I crossed my legs beneath the branch as I worked my own grapnel loose for the next stage. The line had cut a powdery russet groove in the bark. Sticky dust gummed both the line and my fingers.
Lacaille tossed his grapnel, this time with a straight overarm motion. More our speed. He set his hooks in a limb not far above him and scrambled up, panting loudly. That was a three-meter gain, a perfectly respectable portion of the ten we needed.
I stuck the grapnel's shaft under my belt and shifted to the branch Lacaille had just vacated. My line dangled behind me like a long tail. I paused to brush sweat out of my eyes. I saw movement to the side.
Three creatures the size of bandy-legged goats peered down at me from a limb of an adjacent tree. Two were mottled gray; the third was slightly larger. It had a black torso and a scarlet ruff that it spread as I stared at it.
"Holy Jesus!" I shouted. I snatched at my grapnel, the closest thing to a weapon I was carrying.
The trio sprang up the trunk of their tree like giant squirrels. They vanished into the canopy in a handful of jumps. Divots ripped from the bark by their hooked claws pattered down behind them.
"Are you all right?" Stephen shouted. "What's happened?"
"We're all right!" I shouted back. I couldn't see the forest floor, so Stephen couldn't see us, much less the creatures that had startled me. "Local herbivores is all."
That was more than I knew for certain, but I didn't want Stephen to worry.
"There's something sticky here," Lacaille warned. "I think it's from the tree. Sap."
I peered upward to make certain that Lacaille was out of the way before I started to climb. This portion of the trunk was covered with a band of some mossy epiphyte. Tiny pink florets picked out the dark green foliage.
Something was pressed against the bark a few degrees to Lacaille's left and slightly above him. I doubted that he could see the thing from his angle. It eased toward him.
"Freeze, Lacaille!" I shouted.
"What?" he said. "What?" His voice rose an octave on the second syllable. He didn't move, though.
The thing was a dull golden color with blotches of brown. It could almost have been a trickle of sap like the one Lacaille had noticed, thirty million years short of hardening to amber.
Almost. It had been creeping sideways across the bark's corrugations. The creature stopped when Lacaille obeyed my order to freeze.
I drew the grapnel from my belt, then paid the line out in four one-meter loops.
"What's happening, Moore?" Lacaille said. He had his voice under control. He was trying to look down at me without moving anything but his eyes.
"Not yet," I whispered. Lacaille couldn't hear me. I was speaking to calm myself.
I lofted the grapnel with an underhand toss. It sailed as intended through empty air past the creature.
The thing struck like a trap snapping. Its head clanged against the grapnel's slowly rotating hooks and flung them outward—with the creature attached.
"
Watch out below!
" I screamed. The snakelike thing streamed past me, dragged by the weight of steel where it had expected flesh. I let go of the line.
The creature was a good ten meters long, but nowhere thicker than my calf. Tiny hooked legs, hundreds of them, waggled from its underside.
I heard the ensemble crash into the ground. A cutting bar whined. The blades
whanged
momentarily on metal, probably the grapnel's shaft.
"What was it?" Lacaille demanded. "Can I move now? What
was
it?"
"It was a snake," I said. "I think it was a snake."
I wiped my eyes again. "Stephen?" I called. "Tell them to hitch the hawser to Lacaille's line where it is, will you? We've gone as high in this tree as
I
want to go."
"Roger," Stephen said, his voice attenuated by distance and the way the foliage absorbed sound.
I looked at Lacaille. "Yeah, it's all right now," I said. "I hope to God it's all right."
I stepped away from the 2-cm hawser so that Dole and his crew could begin lifting the camouflage net. Lacaille knelt beside the creature a few meters out from the cone of roots. The snake had slid the last stage of its trip to Stephen's cutting bar.
Stephen looked from the creature to me. "Don't touch the damned thing unless you want to get clawed by those feet," he said. "
I
think it's dead, but it has a difference of opinion."
I squatted beside Lacaille. The creature's skull was almost a meter long. Stephen had cut it crosswise, then severed the back half from the long body—which was still twitching, as Stephen had implied.
"I should've taken a bar with me," I said. "I was crazy not to."
"This worked pretty well," Stephen said. "I don't see how you could improve on the results."
He tilted up the front of the creature's skull on his bar. A bony tongue protruded a handbreadth from the circular mouth. The tongue's tip had broken off on the grapnel. The sides of the hollow shaft were barbed and slotted. The tongue was designed to rip deep through the flesh of the creatures it struck, then to suck them dry.
"Wonder if it injects digestive fluids?" Stephen mused aloud.
Lacaille stood, then doubled up and began to vomit.
"Get him back to the ship," Stephen suggested quietly. "Guillermo can find some slash if you can't."
"I can find something," I said. "Come on, Lacaille. I need a drink, and out here is no damned place for anybody who feels as queasy as I do right now."
"I'm all right," Lacaille muttered as he cautiously straightened. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand before he turned to face me.
"Any one you walk away from, hey?" he said with an embarrassed smile. "I suppose I can walk."
He could. We could. Dole's men were raising one end of the net by the hawser Lacaille and I had drawn into the branches on Lacaille's grapnel line. We'd wired a pulley to the limb as well. It wasn't strictly necessary, but it made the lift a lot easier for the men below.
I was only half kidding about needing a drink. Since the snake stalked us, I'd trembled while we continued to work high in the tree. Seeing the creature close up made the fear worse.
We stepped over the rolled net. The bosun was arguing precedence with Salomon, whose men were laying hoses to the river. Both men paused and nodded to us. Piet, examining the tree that would anchor the other end of the camouflage, waved cheerfully.
"You saved my life," Lacaille said in a low voice.
"That fellow might have decided I looked juicier," I said. "He wasn't anybody's friend."
We had to pick our way carefully across the burned patch surrounding the
Oriflamme.
Dense roots withstood the gush of plasma and lurked within the ash, ready to turn an ankle or worse.
"Look," Lacaille said. He stopped and waited for me to meet his eyes. "I won't fight my own people."
"Nobody asked you to," I said. "Christ's blood, d'ye think we can't do our own fighting?"
Lacaille grimaced and shook his head in frustration. "Look," he said. "McMaster? You should have left him where he was."
"You're not the first to think that," I said slowly. I glanced around. I didn't know where McMaster was. I couldn't find him outside nor among the party shifting gear in the hold ten meters from where Lacaille and I stood. "Piet's . . . soft-hearted, though."
"Tonight," Lacaille said. "When shortwave propagation's good, McMaster's going to signal the North Island base on the backup commo suite aft."
Salomon's men joined Dole's on the 2-cm hawser. It would be easier to slide the hoses under the hem of the camouflage net than to lift the roll, so the teams were combining to do the jobs in sequence.
"He told you?" I asked without emphasis.
"McMaster
brags
about things that nobody would admit!" Lacaille said. "Not just this, terrible things! He's a terrible man."
Piet walked toward us, probably wondering what we were discussing.
"Yeah, I can believe that," I said. It wasn't surprising that a man who'd been swimming for years in the filthy slough of President Pleyal's colonies would be unable to recognize that Lacaille might have feelings of gratitude toward those who'd saved his life. Far more surprising that Lacaille's personal decency
had
survived.
"Ah . . ." I added. "Don't say anything to Piet, though. All right?"
Lacaille nodded in relief. "You'll tell Mister Gregg?" he asked.
"Stephen's got enough on his conscience as it is," I said, putting on a bright smile to greet Piet. "I'll see that this one's handled."
We sat at trestle tables sawn from the local wood with cutting bars. The boards' surface was just as rough as you'd imagine. The afternoon's downpour had driven the ash into the clay substrate in a butter-slick amalgam. We'd spread cover sheets over us, but the rare chinks of evening sky we could see were clear.
"You know . . ." said Dole with a mouth full of tree-hopper, maybe one of the trio that'd startled me. It had peeked down at the commotion, this time where Stephen could see it. "That fellow out in the lake might not have steaked out so bad."
"Not for me, thanks," I said, thinking about the monster's teeth. At the other table they were eating a ragout of the local "snake." I didn't even look in that direction.
"Precooked, even," Piet said with a grin. He looked as relaxed as I'd seen him in a long while. We'd have known by now if a Fed on Clapperton's far side had chanced to notice us sliding into the forest. "Well, we had other things on our mind."
Winger, the chief motor mechanic, said, "I don't like the way the main engine nozzles are getting, sir. We've switched out the spares aboard, and they're getting pretty worn themself."
"Umm," Salomon said. "They wouldn't pass a bottomry inspection at Betaport, but I don't think we need to worry as yet."
An animal screamed in the near distance. It was probably harmless—and the "snake" couldn't have made a sound if it had wanted to—but my shoulders shrank together every time I heard the thing.
The local equivalent of insects swarmed around the hooded lights we'd spiked to tree boles to show us our dinner. The creatures were four-legged. They varied in size from midges to globs with bodies the size of a baseball and wingspans to match. They didn't attack us because of our unfamiliar biochemistry, but I frequently felt a crunch of chitin as I chewed my meat.
"The nearest place that'd stock thruster nozzles is Riel," Lacaille volunteered without looking up from his meal. "But the port gets a lot of traffic, and it's defended."
"Real defenses?" Dole asked, glancing over at Lacaille. "Or a couple guns and nobody manning them?"
"I'd sure rather have warehouse stock than cannibalize a ship," Winger said. "It's a bitch of a job unscrewing burned-in nozzles without cracking them."
The little receiver in my tunic pocket squawked, "Calling North Island Command! Calling North Island Command! This is—"
Everyone in hearing jumped up. The opposite bench tilted and thumped the ground. Lacaille's mouth opened in horror.
"What in the name of Christ is that?" Stephen asked softly. He wasn't looking at me. His eyes roved the forest, and the flashgun was cradled in his arms.
"It's all right!" I said. "Sit down, everybody. It's all right."
"Yes, sit down," Piet decided aloud. He bent to help raise the fallen bench, holding his carbine at the balance so that the muzzle pointed straight up. He'd jacked a round into the chamber, and it would take a moment to clear the weapon safely.
He sat again and looked at me. "
What
is all right?"
"—Venusian pirate ship full of treasure," my pocket crackled. I took the receiver out so that everyone could see it. "Plot this signal and home on it. I don't have the coordinates, but it's somewhere in the opposite hemisphere from the base. Calling—"
I switched the unit off. Dole said, "McMaster!" and stood up again.
"Don't!" I said.
Dole stepped over the bench, unhooking his cutting bar.
"Sit down, Mister Dole," Piet said, his voice ringing like a drop forge.
The bosun's face scrunched up, but he obeyed.
"And the rest of you," Piet said, waving to the men at the other table and the far end of ours. They'd noticed the commotion, though they couldn't tell what was going on.
"I fiddled the backup transmitter," I said in a voice that the immediate circle could hear. "No matter what the dial reads, it's transmitting a quarter-watt UHF. He could be heard farther away if he stood in the hatch and shouted."
Stephen made a sound. I thought he was choking. It was the start of a laugh. His guffaws bellowed out into the night, arousing screamers in the trees around us. After a moment, Stephen got the sound under control, but he still quivered with suppressed paroxysms.
"We still have to do something about the situation, though," Piet said softly.
"No," I said. From the corner of my eye, I noticed a shadow slip from the main hatch and vanish into the forest. "The situation has just taken care of itself."
A smile of sorts played with Piet's mouth. "Yes," he said. "I see what you mean. He doesn't want to be aboard the target his friends are going to blast."
He turned his head. "Mister Dole," he said crisply, "we'll have the net down at first light. The voyage isn't over, and we may need it another time. I expect to lift fifteen minutes after you start the task."
"Aye aye,
sir
!" the bosun said.
"I suppose it'll be weeks before another big gulper takes over this stretch of the river," Lacaille said.
"Maybe not so long," Stephen said. He got up and stretched the big muscles of his shoulders. "And anyway, I'm sure there are more snakes and suchlike folk than the one you and Jeremy met."
He chuckled again. The sound was as bleak as the ice of Lord's Mercy.
Guillermo's screen showed the world we circled in a ninety-four-minute orbit. The central display was a frozen schematic of Corpus Christi, Riel's spaceport, based on pilotry data, Lacaille's recollections, and images recorded during the
Oriflamme
's first pass overhead.