Dee. "I'm going to fly as high as possible without losing the sensor data, and slow enough to keep from overrunning the sensors. That should give us maximum sensor coverage. Your job is to monitor the sensors. There aren't many man-sized creatures here, and we're not going to take any chances; we're going to avoid them all. If we're lucky, we'll be able to follow the river almost to a town."
"Then what?" Dee asked. "Forest towns will mean lots of hunters, skilled at reading tracks, and it's not going to be easy to get that cart assembled and pull it to the nearest road. We're going to leave lots of tracks. How do we prevent some smart boy from tracking us back to the flitter?"
Cale shook his head. "I've been worrying about that, too. How about this: We circle around any villages, and keep heading toward Nirvana. The closer we get, the more settled it should become. When we're getting near the edge of the forest, we locate the road or trail they're using, and try to sneak in close to the road. Hunters don't hunt near populated areas, they get out into the wilderness. We park the flitter 15 meters or so off the road in a patch of heavy underbrush. I doubt there will be much traffic on the road. We'll monitor it, of course, and make sure we're not seen. We assemble the cart, pull it over to the road, and approach the village from the city side. That will even help with our trader image. And since the flitter will be near the road, we should have less trouble sneaking back to it."
The first sign of human habitation they spotted was apparently a hunting camp; a single shabby wood hut. There was no smoke coming from the chimney, and they did not get close enough for the sensors to register life signs. Cale swung wide around it, moving dead slow while Dee and Tess's 'bot scanned the sensor screens.
Cale tried moving parallel to the river but 100 meters to one side, picking a gingerly way between the massive tree trunks, But the life sign readings became too numerous to examine in detail; so he was forced to again follow the river's course.
Finally, of course, the moment came. "The sensors are reading wood smoke," Tess reported through her 'bot. "I recommend a detour of at least a kilom."
"So do I," Cale muttered under his breath. He was getting concerned. It was late afternoon by now, and he was worried about spending the night in the endless forest.