by Larry Niven
"Eat a General Products hull?" Krater repeated.
"Not possible," Gambiel ruled.
"All right, stand to," Cuiller ordered. "Ah, Hugh," into the radio. "We're coming back now. Take care of yourself and . . . don't disturb the Bandersnatch, whatever it does."
"Not on your life, Captain."
"Let's go," Cuiller told his party. "And at the first sight of one of them—get up into the trees."
They nodded and turned back on their trail. Without a word passing, they all broke into a jog.
As they went by the patch of young undergrowth with the fallen trunk in the middle, Cuiller began to understand it better. The "groundskeepers" were Bandersnatchi, which fed by cruising between the trees and scooping in whatever vegetable and animal matter fell from the canopy. They were intelligent enough to understand the ecology that supported their existence. They would be wary of a dead tree and leave space for a new to grow and continue the life of the forest. From that perspective, a Bandersnatch might attack the ship as a threat to the ecology—or even, marginally, in retaliation for any damage Callisto had done when it tried to land in the branches and fell through.
But Bandersnatchi were not known for immediate aggression. Rather, they had often exhibited heroic patience, dying in large numbers at the hands of less perceptive sentients before they would make their hurts known. On some planets they had even agreed to be hunted for human sport, accepting a calculated loss for the stimulation of the chase.
On the other hand, Bandersnatchi were a living relic of Slaver times, with germ plasm too massive to mutate and needs too simple to allow their race to die out totally. As possibly the galaxy's oldest living intelligent species, they could well have purposes and prejudices wholly unknown to humans. Defense of territory might be one of their hidden prerogatives.
But still, an aggressive and vengeful Bandersnatch just did not fit the profile.
Yet the evidence which confronted them when they arrived at the landing site could not be talked away. Callisto lay fully against the ground, with two broken trees squashed under her bow. The ceramic outer coating was scuffed and abraded in long swathes and ragged patches. The paired metal horns at her tail, which had been fitted for external weapons and the ion drive, were now broken off and scattered in pieces over the forest floor. Every hatch cover and through-hull fitting had been knocked out.
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 peekaboo 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 'peekaboo' 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.
"So, that's our inventory," Gambiel said at last, corralling the glass vials.
Cuiller told him to hang on to them. Maybe Krater, with her background in biology, could tell the vials apart by smell or taste or something. He supposed she also knew enough basic anatomy to deal with sprains—like continued attention to Jook's knee—and other manual medical techniques. If not, Cuiller had a little knowledge of first aid and could make do with bandage and splits in a pinch.
Gambiel had found nothing of the 'cycler. So they had only the food in their pockets, unless Krater's hunt was successful, or they figured out a way to bring down an adult Bandersnatch, or found a clutch of fresh buds.
"You want to try making a fire with that laser?" Cuiller asked.
"Burning what?"
"How much of a wedge do you think you could cut out of one of these trunks without knocking it down?"
"That's green, sappy wood . . . give off a lot of smoke."
"We can stand it. None of us is going to smell too good in a day or two."
"I was thinking of our white friends. They might be sensitive to fire under the canopy."
"You're right. I—"
The sound was on them before they could hear it: the rippling crackle of tortured atmosphere parting before a heavy body traveling faster than air molecules knew how to move. What they consciously heard was the clap of a sonic boom—the air moving back in the wake of whatever had snapped it apart—followed by echoes of that first, searing push against the atmosphere.
Cuiller looked up, expecting to see a contrail in the sky and finding only the green gloom of the canopy above them.
"That was a ship," Gambiel said. "In a hurry, too."
"Of course. Have any idea what kind?"
"I didn't hear any reaction thrusters. They could be on gravity polarizers."
"And this close to the Patriarchy's back door . . . Can kzinti detect a General Products hull at long range?"
"The same way we go about finding a stasis-box," Gambiel said. "Keep probing with deep radar and study the return images. Our hull comes up cloudier than a Slaver box, but still defined."
"Ouch! Let's get up into the trees."
"What about these?" Gambiel pointed to the hoarded supplies.
"You take the batteries and medicines. I'll take the circuit chips. Leave the scraps—no one's going to eat them."
The Jinxian began filling his pockets.
"Captain, what was that?" Jook called on the radio.
"Company. Daff and I are coming up to join you. Stay put and—until we know more—stay off the radio."
In reply, Jook keyed the transmit twice. Two low bursts of static that could be read as "Aye-aye."
Cuiller nodded silently at Jook's quick and tactful thinking.
"The kzinti won't be out of their ionization envelope yet," Gambiel observed. "They can't hear our radio transmissions yet."
"Still . . ." Cuiller took out his grapple and launcher, hooked up a line cassette, and took aim overhead. "When we get up there, Daff, go as high as you can. You're our best at identifying kzinti ships by their silhouette. See if you can spot and evaluate the newcomers."
"Do my best."
They fired their grapples and swung up through the leaves, As soon as Gambiel was stabilized on a limb near his grapple, he released it, aimed higher, shot, and slithered away after it. Cuiller surveyed the local jungle. Radio would carry to the kzinti, but not voice.
"Hugh! . . . Sally!" he shouted.
Cuiller looked around, parting clusters of flat leaves to stare into the next meter-wide pocket of air. He called again, stepped over to another branch, recovered and reshot his grapple, and swung on a short arc toward where he thought his navigator and communications officer had gone up.
"Sally! . . ."
"Captain, you're scaring the game." It was Krater's voice, but she was invisible, screened by the foliage.
"Belay the hunting, we've got visitors."
"I know. If you keep shouting like that, you'll scare them, too."
"Well, just hang on, because—"
"Heads up, everybody! Coming through!" Small and distant, Gambiel's voice drifted down to them. It was followed immediately by the groan of branches being forced aside—much like the first passage Callisto had made through the treetops—accompanied by the sizzle of wet leaves burning. Cuiller could smell hot iron and dying vegetation.
The question was, where would the mass of the ship come down? If it was right over their heads, they'd never have time to get out of its way before the kzinti ship knocked them loose and crushed them among the collapsing vines and branches. But if it was coming off to one side or another, then any step might move them to safety—or take them into the line of trouble. No way to know . . .
"Hang on!" Cuiller called out, and braced himself.
The wall of leaves that defined the edge of his vision bulged inward and then dissolved in a golden tracery of sparks and incandescent veins. Beneath the fire was the scorching flank of a kzinti warship. Cuiller thought at first it was red-hot metal—or some ceramic, equally heated. Then, from the uniform coloring, he guessed the hemispheric section was simply painted red. It disappeared below before he had a chance to make up his mind. His one glance left the impression of a globular hull. From its chord, it seemed small. He guessed it was only fifteen or twenty meters in diameter. Then the gap in the trees closed on a blackened twist of branch and a fume of smoke.
Cuiller reset his grapple and lowered himself into the feathery bottom layer of the canopy to watch the kzinti ship land. From the whirr of winding motors that came to him through the leaves, he knew the rest of h
is crew had the same idea.
* * *
At this close range, the Leaf-Eaters' special hull showed clearly on a radar scanner working at normal intensities. The spindle gleamed and sparkled under the weakly graded return of the foliage layer covering the planet that Navigator said was chart reference KZ-5-1010. Nyawk-Captain made an estimate of the hull's size—more than 200 cubits in length—and, from this, confirmed the vessel type with Weaponsmaster.
Nyawk-Captain piloted an entry through the green layer, sliding among the interlaced branches and through the nets of vine. He counted on the residual heat in Paw's hull to burn through, where the gravity polarizer could not break through, the entangling vegetation.
He wanted to place his ship at visual inspection distance from the strange hull. Among these closely spaced tree trunks, that meant landing practically on top of it—too near for evasive maneuvers. Cat's Paw went down with every weapon fully charged, ready, and aimed. Yet his greatest weapon against the Leaf-Eater hulls, Nyawk-Captain knew, would be the gravity polarizer itself. At the first sign of hostility, he would use an acceleration forty times the pull of the kzinti homeworld to stomp anything inside that ship into paste.
When the last branches between him and the enemy ship had burned away, Nyawk-Captain focused his optics. The first thing his eyes registered were holes in the hull material. Then scrapings on its surface and the litter of metal pieces all around it. Finally, the trees that bent under its weight and the odd angle at which it lay among them. All of this, plus the total lack of reaction to his coming, gave Nyawk-Captain pause.
It was a dead ship, certainly. But how recently dead? And had its crew died in the accident that made it dead?
Given the Patriarchy's reports on the indestructibility of the Leaf-Eater hulls, this vessel might have been killed many years and light-years from this spot, could have drifted over the distance of time and space and entered the planet's atmosphere as unguided as a meteor, crashing among these trees. But then, Nyawk-Captain would expect some kind of cratering around the ship and more damage to the surrounding forest.
