by Larry Niven
Maybe the Carthers needed copsiks more than citizens.
He helped Merril through the foliage. The light of battle was in her eye. She said, “The copsik runners left us behind. Not worth their time.”
“I had a broken leg.” Clave got it then, and hid his grin. “They made a terrible mistake leaving you, though.”
“They’ll find out. Don’t you laugh!” She shook a harpoon; its point was stained with evil yellow. “This goop will drive you crazy if it doesn’t kill you.”
The sky was a vast sheet of cloud. Lightning flashed in dark rifts. Clave searched the western fringe until he found a thin line of shadow. London Tree was too big to hide in a cloud: fifty klomters or so, half the length of Dalton-Quinn, but five times the long axis of this puffball jungle.
The Comlink’s chosen leader, Anthon, already had his legs wrapped around the largest pod. Anthon was brawnier than the average Carther man, and darker. To Clave he might have had a fragile look, with long bones that could be snapped at whim. But he was festooned with weaponry, crossbow and bolts and a club with a knot on the end; his nails were long and sharp; scars showed here and there on his body; and in fact he looked savage and dangerous.
The stem-ends of the jet pods had been pierced by wooden stakes that now served as plugs. A warrior would nestle into the inner curve of the pod and move his weight to guide it. Clave had used up a few pods practicing.
There were more pods than warriors, a hundred or so spaced wide apart and tied down with light line. Merril chose one and boarded it. Clave asked, “Shall I tether you?”
“I’ll handle it.” She swung her coil of line below her and caught it coming up. Clave shrugged and chose his own pod. It was bigger than he was but less massive: thirty kilos or so.
Men outnumbered women, but not by a lot. Merril said, “Notice the women? You fight for citizenship in Carther States. A citizen makes a better wife. The family gets two votes.”
“Sure.”
“Clave, how are they doing this?”
“Classified.” He grinned and ducked the butt of her harpoon. “I can’t tell you everything. The Sharman says the jungle will pass the tree at an angle, about midpoint, with a klomter to spare. By then we’ll have launched. We’ll match speed with the tree and come in while they’re still terrified.”
“How do we get back?”
“I asked that too.” Clave’s brows furrowed. “Lizeth and Hild are bringing extra pods. They’ll hover in the sky till they see the battle’s over…but they’ll just be caught with the rest of us if the copsik runners use the carm. We’ve got to take the carm.”
“What are we trying to do, exactly? I mean you and me.”
“Gather Quinn Tribe. We want to look good to Carther States, but Quinn Tribe comes first. I wish I knew where they all are.”
Mist was drifting over them, seeping into the foliage. A wind was rising. Storm blurred the sky. He kept his eyes on the faint, shadowy line of London Tree…which was nearer and growing.
The out tuft was nearest: the citizens’ tuft. Citizens would be first to see the oncoming terror: a green mass klomters across flying at the trunk, green warriors coming out of the sky. Not much chance of surprise here. The jungle too was too big to be hidden.
Realistically, they hadn’t a ghost of a chance of rescuing anybody. They would do as much damage as possible and die. Why not attack the out tuft first? Kill some citizens and they’d remember better.
Too late now. The Sharman was klomters away, tending a pillar of fiery steam, aiming it to send the jungle a fingernail’s width from the tree. Fat chance of getting to her with a change in plan!
The line within the fog had solidified into a tremendous integral sign tufted at the ends. Every Carther now held a sword. Clave drew his.
“Warriors!” Anthon bellowed. He waited for silence, then cried, “Our attack must be remembered! It’s not enough to break some heads. We must damage London Tree. London Tree must remember, for a generation to come, that offending Carther States is dangerously stupid. Unless they remember, they will come when we cannot move.
“Let them remember the lesson!
“Launch!”
Sixty swords slashed at the lines that tied them to the jungle. Sixty hands pulled the plugs from the stem-ends of sixty jet pods. Pods jetted away in a wind that smelled of rotted plants. At first they clustered, even bumping into each other. Then they began to separate. Not all jet pods thrust alike.
Clave clung with arms and legs, tight against the screaming pod. He was wobbling a little, more than the others. Unskilled. Blood was draining from his head. The tide was ferocious.
The sky was dark and formless, and lightning flashed nearby. They were approaching the center of the tree, as planned. There at the midpoint was the carrier, its nose against the trunk. Its tail was on fire.
Lawri tapped the blue button in a row of five.
Blue numbers flickered and steadied in the bow window. Blue lights appeared in the panel below: four clumps of four little vertical dashes each, in diamond patterns around a larger vertical bar. The array tickled at the Grad’s memory. Lawri’s hands hovered like Harp about to play.
“Strap in,” Klance said. Lawri looked back in annoyance, then tapped rapidly. The Grad got it then. He was in a chair when the carm roared and trembled and lunged.
Tide pulled the Grad back in his seat, then eased off. (It hadn’t mattered in Quinn Tuft, but the Scientist had drummed it into his head. Not tide! This was thrust! It might feel the same, but causes and consequences were different. The dead Scientist’s legacy: thrust!)
The bow window nestled snug against the trunk. A breeze had sprung up; eddies swirled through the side windows.
Lawri activated green patterns and tapped at them. Within the bow window appeared a smaller window in which an edge of sky peeped around a glare of white light. An aft view within the forward view: disconcerting.
Klance was going for a better look. He made his way to the airlock, gripping chair backs as he went. The Grad followed. A few kilograms of tide…of thrust took the vibrating walls forward, past him, till he hit the aft wall with a solid thump.
Klance was braced in the outer door, all of his fingers and toes gripping the rim. “I’ll let you see in a minute, Jeffer. Don’t fall out. You might not get back.” He craned his head out. “Damnation!”
“What is it?”
“It’s the jungle. I had no idea they could move the jungle! Hah. We’ll give them a surprise. We’ll just move away from them.” Klance grinned over his shoulder. He saw the Grad brace himself, too late.
The Grad’s foot lashed out and caught the Scientist above the hip. Klance yelled and flew outward. Long fingers and toes still clung. The Grad’s heel smashed at a hand and a foot. Klance disappeared.
He moved into the outer door and leaned out. The drive screamed in his ears.
The tree was massive, but it was moving. Klance drifted slowly aft, thrashing, trying to reach the nets on the carm’s hull. In his terror he seemed to have forgotten his line. He saw the Grad leaning out and shrieked at him: curses or pleading, the Grad couldn’t tell. He looked away.
The tree now had a slight curve to it, like Minya’s bow. The carm thrust in the center, and the tufts trailed behind, not very far. A stronger thrust might break the tree in the middle. But the carm was so much tinier than the tree; it was probably thrusting at full power now.
Klance was a thrashing black shadow against a brilliance like Voy brought close. The carm’s main motor sprayed blue-white fire, pushing the carm forward against the mass of the tree. Klance was floating into the flame.
Ordon, halfway to the elevator, had seen them.
The jungle had become half the sky. Scores of objects moved alongside it: shapes like those he’d seen before the bark raft crashed into the jungle. Jungle giants on jet pods! But they wouldn’t arrive if the carm continued to push the tree away. He had to turn off the main motor, now!
So he hadn’t been
premature, hadn’t murdered Klance for nothing.
Lawri! He reentered the carm and leapt toward the bow. Lawri hadn’t seen him. She stiffened suddenly and half rose, staring aghast at the rear window display. A shadow was thrashing in the flame, dissolving.
She whirled about. She was staring him in the eye when the Grad lashed out at her jaw.
Her head snapped back; she bounced against her straps and hung limp. The Grad used his line to tie her to one of the chairs. He sat down at the controls and studied them.
Yellow governed life support systems, including interior lights and the airlock. Green governed the carm’s senses, internal and external. Blue had to do with what moved the carm, including the motors, the two flavors of fuel supply, the water tank, and fuel flow. White read the cassettes.
What had Lawri done to activate the drive? His mind had gone blank. He tapped the blue button. No good: the blue displays disappeared, but the motor’s roar continued. He restored the display.
Through a side window he glimpsed patches of Navy blue cloth moving across the bark. No time. Think. Blue vertical bar surrounded by blue dashes…in a pattern like the motors at the stern. He tapped the blue bar.
The roar and the trembling died to nothing. The tree recoiled: he felt himself pulled forward. Then it was quiet.
Kendy was prepared to beam his usual message when the source of hydrogen light disappeared.
That was puzzling. Normally the CARM’s main motor would run for several hours. That, or the attitude jets would send it jittering about like the ball in a soccer match. Kendy held his attention on a drifting point within the Smoke Ring maelstrom, and waited.
A dozen Navy men were making their way toward the carm, using lines and the lineholds, wary that he might start the drive again. Ordon was far ahead of the rest, mere meters from the window. There was murder in his face.
Quick, now! Hit the yellow button. The display was too cluttered: turn off the blue. Yellow display: interior lights showed dim, internal wind on, temperature shown by a vertical line with numbers and a notch in the middle; here, a complicated line drawing of the carm’s cabin seen from above. The Grad closed lines that should represent the doors, with a pinching motion of his fingertips. Behind him the airlock sealed itself.
Lawri stirred.
He heard muted clanging from the doors.
The Grad began playing with the green displays, summoning different views from the carm’s cameras. He had precious little time to learn to fly this starstuff relic. He felt Lawri’s eyes on him, but would not look.
The clanging stopped, then resumed elsewhere. Ordon snarled through a side window. He must be clinging to the nets, pounding at the glass.
The Grad moved to the window. He spoke a word. Ordon reacted—puzzled—he couldn’t hear. The Grad repeated it, exaggerating the motions of his lips the word that would justify murdering his benefactor Klance, assaulting Lawri, betraying his friend Ordon, leaving London Tree helpless against attack.
“War, Ordon! War!”
Chapter Eighteen
THE WAR OF LONDON TREE
Clave was being left behind. The Carthers had judged him a novice, and he was: he hadn’t known how to choose among these strange pods. They had let him pick a slow one. He’d flown past the trunk, his path was curving back now. He would be among the last half dozen to land.
Lines ran along the trunk of London Tree, and wooden boxes were rising toward the center from both ends. Clave saw both boxes break open almost simultaneously, spilling men in blue, eight to a box. The copsik runners seemed to know what they were about. They rapidly oriented themselves and fired small jet pods to send them toward the midpoint of the tree, on the eastern face.
Toward the carrier. Twenty-odd copsik runners already surrounded it. The flame at its tail had died, for whatever that might mean.
The Carthers had passed the trunk in a gust of jet pods. Now they were returning, coming up on the western side of the trunk, drastically spread out. Feathered harpoons flew from the copsik runners’ long footbows. The Carther warriors sent crossbow bolts among them. They outnumbered the enemy almost two to one.
The jungle was tremendous, a green world passing less than a klomter away. Clave had wondered if it would actually hit the tree, but it seemed to be going past. The steam jet had stopped firing. The jungle trailed a curdled line of cloud and a storm of birds trying to catch up, and two dark masses: Lizeth’s and Hild’s clusters of twenty jet pods each.
This close to the tree, the curve of the trunk hid the ancient carrier and its mooring; but both gusts of enemy reinforcements seemed to be converging on the carrier. They would know its value too. They flew behind a thicket of feathered harpoons.
The jet from Clave’s pod died away.
Curses ran through his mind while he clambered around the pod to put it between himself and the harpoons. He was still approaching the trunk. Others were there first. Carthers were using lineholds about the clustered buildings to dodge the feathered harpoons or tearing up sheets of bark for shields. The copsik runners preferred to fire on them from the sky, where their limbs were free to work their huge bows.
Anthon and a dozen warriors were firing at the carrier, using the curve of the trunk as cover.
Merril’s pod struck a wooden hut with Merril behind it. She’d used the pod as a shock absorber: good technique. Some of the copsik runners were trying to reach that building. Merril shot two from behind the building, then abandoned the shelter when the rest came too close.
Something valuable in that building? The copsik runners seemed to want it. Clave put an arrow among them and thought he hit someone’s foot.
They wanted the carrier more. Clave could see it now: they were all over it, hanging on the nets and the bark.
Most of the Carther warriors had reached the trunk. Clave would touch down inward from the battle, presently. For now he could only watch. From the chaos of battle, patterns began to form.
The copsik runners were outnumbered. They hung back, for that reason and another. In close work they couldn’t use the bows. They had swords, and so did the Carthers; but the taller Carthers had more reach. They won such encounters.
The copsik runners had small jet pods, the kind that would grow on an integral tree. They preferred to stay in the sky.
Clave watched Carthers leap into an eight-man gust of blue ponchos. The copsik runners used their jet pods, left Carthers floundering in the sky behind them, and fired back with the footbows. Then two Carthers were among them, slaying, and two more joined them. In free fall the copsik runners fought like children. The Carthers robbed the corpses of their jet pods.
Clave drifted, and Carther States was winning without him!
In along the trunk, a wooden box was rising slowly. It spilled reinforcements: six blue-clad footbowmen and a bulky silver creature. There was a terrible familiarity to that shape…but they wouldn’t arrive for a kilobreath yet.
A copsik runner spotted Clave, a sitting target. He carefully fired a harpoon through Clave’s pod, then moved in along the trunk. He’d have a clear shot when Clave came nearer. Clave fired at him. No good, the copsik runner dodged and waited. Clave could see his grin.
The grin vanished when Merril shot him from behind. The bolt protruded below the kidney. He could have fought on…but his face was a silent scream; he clawed at the bolt, then went into convulsions. That poison-fern brew must be terrible stuff.
The pod bumped wood with Clave behind it. He turned it loose, clutched bark, and made his way toward Merril with his crossbow ready. He saw blue against storm cloud sky, fired a bolt through one man, and drew his harpoon as the other came at him with a sword.
The copsik runner came too fast. Clave batted him in the face with the crossbow handle and, as he recoiled, stabbed him in the throat.
Merril was making her way around the curve of the bark. He followed her. She stopped and crouched a moment before he saw the carrier, outward along the trunk. Copsik runners were all over
it.
He moved up beside her. She said, “All right, why aren’t they killing us with that scientific thing?”
“Good question.” Clave watched Anthon’s team launching crossbow bolts from around the curve of the wood. The carrier’s guardians fired back, not very successfully.
He said, “Forget it. They aren’t using it. They are using those wooden boxes to get reinforcements. Let’s—”
“Cut the lines.”
“Right.”
Two lines as thick as Clave’s arm ran parallel along the trunk. The last box was on its way in, nearly gone from sight. Another box must be rising. Clave and Merril made their way to the nearest line and began to chop at it.
Six men and a silver thing were coming into footbow range. Clave and Merril set bark sheets to protect themselves. Clave stared at the silver man. It was as if he were trying to remember a nightmare: a man made of starstuff, with a blank ball for a head. Clave fired at it until he saw a crossbow bolt strike and bounce away.
There were feathered harpoons in his shield and Merril’s. Clave saw three tiny things like thorns strike her shield in a line aimed at her bare head.
He yelled. She ducked. Thorns spat into the trunk. She said, “Oh. The silver man.”
“You know him?”
“Yes…keep chopping…he was with the copsik runners in Carther States. We don’t have anything to breech that armor.”
Another box had come into sight when the line parted. That box began to drift. Men spilled loose and flew in curves, pod-propelled, making for the trunk. They seemed too far in to do anything useful. The other line had gone slack. Merril said, “It’s a loop. We don’t have to cut the other one.”
“Then let’s get out. There was a cable running outward—”
“No. Let’s go join the victory party. Quick, or we’ll be left behind.”
“Victory—?” Then Clave saw what she meant.