Bram leaned over Lydis’s shoulder and told Jun Davd about the glass helmets.
“Thank you, Bram,” Jun Davd said. “That ought to help. We can throw missiles. Humans are good at playing ball, at least. But we’re spread too thinly through the branches. We’ll be vastly outnumbered at any given attack site, until we can rush reinforcements—and that’s going to take too long under acceleration, using the internal transport system.”
“That’s why I’m doing this,” Lydis said.
“Good luck,” Jun Davd said simply.
“What’s going on?” the frightened curator asked. “Why aren’t we landing?”
Bram tried to calm him down. The little man drew himself up. “You don’t understand,” he said with mustered dignity. “I’m not concerned for myself. But nothing must be allowed to happen to these Rembrandts.”
“If the dragonflies get into the tree, they’ll use them for napkins,” Jao said. “So shut up.”
The curator assumed an aggrieved expression. “If I can help…”
“I’ll let you know,” Bram said. “In the meantime, hang on to that portfolio.”
The tug rounded the curve of the treetop with a virtuoso application of lateral jets by Lydis. Ahead, the dragonfly bubble rose into view. Its pilot was applying the brakes with a skill that matched Lydis’s. It hovered a bare quarter mile above the crown of leaves, its chemical jets scorching the branches. The other bubbles were some tens of miles away, not yet a threat.
The opalescent sphere crowded the viewport. With sickening clarity, Bram saw hundreds of space-suited nymphs crawling over its surface, ready to swarm over the branches at the instant of touchdown.
The tug hit it broadside with its cushioned nets. The work vehicle was a mere speck next to the sphere, but its powerful engines had moved comets larger than this.
Bram saw a shower of nymphs wriggling against the void, shaken loose by the impact. The pilot of the bubble frantically tried to bring his own maneuvering jets into play—either to try to burn the tug or to slip out of its clutches. He and Lydis dueled, two masters of the pilot’s art. But Lydis anticipated every parry. Slowly she drove the hovering bubble off its landing pattern, moving it farther and farther along a tangent away from Yggdrasil.
The bubble’s main thruster was pointed down toward the tree, still spouting fire and helping Lydis. There was only one way the pilot could hope to break away from the mite that was pushing so hard at his ship. He turned the braking blast on full force, driving himself away from the tree so that he could start over again—and incidentally char the tug to a cinder.
Lydis was ready for him. The instant she felt herself losing contact, she spun the tug one hundred eighty degrees on its steering jets. By the time a haft mile of globe had slipped past her, she was zooming away at full acceleration. It was the dragonfly bubble that was licked by her flame.
Bram could see the cloudy orb fighting for control. They were still alive in there, but they were in trouble. The nymph pilot was trying to spin the globe around so that he could kill his outward momentum and dive toward the tree again, but his key maneuvering jets must have been damaged because he could achieve only an erratic wobble.
Again, he did the only thing he could. He cut the main jet to stop his headlong outward flight and began, slowly and painfully, to spin the sphere around by some internal means.
“Either they’ve got a whopping big flywheel in there,” Jao said, “or there’re thousands of nymphs running around an inside track.”
The globe receded into the distance. But the rest of them were drifting toward the giant tree like a clot of foam.
But by this time, Yggdrasil itself was moving beneath them. Bram saw the bright ball of the fusion sun in its cage, shining through the polarized disk that had appeared on the viewport to eclipse it. A brilliant pathway of hadronic photons reached thousands of miles into space, like a sword with the probe as its haft.
“Now to get down there before they build up to a g,” Lydis said through clenched jaws.
Her fingers flew over the console, and the tug began its downward descent.
An incoherent choking sound came from the curator. “L-look, they’re all over us!”
Bram whipped his head around. All of the viewports were filled with dragonfly faces, boxed in glass. Armored claspers hammered at the hull.
“We’re covered with them,” Lydis said. “They must have swarmed over us when we jolted them loose.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know. Tens of them, maybe.”
Jao assumed a noble pose. “We can’t take them back with us. We’ll have to—
“Too late,” Bram said. “Some of them are already breaking free. They can drift down to Yggdrasil on their own.”
“There’s only one thing to do, then,” Lydis said. “Deliver them to one spot.”
She conferred by radio with Jun Davd. The outside defenders were alerted. They were all keeping their eye on the approaching tug. A flare went up to indicate where Lydis should try to land.
It was tricky. Fortunately, they were headed toward the leading edge of the tree crown, so there was no danger of sliding down the effective side of an accelerating object and falling into the photon stream. But Lydis had to contend with a rough landing field whose surface was rising toward her at an increasing but unknown rate and whose counterfeit gravity was mounting by the second.
Jao tried to help her with the variables and derivatives until she told him to shut up and let her concentrate.
Below, where the flare had been, Bram could see a ring of bobbing lights—men and women with torches. The ring expanded, dispersed, as the defenders scrambled outward, away from the touchdown point.
From all directions, other lights converged on the target ring as other defenders abandoned their positions and came to help.
Bram waited out the descent, sweating. A nymph scrabbled at the viewport opposite him and seemed to be making progress in creating a loose place for prying away the frame.
Then the nymphs were hurling themselves away from the hull, abandoning the tug before it touched down and spreading outward to get away from the rocket blast.
“Hold on!” Lydis cried.
She cut the drive twenty feet up, motionless in respect to Yggdrasil. But Yggdrasil continued to accelerate, and when it met the undercarriage of the tug, there was a respectable jolt. The tug settled into a nest of charred leaves, broke through smaller twigs, and came to rest at a crazy angle.
Bram hoped the landing had been as hard for the nymphs that had jumped ship before the impact. He saw one snatch at a twig, miss it, and smash its glass helmet against a projecting branch. But other nymphs were managing to land right side up or to grab branchlets with their four legs and abdominal claspers and swing themselves around.
“Let’s go!” Jao roared, and he headed for the air lock with a grappling hook in his hand.
“Stay inside!” Bram said sharply.
Jao turned slowly around, an incredulous expression on his face.
“We’d only get in their way,” Bram said. “We’re inside the circle with the nymphs.”
The curator sat with his teeth chattering, hugging his portfolio to his knees. It would have been an injustice to say he looked relieved.
Bram went with Lydis and Jao to look out the main port. Methuselah leaped off his shoulder and scampered ahead of him, taking a lively interest in the proceedings. “That’s right, old fellow,” Bram said, patting his head. “We’ve got lots of friends out there.”
The circle of torches converged inward, making a pool of light as big as a teamball field. Bram saw the flickering nymph figures darting back and forth amidst the shadows of leaves.
One of them made a run at the perimeter of the circle. It was met by a hail of small thrown objects. It scuttled back and forth, trying to escape, but several missiles found their target. The glass helmet flew apart in fragments. There was a brief greenish snowstorm within the square frame, and
the long tubular body curled up in the agony of death.
The circle of lights moved inward. Bram could see more lights rising above the sharp curve of the branch’s horizon and approaching in ragged lines from the longitudinal directions.
Another dragonfly made a rush and was driven back by brickbats. The circle of lights contracted again.
“Throwing things,” Bram said. “That’s what Ame says our treetop ancestors were good at. It gives us a longer reach than creatures like these. They don’t understand throwing.”
“They’re learning,” Jao said. “Any minute now it’s going to occur to them to rush in a group, and then some of them will break through.”
Bram glanced at the approaching lights. Reinforcements. He wished they would hurry up.
“We’d better get out of this system fast,” Jao went on. “Because the next time we meet these things in space, they’re going to be wearing wire mesh over their helmets.”
Two dragonflies charged the line of defenders, one behind the other. The first one went down, but the second reached the perimeter. Bram saw a man go down, then there was a flurry of activity as a dozen humans swung at the insect with bats and pikes until it stopped moving.
By now the contracting circumference of men and women had closed up the gaps in the line, and more people were arriving every moment. A hard rain of missiles filled the circle. Bram heard metal ring off the hull of the tug, and something sharp and fast made a small star in the plastic of the viewport.
“What a pitch,” Jao said. “There must be a lot of team-ball players out there.”
“The gravity keeps changing,” Lydis said. “It must be hard to judge.”
“The human brain’s a marvelous computer, Lydis,” Bram said. “You ought to know that.”
The pelting shower of hard objects grew thicker as more people joined in. The nymphs, with their wraparound eyes and their superb ability to detect motion, were good at dodging. But it did them no good when they were bracketed on all sides.
The flat trajectories of the missiles became shallow arcs as gravity increased. But by the same token, the rain of brickbats from above grew harder and harder.
The pitchers were learning to act in unison—picking out one or two targets at a time and concentrating fire on them. By the time the nymphs made the concerted rush that Jao had predicted, there were too few of them left.
These, too, went down under the concentrated stoning. The fact that they were bunched together even helped the humans. Bram tuned into the common wavelength and heard a cheer go up. The defenders swarmed all over the battlefield, making a muddle of light. When Lydis opened the air lock door, quite a crowd was waiting outside.
The elongated figure in the old-fashioned accordion-jointed space suit was Jun Davd. A transparent sack that still held a few unused lumps of metal and ceramic dangled from his hand. He grinned at Bram.
“Did you get them all?” Bram said.
“Yes.”
“There were some that jumped free early. And there are clouds of nymphs out there that the bubble ship shed when we bumped it. They had a net vector toward the tree at the time. I doubt that any of them could survive impact at what the relative velocity was at the time, but…”
“We’ll search the tree. We’ll hunt them down. We won’t rest until we know for sure.”
The curator came swiftly out, clutching the big floppy portfolio he had risked his life for. He refused to let anyone take it from him. Friendly hands led him away toward the nearest entrance to the branch.
“Another iota of the human heritage.” Jun Davd sighed. “We’ve got more of it than we ever bargained for. But we’re leaving so much more behind. After coming all this way, through black holes and exploding galaxies, it doesn’t seem fair to have to run away like thieves.”
Lydis came over and joined them. She had plenty of willing helpers pitching in to secure the tug to the big branch. It would not be sacrificed, after all; somewhere between stars, before Yggdrasil spun again, it could be flown or towed under no-g conditions to an airdock in the trunk.
She pointed at the clot of bubbles that was sinking below Yggdrasil’s horizon. “We ought to be safe from them now,” she said. “There’s no way they can match velocities with us anymore.”
“Let’s be sure,” Jun Davd said.
Five minutes later he had a patch in to Smeth in probe control central, in the trunk. An assistant had hurried over with portable equipment. Bram hadn’t realized the extent of the communication coordination effort that had gone into repelling the dragonfly invaders. There was even a small videoscreen in color—though it was flat, not holo.
They sat outside on the branch to watch; there would not have been time to go inside. Smeth’s voice came in, clear as a bell, from one hundred fifty miles away.
“The bubbles are rising over the horizon now,” Smeth said. “They’re very low—not more than a hundred miles from the treetop. Can you see them?”
In the little portable screen, flecks of spume emerged from behind the curve of the aft horizon. Some remote camera on the other side of Yggdrasil was taking the pictures—probably one of Smeth’s probe monitors. Bram was horrified to see the fiery sprays of exhausts coming from the bubbles, pointing outward; the dragonflies were still trying to land on the tree.
“They don’t realize…” someone murmured. Bram recognized Ame’s voice; she must have gone to probe central to be with Smeth when he returned from the ramjet with his black gang.
“I don’t think they use instruments,” Smeth said in a strained voice. “I think they do everything by vision and instinct.”
“Are you running a parallax on them?” Jun Davd asked.
“Of course,” Smeth snapped. “I’m doing a continuous prediction.”
Bram put the question that was on everyone’s lips. “Are they going to make it?”
“I don’t think so. They think they are. But it’s going to be very close.”
The remote camera tracked the bubbles across Yggdrasil’s sky, gave it up, and another camera—evidently on the trailing branches—picked them up.
“There—they’ve seen their error,” Smeth said.
The bubbles must have rotated all at once; the exhaust plumes now faced Yggdrasil, trying to push the colony vehicles away. But they’d been picking up momentum too long; they continued to fall inward toward a tree that was slipping inexorably past them. They fell past the edge and into the blinding stream of the hadronic photon drive.
They simply vanished. The energy that had instantly vaporized them was such an infinitesimal fraction of the energy flowing around them that they didn’t even make a brief flare.
Bram heard all the sighs of relief through his suit radio. He did a little sighing himself.
A million miles out, they allowed themselves to feel safe. Yggdrasil was hitting almost its full one-gravity acceleration by then—far beyond anything dragonfly technology was able to approach. In a few Tendays, they would be out of the system.
Bram had time enough to clean up, eat something, and grab a few hours’ sleep before he and Mim had to attend the impromptu celebration that was being held in the observation lounge. Marg had decided to cater it at short notice. Word was out that it would feature wines fermented with the help of terrestrial yeasts that had been retrieved from storage on the diskworld.
When he and Mim entered the great curved gallery arm in arm, a couple of thousand people were already milling around. The atmosphere seemed a little subdued for a party. People’s eyes kept stealing to the sweeping expanse of clear plastic that showed the rearward view.
There was no sky behind them—just a solid wall against the firmament. It was blank-faced, featureless, lit only by the receding inferno of Yggdrasil’s artificial sun. Even at a million miles, the top of the wall showed almost no curvature.
Bram got drinks for himself and Mim at one of the bars, then steered her over to the big holo display at the end of the lounge. That had its share of spectators,
too. Jun Davd was keeping his telescopes trained on the hairbreadth of rim where what was left of the human race had spent a year digging up its past, and was piping the images to the public displays throughout the tree. Though the images used the holo apparatus, they were flat, showing only what the telescope saw.
Somehow, that made the sight more immediate.
At extreme magnification, the tethered moon was a child’s top poised just above the knife edge of the rim. Its waistline harness and the grid of its engineering structures could be seen fuzzily.
Directly beneath the moon’s small end was the excavated city they had quit. There was no individual building large enough to be seen, except for a tiny bump that might have been the sports arena—if that wasn’t merely an irregularity in the telescope’s charge-coupled retina. But the crosshatched pattern of the streets could be made out, and the two moon plazas—one on either side of the rim—were a pair of tiny eyelets.
But what really drew the fascinated attention of the people standing around the display was the dragonfly settlement a couple of hundred miles farther along the plain.
It had grown large enough to be seen from space.
At its center, the original dragonfly bubble was a small white bead. A grayish honeycomb was spread around it, like dirty froth. The froth seemed to have crept a little farther toward the buried city than it had in other directions.
Trist drifted over with a drink in his hand. “I hate to think of that wonderful storehouse being overrun by those monsters,” he said, nodding at the telescopic image.
Bram agreed. “All the buildings and underground tunnels need only a little patching to make them habitable—they’ll just be breeding spaces for the creatures. Still, there are other human sites—on that disk and the others, and on all the tethered moons.”
“They’ll get around to them,” Trist said, taking a sip of a pink concoction. “It won’t take long for them to spread through this entire system, the way they spawn.”
Mim, lovely in a gown that left her arms and shoulders bare, shivered. “I’m just glad we’re away from there. And we’ve managed to take away so much in spite of every-thing—from the life work of thousands of tale tellers and composers to the genome of the giraffe.”
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