Man-Kzin Wars V

by Larry Niven

  Uncharted but not unknown, Cuiller reminded himself. A thousand, a million times over the millennia, humankind had looked outward toward this sector and seen its stars—stars now hidden in the Callisto's Blind Spot. Some of these stars, judging by their lines in the mass pointer, were even bright enough to be visible from Earth. But no one had taken a survey mission through here. Not after bumping into the kzinti coming the other way.

  "Captain . . ." from Jook at the comm down by the pointer. "We're going to graze the singularity limits of a star—"

  "Initiating evasive."

  "No, wait. The mass says it's a sol-type, G1. We might drop in for a look."

  "Again?"

  "I've got some scatter that might be planets," Jook said hopefully.

  "Or another fully developed Oort cloud?"

  "Well, we can't know till we look . . ."

  "We've got a mission to perform, Hugh," Cuiller told him.

  "Survey data is valuable, sir."

  The commander sighed. Jook was right. And it was time for them to drop in and see some stars in visible light for a change, if only for an hour or so.

  "Very well. Sing out when it's time to decouple the hyperdrive."

  "Now! . . . sir."

  Cuiller hit the switches on reflex. It wouldn't do any good to wander into a singularity. Stars bloomed in the nothingness beyond the wide window stripes in the ship's surface covering.

  "Which direction?" he asked.

  "Off our port bow and now rolling up at, uh, 230 degrees."

  The commander looked and saw a bright yellow bead, big enough to begin showing a disk.

  "Start plotting the planets, or whatever they are. I'll wake Lieutenant Krater and get her on the console."

  "I'm awake," she said, rolling out of her sleeping cocoon. "I felt the ship acquire momentum."

  "Jook's got another possible planet. Give it the once over, will you, Sally? Full spectrum."

  "Gotcha."

  The crew settled into their workstations, except for Gambiel. Cuiller let the weapons officer go on sleeping, held in reserve against a probable long watch when they were underway again.

  After ten minutes, both Jook and Krater spoke at once.

  "Hello!"

  "I've got—"

  "One at a time," Cuiller ordered.

  "I've found a planet," the navigator said. "One body, no moons. It has an equatorial radius of about 3,400 kilometers, about the same as Mars. But it's got a lot higher mass, pulls about point-seven-nine gee. We can move around easily enough, but if there's an atmosphere it's going to be dense and hot. The planet is far enough out from the primary for water to go liquid but not start icing down."

  "Spectral analysis says there's atmosphere," Krater confirmed. "Sixty-eight percent nitrogen. Twenty-two percent oxygen. Nine percent water vapor—so the air is pretty steamy, too. The rest is traces. We can breathe, unless we find pockets of poison gas or spores or something. . . . But that's not the big news. I've got a hard return!"

  "On deep radar?" Jook asked eagerly.

  "Of course. I thunked your planet once just for luck. And the return shows either a chunk of neutronium, or—"

  "You weren't scanning at the core?" Cuiller asked quickly.

  "Naw, it shows up right near the surface."

  "Well, well."

  "You're not going to make us go down there, are you, Captain?" Jook asked, inserting a mock whine in his voice. "You know we've got a mission to complete, with lots of phantom kzinti to chase."

  "Stow it, Hugh." Cuiller grinned. "Give me a vector to the planet. Sally, when we get close enough, localize that hard return for the navigational console and send it to Hugh. . . . We make one pass over it in low orbit, Hugh, to get a fix on landing sites, and then we head in. Right? Look sharp, everybody. We could be going home rich."

  "Aye, sir!" from both of them.

  * * *

  From more than ten million kilometers out, they could see with the naked eye that the planet's disk was unbroken. It showed a pale green atmosphere, banded with broad strips of white.

  "Looks like a gas giant," Cuiller said uneasily.

  "No way, Cap'n," Jook answered. "We definitely have rock."

  The green was the color of dilute free chlorine—lots of it. On a hunch, Cuiller asked Krater to recheck the spectralysis, which was taken by comparing incident light from the G-type primary with sunlight reflected off the planet.

  "I do get some dropout lines for chlorine," she said. "But not enough to color the atmosphere like that. The machine still says what it's got is breathable."

  From a million kilometers away, they could see little more.

  "The green is probably chlorophyll," Krater observed. "We're looking at grass fields, swamps, taiga, or all three."

  "Should be greener then," said Gambiel, who was awake by now and at his forward station.

  "Remember all the H2O in the air," she told him. "We're looking through a mile or two of light haze. A lot of reflectance there."

  "Oh."

  The haze appeared to deepen and grow whiter as they locked into an orbit. "More scatter effect," Krater called it.

  "Do you have any features around our deep return?" Cuiller asked.

  "Captain, you're looking at a billiard ball," Jook announced. "I'm doing a navigational scan in the point one-meter range, and the spherical deviation is nil. A trifling amount of oblateness. Otherwise smooth. I mean, a rise of fifty meters would be a mountain range down there."

  "Then we can set down anywhere," Cuiller summarized.

  "Well . . ." Jook hesitated.

  "Give me a fix on that deep radar pattern, Hugh," Cuiller told him, "and I'll kill the orbit."

  "You've got it, Cap'n. Deceleration point coming up in two minutes."

  "Sally, do you see any change in that pattern?"

  "No, what you're looking at is just what we've had from the first, allowing for scale change. I read the return image as just about a meter in any dimension."

  "Better all the time. . . . You'll have to reel in the whip now," he told her.

  Because a General Products hull blocked all radiation outside the visible spectrum, Callisto communed with her environment through a trailing string of antennas and sensors that wound on a reel in her tail section. The sensor string would not survive the buffeting of an atmospheric entry. "Aye, Captain." Krater keyed the proper contacts.

  "All right, people," Cuiller called out, "strap in."

  He counted the whirs and clicks as the crew pulled out the gravity webbing and made themselves fast at station. Cuiller fastened himself down last.

  "One minute to mark," from Jook. "You going to take this one in manually?"

  "I need the practice," Cuiller said.

  "Easier to let the computers do it . . ."

  Cuiller thought about that, looking down at the nearly white curve of the horizon. "We've got room to play around, surely."

  "All right . . . Mark!"

  The commander closed a series of switches, engaging the external ion engine. The ship vibrated, and Cuiller felt his body sway forward against the retaining strands.

  Callisto glided down in a long curve. Her forward quadrant glowed where the external ceramic coating—which deflected laser attacks tuned in visible light—covered the impervious General Products surface. The hull itself remained serenely clear, except for a buffeting layer of ionized air.

  At 2,000 meters above the surface, Cuiller terminated the ion drive and brought her gliding around on inertial thrusters, maneuvering under his own eye-hand coordination. He glanced at the repeater from Krater's station.

  "I'm going to set down about two kilometers from that reflection," he announced. "Not too far to walk, but not close enough to disturb it."

  No comment from the crew, which he took for agreement. As Callisto cut through the mist, the planet's surface was revealed as a deep and startling green. Cuiller was reminded of pictures he'd seen of Ireland but then amended that. This was bright enou
gh to be an enhanced color graphic of Ireland, with overdrive on the yellow and cyan pigments. Jook had not overstated the flatness. Even from a hundred meters up, Cuiller could not see any hill or wrinkle higher than two or three meters. No valleys either. And no boulders, trees, rivers, lakes, nor any other feature. Just a deep and rustling green vegetation.

  "Settling in," he said, killing forward motion and dropping the lift smoothly toward a steady seven-point-seven-three meters per second, just enough to counter local gravity. When the greenery—it looked like large and feathery leaves—reached up to touch the clear window in the hull's underside, he backed the thrusters down to zero and switched them off.

  "Captain!" Jook called out. "Check your navigational radar!"

  "What? Oh shit!" He saw the 120-meter discrepancy immediately.

  The leaves flared back around the window below and revealed lighter green strings of moss and the wet black bark of tree branches. Between them, Cuiller could see more layers of green and black strands, receding indefinitely, with nothing solid under them.

  He got his hands back on the switches for the inertial thrusters and initiated a restart. But before he could key in the full sequence, Callisto's tail, weighted down with the unbalanced mass of the hyperdrive engine, broke through the surface.

  It happened too fast. Cuiller was still thrusting on the ship's long axis, but Callisto was now falling nearly vertically. He tried to correct—and only pushed her backward into a tangle of branches and vines. Their springiness absorbed the horizontally vectored thrust for ten meters of travel, then rebounded, shoving Callisto down her own hole.

  They all felt the shock when the stern contacted firm ground at last. No one cried out, but someone among the crew gave an involuntary gasp. Cuiller, glancing down the spindle into the maze of machinery, could see a subtle misalignment. Internal structures had shifted. He could also hear things falling, plink and clunk, along the hull. Not all of them were personal effects shaken out of the sleeping cocoons.

  The bow and the forward band of windows, around the control yoke, were still angled above the leaf layer, exposed in misty sunlight. Cuiller's fingers were dancing over the switches, trying to get thrust under them and lift clear. But the ship was sliding, changing orientation too fast. He and Gambiel watched the world rotate and sag as the hull's weight found paths of least resistance among the branches and vines. Callisto swung and turned, walked and slid. A green gloom rose up around their window. Cuiller quit trying with the controls and lifted his hands clear.

  "Hang on, people!"

  Finally, only the forward tip of the spindle was caught in the branches, and they were slipping away to the left and right, passing Callisto side to side, as they got out of the way of her mass. In two more seconds, the ship was free and fell a hundred meters at the bow along her own length.

  Wham!

  More clatter came up from the hull behind Cuiller, but then his ear caught a louder groan. At first he thought it came from one of his crew, until Cuiller realized that one of the weapons pods, located forward of the control yoke, was moving. Right before the commander's and tactical officer's widening eyes, it turned on its own axis and fell through the open space ten centimeters in front of their toes. Severed conductors in a cable tray snapped and fizzled before the automatic extinguishers kicked in with a chill cloud of carbon dioxide.

  The ship rolled almost 180 degrees in settling, and the weapons pod swung back, now poised above them. It caught up on the lateral strut that braced Cuiller's and Gambiel's watch-keeping station, and it stopped moving.

  "Everybody sit tight till the ship quiets down," the commander ordered. They were all hanging by their ears now.

  "I got nowhere to go," Gambiel breathed beside him.

  The infrastructure creaked and groaned, but nothing more came loose.

  "Let's try to get damage reports before we shut down."

  "Aye, Captain," the crew called back raggedly.

  In the space of two minutes, they had logged the ship's status—weapons, propulsion, sensors, life support—at their various duty stations. Callisto had lost that forward weapons pod for certain, and the sensor whip was not reporting, even from its reeled-in position. Two portside thrusters were impaired, if not inoperable. The recycling system had lost function. Auxiliary power was down by three charge cells. And the ship was oriented horizontally in a 170-degree roll—standing on their heads, as it were.

  "I should try to get off a position report," Krater said. "If that's possible, with the antenna cable damaged—"

  "Do what you can," Cuiller told her. He swiveled around in the stirrups, hanging head down in the webbing, to observe the crew at their stations. "Anybody take injuries in that last fall?"

  "Well . . . it's my knee, you see," Jook said. His webbing was loose enough that he had bashed his leg against the mass pointer. No damage to that piece of equipment, of course, but Jook's knee was swelling rapidly. Otherwise the crew was shaken but unhurt. Cuiller directed Krater, who doubled as medical assistant, to help the navigator into the autodoc.

  "Daff, take air samples," he ordered. "And if it's clean, pop the hatches. Let's get outside and see where we are."

  * * *

  The main entry hatch, normally oriented toward the underside of the hull, was now positioned near the top. Cuiller, Krater, and Gambiel climbed up handholds and over equipment bracing to reach it. Jook stayed inside, nursing his knee in a bubble cast foam-molded by the 'doc. While they went outside, he would use the time to catalog and schedule their estimated repairs.

  After levering themselves through the opening, the three crewmembers stood on the roughened ceramic surface and surveyed the landing site. Callisto lay on clear ground, angled slightly upward at the bow, where the hull was wedged between the smooth trunks of two trees. Those trees, and every other tree in view, supported a high forest canopy whose underlayer was more than ninety meters overhead.

  Cuiller searched for the hole they must have made in passing through it but found nothing. No clearings punctuated the vaults of leaves and trailing moss that soared above them. The surrounding world was a uniform green gloom, without a splash of sunlight.

  "Beanstalk," Krater said suddenly. "That's what we'll call this planet."

  "What?" from Gambiel. "This patch, maybe. But who can say what's going on in the next county over."

  "I can say," she answered. "There is no 'next county.' We've been around this world once and taken a radar image of it. This is one huge, unbroken rainforest, girdling the planet, covering probably sixty percent of its surface."

  "Well, at the poles, then . . ." the weapons officer said, trailing off.

  "There ought to be what?" Krater asked. "This planet's rotational axis is perpendicular to its ecliptic. So you won't get seasonal temperature variations, as you do on Earth. You can expect the temperature to drop uniformly at the higher latitudes, because of the sun's lower angle in the sky. But that only means that the rain-forest is going to peter out in low scrub, then mosses and lichens, and eventually frozen deserts. This planet clearly has no plate tectonics, which means not much in the way of topography ever formed here. So no mountain ranges, no valleys, no river floodplains, no oceanic heat sinks. That means there can't be any weather."

  "What about Coriolis effects?" Cuiller asked. "You'd still have moving air masses, trade winds, horse latitudes—any planet that's turning has them."

  "All right, I'll agree to trade winds. But on a smooth ball like this, they sorted themselves out long ago. Even flows without much intermixing. That's the cloud banding we saw from far out."

  "Hugh said he detected a smooth surface, and it was—even a hundred meters up in the treetops," Cuiller said. "That's what fooled me, I guess," he added sheepishly. It was as close as a commanding officer could come to officially apologizing to his crew for that fiasco of a landing. "Daff, if you would rig a rope ladder or something like it, we can go down and check out the ground."

  "Aye, sir." Gambiel climbed ba
ck down through the hatchway.

  The commander looked off into the distance, a perspective of spaced tree trunks vanishing into a brownish-green mist. Something about the trees . . . He turned his head one way, then the other. He moved his head sideways, left then right, along the baseline of his shoulders. He widened that line by taking two steps to the side. As the angle changed, the trunks seemed to line up in a geometric pattern. And then the pattern faded out as he moved farther to one side or the other.

  "Sally? Does it look to you like the trees are—"

  "Lined up? Yeah, I was thinking that, too. They're spaced in a matrix, actually."

  "Like an orchard," he agreed.

  "As if they had been planted on purpose. But it's not a simple design of rows and columns. More like pentagrams or hexagons."

  Cuiller itched to get down and begin taking measurements.

  Gambiel returned with a length of spare optic-fiber cable in which he'd tied small, tight knots at half-meter intervals. He anchored it inside the open hatchway and dangled the rest across the smooth curve of the hull. They all heard its trailing end thump on the ground.

  "We might be needing that cable to make repairs," Cuiller observed quietly.

  The Jinxian stared at him. "We won't. I checked with Jook."

  "Well," he went on, "you might have brought up a spider rig from the EVA equipment."

  Gambiel turned to show his left shoulder, where three of the rigs hung like loops of uniform braid. "We have one each. And we'll all need them."

  "What for?" Krater asked.

  "Climbing."

  "Climbing where?"

  Gambiel pointed over his head. "Deep radar was your station, Sally. You saw the return image. Whatever made it, it's still up there."

  "In the treetops? But—"

  The Jinxian turned toward his commander. "That was why you tried to land in the canopy. You were watching the deep display instead of the navigationals. . . . Keeping your eye on the prize."

  "Well, yes . . ." Cuiller hesitated. Was that the cause of his error?

  "Honest mistake," Gambiel offered with a shrug.

  Climbing down was not as easy as Cuiller had thought it would be. They had to go one at a time, walking backwards and paying out the knots hand over hand, until their bodies were laid out almost parallel to the ground. Then they rappelled from the ship's side, slipping cautiously down the knotted cable until they were under the overhang. Finally they dragged their feet on the hard-packed ground to kill the final swing. Climbing back up was going to be harder and take longer.