Midworld (27 page)

“Yes, sir,” they chorused dispiritedly.

Hansen took a deep breath. “For myself, I’ve got another report to make out, more than usually negative. Get out of my sight, the both of you.”

Cohoma seemed about to add something, but Logan put a cautioning hand on his arm and drew him away. Hansen continued to hand out directives. One by one, the crowd dispersed, each to his or her assigned task. The station chief was left alone. He stood staring down the hole for a long time until the rifle crew arrived.

When they began to set up the powerful, slim weapon on its tripod, he spun around and stalked off toward his office, trying to imagine the phraseology that would explain to his shadowy superiors how the station perimeter was violated by two aborigines and a pair of oversized, sixlegged cats.

The director would not be pleased. No, most definitely not pleased.

BENEATH A BROAD CURVED
panpanoo leaf which served as shelter from the steadily falling night-rain, man and furcot rested on a wide tuntangcle and held a council of war. Hansen was right. To Born and Losting, Ruumahum and Geeliwan, the actions of the giants were grounds for a jihad.

“We can conceal ourselves in the trees below the level where they have killed,” Losting suggested, his voice sharp against the constant pit-pat of rain, “and pick them off as they come out.”

“In their sky-boat skimmers as well?” Born countered. “With our snufflers, no doubt.”

“Gather the brethren,” Ruumahum growled terribly.

Born shook his head sorrowfully. “They have long eyes for seeing and long weapons for killing, Ruumahum. We must think of something else.”

It was silent then save for splash and spray and occasional shuffling below the panpanoo. Once Born’s half-lidded eyes opened and he muttered to the wood, “Roots … roots.” Other eyes gazed at him hopefully, till he turned quiescent again.

“I have an idea of how this may be begun,” he finally announced without looking at anyone in particular. “It scratches at the edge of my mind like a wheep hunting for the entrance to the brya burrow. Roots … roots and a parable.” He got to his feet, stretched. “Where is the power of the giants anchored? From whence do the marvels attributed to them come?”

“From Hell, of course,” Losting mumbled.

“But which Hell, hunter? Our world draws strength from the Lower Hell. These giants, from what they say, derive theirs from the Upper. Their roots are locked in the sky, not the ground. They have cut their way into our world by digging downward. We will cut into theirs by digging up.”

“How can one dig up?” Losting wondered aloud.

By way of reply Born walked to the edge of the sheltering panpanoo and stared up into the tepid rain. “We must find a stormtreader.” He turned back to eye Ruumahum questioningly. “How many days till the next big rain?”

The furcot uncurled himself and padded to stand next to his person. The blunt muzzle probed the night air. As water dribbled off his face, he sniffed deeply, inhaled through his powerful mouth. “Three, maybe four days, Born.”

The stormtreader was not too rare, not too common, and no two were ever found near each other. But moving on the Third Level, they had located the silver-black bole rising in the forest on the far side of the station. It was not close to the cleared area, but the long, chainlike leaves reached downward all the way to the Sixth Level. They would reach upward as easily.

There was only one way to handle the leaves of the stormtreader. By covering hands and paws, arms and legs with the sap of the lient, it was possible to safely draw up hundreds of meters of interlocked leaf and coil it in readiness.

“I still do not understand,” Losting admitted, as they rubbed the sticky black sap from their hands.

“Remember, the giant-made vine web we first passed through when they took us into their station-Home? Remember the Salgiant explaining what it ate? I once saw a cruta eat so much tesshanda fruit it exploded. Its insides flew all over the branch it had been sitting on. I’ll never know whether I looked as surprised as the cruta did, but I’ll not forget the sight as long as I breathe. This is what we do here, I hope.”

Losting was appalled. “We may only make the giants’ roots stronger, firmer.”

Born shrugged. “Then we will try something else.”

Despite Losting’s impatience and uneasiness, they waited through the storm that raged the third night. Born knew he had made the right decision the fourth evening, when Ruumahum scented the air and rasped, “Rain and wind and noise aplenty, this night.”

“We must move quickly, then, before it howls at us, or even the sap of the lient won’t save us.” He spoke as the first big drops began to set the forest humming.

In near total darkness they started toward the station, moving beneath the cleared area covered by multiple electronic sensors and fight amplifiers and the red light death. They had three of the long silvery leaves. Each of the furcots wrestled with one, Born and Losting with the third. Thickly coated with lient sap they dragged the ever-lengthening strands behind them, until they reached the dark wall formed by one of the station-supporting trunks. Born touched it, peered close. The topped tree was already beginning to die from loss of its leaf-bearing crown and infection of the heartwood.

Moving slowly they started upward, parallel to the colossal trunk. Thunder boomed down to them now, as the still distant lightning cracked the sky like drying mud beneath a summer sun. Already Born was drenched. Ruumahum had been right. Rain aplenty, this night.

The black lient also helped conceal them when they emerged into the open air. Wind still carried the rain to them, but here, directly beneath the shielding bulk of the station, it was still relatively dry. That was fortunate, since there were no friendly cubbies and creepers to mount there. They had to make their way with the heavy leaves up the vertical shaft. But though security was no less lax and those who studied the monitors and scanners no less intent on their tasks, the tiny blots that moved up the trunk were not seen. The station’s defenses were aimed out, not down. Nor did Born make the mistake of trying to mount the tree Ruumahum and Geeliwan had used to rescue them. That bole, at least, still commanded plenty of attention.

Born waited till all were ready just below the metal web that prevented further ascent. Lightning split the night-rain steadily now. They had to hurry. Above him, the web crackled and sputtered with each atmospheric discharge. He nodded.

Together, man and furcot carefully draped the three silver-black leaves over different strands of the web. Born held his breath as the leaf touched metal. A few tiny sparks, then nothing.

“Down and away—quickly!” he called to the furcots.

Within the sealed outpost, an unexpected movement caught the eye of the third engineer on duty at the generator station. He frowned, walked over to the dials in question. There was nothing radically wrong about the slight fluctuations in current that were registered, but there should have been no such flutterings at all. The variations were more than the most violent storm was expected to produce. For a brief moment he considered waking the chief engineer, decided against chancing that worthy’s temper. Probably there was some minor malfunction in the monitoring equipment itself—the B transformer had displayed a tendency to act up from time to time. And it could hardly be due to normal shifts in the power produced by the solar collector—not in the middle of the night!

The monitoring chips checked out operational one after another. He was still searching for the source of the disturbance when a huge lightning bolt struck near enough for the sound to penetrate the station’s dense soundproofing.

Several things happened simultaneously.

The ear-splitting discharge struck a tree in the hylaea to the southeast of the station. There was no shattering of wood, no brief flare of flame. The crown of this particular tree was not split or blackened. Instead, the naked apex of the stormtreader drank the lightning like a child sucking milk through a straw. The metal-impregnated wood quivered visibly under the impact, but was not damaged as the tremendous concentration of voltage was distributed by the tree’s remarkable inner structure.

Momentarily, the mild defensive charge the tree usually maintained was increased a thousand million times. Under normal circumstances the entire charge would have been dissipated into the distant ground by the stormtreader’s complex root system, creating oxides of nitrogen and heavily enriching the surrounding soil. But this time something else commanded the full force of that jagged disruption, diverted it through the defensive screen formed by the tree’s long, deadly leaves.

The puzzled engineer would never know that his meters and dials had registered correctly, would never learn the source of those first enigmatic fluctuations in current.

Born did not know what to expect. He had hoped, as he had described to Losting, to overfeed the protective webs which guarded the station’s underbelly. Instead, the three grids exploded like pinwheels a nanosecond following the deafening draw by the stormtreader. They flared like burning magnesium for long seconds before wilting and melting to slag.

Distant explosions sounded across the dark Panta, and lights flared within the station, reaching out to the tiny knot of stupefied watchers crouched in the forest wall. Modulators sparked and exploded, unable to regulate the stupendous overload. The storage batteries simply melted like ice, depriving the station of back-up power.

Thirty million volts at 100,000 amperes poured into the station’s generating system, melting or shorting every cable, every outlet, every bulb, tube, and appliance within. One overriding eruption sounded from the far side of the station as the central transformer and solar plant were blown wholesale through the outside wall.

Over the steady rhythm of the indifferent night-rain, the screams and shouts of the confused, the stunned, and the burned began to sound. But there were no cries of the slowly dying. Those who had been killed, like the engineer, had been electrocuted instantly.

Losting started forward. “Let us finish it.”

Born had to reach to restrain him. “They still may have the red light, which kills before a snuffler can be loaded, hunter.”

Losting indicated the twisted, smoking gun turrets. Though the cannons within could still be repaired, they were momentarily useless. The turret mechanisms were thoroughly burnt out.

“Not those,” Born explained. “The tiny ones the giants wear like axes may still work.” He sat back on the damp branch and eyed the sky. “What will the violent and unusual noises bring by the morning, hunter? Think! What can several men shouting in unison attract?”

Losting searched his thoughts, until his eyes widened. “Floaters. Not Bunas … Photoids.”

Born nodded. “They must be stirring already.”

“But surely since they’ve been here, these giants have seen Photoid floaters?”

“Perhaps not,” his companion argued. “Their skimmers are quiet, and Photoids are rare. Only prey large enough for a Photoid can make enough noise to attract one. I did not think of this.”

Losting sat back and clasped his hands together in front of his bunched-up legs. “What will it matter, anyway? The floaters will see no prey and depart.”

“They may well do just that, Losting. But think of how the giants react, how the Logan and Cohoma persons first reacted to me, how they reacted in the world. They fear without trying to understand, Losting. And they must be nervously fearful now. We will see how they react to the floaters.”

Hansen kicked at the still smoking fragments of metal and polyplexalloy that speckled the buckled floor and surveyed the gaping hole where the power station had once sat. Puddles of hardened slag were all that remained of the complex, expensive installation. It was not broken—it was gone.

A very tired Blanchfort appeared. Like everyone else, he had not slept in many hours.

“Let’s hear the rest of it,” Hansen sighed.

“Everything which drew power is burnt out or melted, sir,” the section chief reported solemnly. “There isn’t a circuit, a solid- or fluid-state switch, a linked module left in the place. We’re going to have to rebuild the entire system.”

Hansen allowed himself several minutes to reflect on this, then asked, “Did they find out what caused it?”

“Mamula thinks so. It’s … well, it’s pretty straightforward, once you’ve seen it.”

Hansen followed the other man through the station, passed exhausted crews working at blackened sections of walls and floor. Before long they reached the access hatch through which an open elevator lowered explorers to the roof of the cut-off forest below. The elevator, naturally, had been burnt out. Someone had cut the melted wiring and other electrical connections and rigged a makeshift winch. The elevator was in use now, suspended halfway between the station and green world beneath. Suspended right at the level where the charged grid had once been.

Hansen peered through the gap. From the point where the grid had been bolted to the tree, a ring of still hot metal ran like candlewax down the trunk. Wisps of smoke from the scorched bark still rose into the air.

“Do you see it, Chief?” Blanchfort asked.

Hansen squinted against the brightness of day, stared harder. “See what? I don’t—”

“There, to the left a little and below where Mamula and his people are working. There are two more further around the trunk.”

The station chief stared. “You mean that long silvery chain that extends down into the treetops?”

“That’s it, sir, only it’s not a chain. Not of metal, anyway. It’s a leaf, or many interlocked leaves.”

“What about them?”

“Mamula thinks they were laid into the grid before the storm last night. We sent a party out—I hoped our two native boys would show themselves, but they didn’t—to trace it back. All three leaves go straight down into the forest for about fifteen meters, then off to the southeast. They link up to the parent tree about thirty meters back front the clearing.” He turned and gestured out an uncracked window. “That way.

“It’s one of the smaller emergents. Bare crown, mostly black and silver-colored— bark, leaves, everything. Very little brown or green in it, except in some subsidiary growth.” He glanced down at the clipboard he always carried with him. “A woman named Stevens was in charge of the tracing party. According to her report, the tree itself maintains a lethal charge. Anything that brushes against one of its long leaves is killed instantly. Mamula theorizes that when the tree is hit by lightning, as it apparently was last night, the charge is somehow handled and carried off. Only a tiny recharge is necessary to maintain the tree’s defensive system. And it’s an isolated specimen, though he says if we look, we’ll find more of them around.”