Larry Niven’s Man-Kzin Wars - V

by Larry Niven

  The commander pointed ahead. “Our goal is over that way. We’ll reach it faster walking on the ground.”

  “We might lose her”

  “We’ve got visibility of what—?” He looked around. “A hundred meters down here? And less than ten meters up there in the leaves. If she gets lost, she can always drop down and we’ll spot her.”

  “If we’re looking in the right direction.”

  “She’ll probably scream or something,” Cuiller said.

  “Yeah, she probably will.”

  The two men walked on through the trees.

  The sound came from Navigator’s panel. It was a strange burring—full of enough sonics to make a kzin’s neck ruff stand out from his chin. Nyawk-Captain searched his memory for a sound like it and finally decided it was not part of normal ship’s operation. Perhaps a malfunction? A small, fast motor vibrating out of its bearings? But coming from inside the solid-state circuitry of the panel…? Then a wrinkle of memory surfaced, a significant detail from his early simulator drills with the Vengeance-class interceptor.

  “You have a return from the hardsight,” he snarled over his shoulder.

  “Wh-what—sir?”

  “Wake up, root breath! Your station is active—and signaling you.”

  “Ah, yes, Nyawk-Captain. I see that now. Sorry, sir.”

  “Vigilance, Navigator. Now, describe the sighting.”

  “It is still several light-hours distant…”

  “Wake up, damn you! Give me facts in the order I need to know them. Is the anomaly along our prescribed course? Or somewhere off in the starfields?”

  “The sighting’s deviation is…fourteen degrees from our projected—”

  “So we would not otherwise have walked across it. Describe the contact.”

  “Contact?”

  Navigator’s surprise was genuine, because kzinti battle referents were precise. Passive objects might be “sighted.” Enemy vessels were a “contact.”

  “What does your training say?” Nyawk-Captain replied. “This ship was designed to cruise with its hardsight range detector automatically probing along our forward path. Why else—if not to detect the Leaf Eaters’ improbable hulls?”

  “To seek out Thrintun boxes?” Navigator replied brightly.

  “Fool!” Nyawk-Captain spat.

  “A witticism, sir! I abase myself.”

  “For a Navigator who sleeps at station, you should have no comedy available to your mouth.”

  “I humbly abase myself”

  “Describe the contact”

  “The hardsight return is in close proximity to a star, but not within its photosphere. So the contact is either in orbit itself or lodged on a planet—although the surrounding return is too weak to show such a body. There is one object…No, correction. At extreme gain I observe two contacts. One is sharp. The other is fainter and…fuzzy. It may be merely a reflection of the first. It certainly is close enough for that.”

  “What are the dimensions?”

  “At this range, Nyawk-Captain…”

  “Is either one big enough to be a hull?”

  “One of the reflections may be, but the distance…”

  “Very well. Bend your fullest attention to refining your observations.”

  “Shall we alter course? If we could draw nearer…”

  “I will decide, when you give me further useful information.”

  “As we move to pass that system, it’s possible that the two signals might show some degree of separation. From that we may learn—”

  “Provide me with facts, Navigator.”

  “Such is my only objective, Nyawk-Captain.”

  “Very good. Be vigilant—and wakeful!”

  Sally Krater hitched her feet up, pivoting about the liftpoint at her solar plexus, where the takeup reel whined and throbbed. After the soles of her moccasins broke through the leaf veils of the lower canopy, she slipped the clutch on the winding mechanism. The pull against her chest halted abruptly, but her mass continued to rise in a flattened arc. With Beanstalk’s reduced gravity, she slowly topped out, pitched forward to the length of her remaining line, and fell gently back through the leaves, swinging on the grapple anchored above her.

  Krater suddenly realized that her back could be shattered against any heavy tree limb coming up behind her. She immediately dragged with her heels through the leaves, trying to kill her momentum. At this level, the greenery was dense but not cloying. The leaves were flat and veined, each about the size of her open hand. They clustered in billows around her, supported on springy whips that were either tiny branches or vines—she couldn’t yet say which. As Krater swung, her head, arms, and legs batted through masses of these leaves, stinging where her skin was exposed but not otherwise hurting her. When she looked down between her feet she could see random patches of brown ground. At the end of her last rising swing, she glimpsed in one of these patches two pale dots that might be Cuiller and Gambiel, far below and looking up.

  Once her momentum was stopped and she hung straight down, she began to reel in slowly, rising meter by meter through the canopy. Within five meters she had reached the grapple, which had fallen across the first stout branch she had seen—up in what she wanted to call the canopy’s mid-level. She twisted slowly on her monofilament, conscious that the invisible strand ran just centimeters from her face. Any sudden motion, she realized, might clip her nose or an ear. She wondered how close she had come to cutting her own head off when she topped out and pitched after that first upward rush.

  Krater’s thighpockets held a rescue kit, and from it she took a packet of fluorescent dye, suitable for marking a water landing. She broke it open and ran the exposed sponge lightly up and down the line, until it became a bright purple steak before her, like an etching laser flashing through smoke. With the remaining dye she reached up and soaked the line spindled in the grapple’s socket, then the slack taken up on the reel at her chest. She made a mental note to suggest this to Gambiel, when they got together again.

  As she hung there, her mass started to spin lazily, and she put a hand against the branch above her to stop it. The sudden pressure dislodged something up there, and a stream of liquid cascaded down. It splashed off her shoulder and struck a bunch of leaves below and off to her left. She carefully tasted the drops clinging to her uniform: water; sweet and cool.

  From her other pocket, she took out her field kit. It popped open and she keyed up the gas chromatograph and amino acid analyzer. The only samples within reach were that water and the leaves around her. Although she had no immediate plans to eat the leaves themselves, they would provide a clue to the nature of indigenous life on Beanstalk. The flora would reflect any general tendency toward toxins, heavy metals, or wrong-handed molecules. Balancing the kit on her raised knee, she tore a nearby leaf into bits and pressed them against the first sensor mesh. She dabbed a few of the drops that remained on her shoulder into the second mesh.

  Something moved. Out of the tail of her eye, off to the right, she detected a pattern shift. From her undergraduate biology, Krater knew that human peripheral vision worked best at perceiving motion—a relic of primate development, both as hunter and prey. So, if she could sense something moving, it was moving.

  “Just the wind,” she whispered to herself. And yet she knew that the motion had been localized. If it had been wind, the whole canopy would be surging around her now.

  She turned her head slowly, swinging her nose centimeter by centimeter to the right. She did not dart with her eyes, but shifted them only in slow blinks. But before she could begin facing the whatever-it-was, the radio strapped at her wrist crackled.

  “Sally, are you all right?” in Cuiller’s voice. The leaves off her right shoulder swirled with movement, as the something there darted quickly, but whether lunging or withdrawing, she couldn’t tell.

  Krater had no time to fool with the hand-laser attached at her belt but instead slapped the release on her cable reel. She dropped three meters
in near freefall. On the way, she bobbled and almost lost the field kit. Finally she caught it, snapped it closed, and slipped it back in her pocket. The kit would digest the vegetable sample and report later.

  “I’m fine,” she called into the radio, although her voice was shaky.

  “You shouldn’t just head off like that, Sally,” Cuiller said. His tone was masked by the tinny quality of the transmission.

  “I wanted some samples.”

  “Well, next time, ask first. Please?”

  “Yes, sir. I’d like to come down now—with your permission.”

  “Do so.”

  She toggled the reel to unwind. In a few seconds her feet broke through the lowest layer of leaves into clear air.

  The canopy above her did tremble then, like a breeze fluttering its lower edges. But Krater could swear that no wind had stirred since she climbed up there. She stared into the overgrowth, looking for anything that might be poking through and…reaching for her.

  Nothing.

  To rest her eyes, she looked away to the middle distance. From where she hung, about three meters below the canopy proper, the spaced tree trunks were just beginning to branch out into the flying buttresses and arching vaults that supported the greenery. The view was almost what a medieval mason might have seen, working in a sling up near a cathedral’s ceiling and looking out between the stone pillars. Except these pillars were green and alive—and all were suddenly swaying.

  Expecting to see the ripples of an earthquake, she looked down at the forest floor, scanning the barren ground there. That was when she saw the iceberg, moving off to one side.

  “Captain…” She kept her eyes on the shape.

  “Right here, Sally.”

  “Can you see me?”

  “I do. You’re just below where you went up, aren’t you?”

  “Yeah, still on the same grapple point. Now, do you see my arm?” She pointed it at the white object. “Follow that line and tell me what you see.”

  “Trees and deepening gloom. What do you see?”

  “A white shape. And it’s moving.”

  “Jared!” It was Gambiel, on another radio channel. “I can see it, too, from here.” Had the weapons officer also wandered away from the commander? Krater wondered.

  “Then you’re closer, Daff,” from Cuiller.

  “Sally? How big would you say it is?” from Gambiel.

  “I don’t know. It’s about…oh, six or seven trees off. Say a hundred and fifty meters over the ground. But it seems to be…squeezing between the trunks. That would make the thing more than twenty-five meters wide, wouldn’t it? And I’d guess it’s at least five or six times that long—but I can’t see all of the creature.”

  “Can you see its head?” Daff asked.

  “No. And I won’t swear that it has one.”

  “Not important,” Gambiel said. “I know what it is anyway.”

  “Bandersnatch?” from Cuiller.

  “Yes, Captain. You’ve seen them before?”

  “Once, on Jinx. They’re intelligent—and harmless.”

  “Right. Sally? Which way is it moving? I can’t tell from down here.”

  “Back the way we came, looks like,” she said. “Roughly parallel to our path.”

  “I’ll call Jook,” Cuiller said. “Alert him, so he doesn’t do anything rash if it shows up at the ship. And Sally, why don’t you come down and join us now?”

  “Aye, Captain.” She paid out line and dropped toward the forest floor.

  Her feet touched the ground near where Cuiller was standing, finishing his call back to the ship. Gambiel walked up a moment later. She showed him the dye on the line and explained her reasoning. He nodded thoughtfully.

  “But how do I recover the grapple?” she asked, looking up into the trees. “We can’t afford to lose one each time one of us goes up and comes down.”

  The weapons tech reached over to her harness, locked the takeup reel, and thumbed the cover off a protected red stud on the control panel. He pushed it—unconsciously shoving her backward with his latent strength. “Step back and bend your knees,” he said.

  She did so, and a moment later something fell out of the canopy. When it hit the ground, she recognized her grapple, with the barbs folded in.

  “Radio-controlled unlocking device,” Gambiel said. “Don’t use it while you’re hanging around…Well, reel it in.”

  Krater started the winder motor.

  “Slowly!” Gambiel ordered. “Or you’ll catch that thing right in the tits.”

  She slowed the winding and watched the folded grapple tumble and walk across the scoured dirt toward her. When it was a meter out, she braked the reel, picked up the grapple, and tucked it into her belt loop.

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “Now, we go on,” Cuiller replied, pointing the way toward their objective, the calculated position of the deep radar’s return image.

  Hugh Jook was wedged under—or now over, rather—the forward control yoke. He was bent around the station-keeping stirrups, stretching as far as he could go with one leg immobilized by the bubble cast. In one hand Jook held a collection of electronics chips, all banded and tagged with alphanumerics to show what each circuit was supposed to do. In the other hand was a socket-puller. He was poking into the guts of the overturned weapons pod, hoping to get enough response from it for the ship’s computer to run a diagnostic. Then it would be thumbs up or thumbs down: reconnect and rebrace the unit, or bleed away its residual charge, cut it apart with a hand-laser, and dump it out on the ground.

  With his head inside the access panels, he never saw the Bandersnatch approach Callisto, even though the main window stripe was right behind his ear and oriented up toward the trees. His first sign of trouble was the lurch the ship took as the white beast nuzzled it.

  “Yo!” he sang out and straightened up.

  The exposed hull scritched and squeaked under the impact of the Bandersnatch’s sensory bristles. Jook looked out into a squash of thick white tubules, like a pot’s view of a scrub brush at work. Although nothing there looked like an eye, he had the uncanny feeling the giant was peering in at him.

  “Leave it alone, and it will leave you alone,” Cuiller had told him, when the ground party had called in their sighting of a Bandersnatch. “Nothing on its body is small enough, or delicate enough, to be harmed by our short-range weapons. And there’s nothing much it can do to the ship, even if it sits on the hull.”

  “Right,” Jook had agreed over the radio and dismissed the threat. Besides, Bandersnatchi were known to be harmless—and quite intelligent.

  But now, with the mass of pallid flesh pushing against the side of Callisto, he wasn’t so sure.

  Jook unbent himself, steadied with his hands against the jostling that the hull was taking, and tried to reach the panels of the control yoke. He had no intention of opening hostilities, but he hoped the beast would survive the scatter from Callisto’s ion drive when he departed the scene.

  A couple of times he got his fingers up on the buttons for the engine initiation sequence. But each time he tried to key it, the ship lurched and his hand slipped. Then it didn’t matter, because the natural light coming through the window faded entirely. The Bandersnatch was riding up over the ship. It was too late to break away, even at full thrust.

  Jook’s ears popped.

  That had to be a pressure variation, but he hadn’t keyed any changes in the atmospheric specs. He looked around. The main hatch, above him and now thirty-five degrees off local vertical with the hull’s current orientation, had worked open—falling inward. The hatch panel was fabricated of aligned-crystal vanadium steel. It was set in a vanadium-steel rim and keyed into the standardized opening in their General Products hull by lipping it both inside and out Short of a patch of GP monomolecule itself, the hatch was the strongest possible seal that human technology could devise. And yet the Bandersnatch had punched it out like a baby poking his thumb through a piecrust.

  R
ipples of the Bandersnatch’s white underside ballooned into the opening. At first Jook thought it was just normal pressure expansion, the weight of the animal forcing its underside into a new cavity as the Bandersnatch settled its mass over the ship. But as he watched, the volume of white flesh inside the hatch grew. It began lapping around the cross bracing for the portside inertial thrusters and weapons pods. As the flesh made contact there, the Bandersnatch’s belly vibrated and the metal began to scream.

  It also began to dissolve. Big, fuming drops of fluid wept from the point of contact and fell into the bilges. Wherever they touched, except on the hull material itself, that spot also started smoking and dissolving.

  Jook moved. He climbed along struts and down handholds, swinging his stiffened leg over obstacles and bashing it twice. The pain didn’t slow him down. He made it past the waist, where his nominal duty station was, and kept on going, around the hyperdrive engine. In the rear, about as far forward from the tail as the main hatch was back from the bow, the hull had another opening. This one was smaller and fitted with an airlock. He thought briefly about hiding inside the lock, but he remembered it was constructed of the same vanadium steel that had failed in the main hatch. No, his only option was to climb through while that end of the ship was still uncovered by the creature’s bulk, get to the ground before the Bandersnatch noticed him, and run like hell, or as fast as his bad leg permitted.

  To lower himself from the lock entrance, Hugh Jook pulled on a climbing harness and gathered up the grapple, launcher, line cassettes, and gas cartridges. Almost as an afterthought, he broke out a laser rifle and a personal radio.

  While dry-locking through, he punched up the radio and whispered into it.

  “Captain…!”

  Nothing, not even static.

  “Jared!”

  Still nothing.

  Of course—inside the lock even the strongest signal would be blocked. He’d have to wait until he was outside and clear before calling the ground party.

  The outer hatch opened, and Jook was looking up into a billowing wall of rough, white flesh. There was no time to set the grapple or pay out line. He levered himself up on the hatch coaming, scrambled over the ceramic hull surface trailing down toward the tail, got his good leg lowermost to take up his impact with the ground, and dropped.