Luther Brachis stared at the stump of his hand. The nubs of new fingers were already beginning to bulge under synthetic skin. He wiggled them experimentally.

“Itches like the plague.” He tapped the sheet in front of him with his left hand. “Think this will do it? I don’t think so. I’m willing to wager we don’t catch him.”

Mondrian shook his head. “No takers. Not if he was as smart as you seem to think. He must have planned this for years, ever since he created his first facsimile Artefact. The next one could look like anything.”

“I know. That’s why I’m worried.”

“You’ll be all right. Stay well-armed. You’ve got the training to handle any number of Margraves, one-handed or two.”

“You don’t understand.” Brachis placed his hand on the gun that sat on the table in front of him. “I’m not worried for myself, I’ll blow ’em away before they get near me. But suppose that bastard takes a shot at Godiva?”

Chapter 22

Dear Chan,

This is a letter that I never expected to write, a message I never dreamed I would send, especially (don’t misunderstand this) to you. But it’s our first night down on Travancore, and I’m flat out scared. Tonight I wish you and I were still down in the Gallimaufries, watching Bozzie preach self-denial while he gobbled down a dozen waffles with honey.

If we can’t be together, at least let me babble at you for a while. We — the team, I mean, they gave us a rotten name, Team Alpha, but I hope we’ll come up with something better for ourselves — anyway, my team, Team Alpha or whatever, we weren’t allowed to bring a Martin Link ship anywhere near Travancore. No matter what happens here, Commander Mondrian won’t risk the Morgan Construct having access to a Link again. So this message will be fired off to the ship, a million kilometers away, then through a Link back to Sol, then through the Censor’s office, and then, if everything works out right, you’ll get it before you leave Barchan. Good luck down there. The last word I had, you have the hottest Pursuit Team they’ve seen since training began. I hope so — and I hope you will never have to visit Travancore. Because if you do, it will mean that we have failed.

I said that we are “down on Travancore” but that’s more like a figure of speech than anything else. We don’t know where the true surface of the planet begins. No one does. We’re hanging in a sort of half-balloon tent with a flat, flexible base, about a hundred feet down from the topmost growths of vegetation. There’s another five-kilometers-plus of plant life underneath us.

Animal life, too. We saw the first signs of that on the low-altitude automated survey. The whole planet is riddled with holes, circular shafts about five meters across. They dive down from the top layers, and at first we thought they might be natural rain channels because it rains every day over most of Travancore. But now we’re not so sure. S’glya — she’s the Pipe-Rilla on our team — saw something Dig wriggling away down one of the tunnels when we were flying in. Scary. But I was mainly happy that it wasn’t the Morgan Construct, because we were a sitting target. I tried to hide my panicky feeling but of course it didn’t work. S’glya has this absolutely uncanny ability to read human feelings and she told the others.

They didn’t seem worried. It’s an unpleasant thought for me, the idea that soon we’ll be heading down one of those tunnels, but the Tinker feels quite different about that. It argues that the tunnels are a big boon to us, since without them it would take forever to explore the vertical forest on Travancore. Maybe it will take forever anyway. We’ll know, as soon as we get down to the interior.

Even before we made the final descent we decided that the training program had missed the point. We were sent to Dembricot for final training, because it’s a vegetation world like Travancore and everyone thought it would be good experience for this place.

Logical idea, but totally wrong. You must have seen the training films of Dembricot by now. Flat, water plains of plant growth, but they’re no more like Travancore than Barchan is. This planet is dense, tangled hillocks of jungle, boiling up in swirls and breakers like one of Earth’s seas in a bad storm.

One good thing: I can breathe the air with just a compressor. I should be able to manage without even that when we get down to a lower level where the pressure is higher. We’re all doing well. S’glya needs a heating unit, and Angel had to do some mysterious interior modification before the atmosphere was acceptable, but that’s all.

The view from the top layer of vegetation is spectacular at the moment. Travancore’s primary, Talitha, is close to setting, and when it’s low on the horizon it shines through mile after mile of ferns and leaves and vines. No flowers, I’m afraid — Travancore wouldn’t please old Bozzie. Everything in sight is greener than green, except for the Top Creepers. That’s not their official biological name, but it’s a good description. They are purple, gigantic lateral creepers that snake away across the top of everything as far as you can see. And I mean gigantic. They’re only a few meters across, but each one is many kilometers long. In spite of their size they are not at all dense and heavy. I tried to take a sample from one, because I couldn’t see how the rest of the vegetation could possibly support that much weight.

When I cut into it there was a hissing sound and a horrible smell, and the level of the vegetation around the Top Creeper went down a fraction. The whole thing has to be nothing more than a wafer-thin shell stretched out over a hollow center full of light gases. Now I suspect that they are actually holding the other plants up.

I told you I was going to babble, and I think I’m doing it, but I hope that I’m justified. If you do have to come here, the more you know about the place ahead of time, the better. We were trained as well as we could be, but it surely wasn’t enough. No one has ever looked closely at Travancore before. With no defined surface and no open water, no one thought that it was worth it. We have more questions than answers.

More about those mysterious holes. They keep preying on my mind. Angel’s imaging organs (can’t call them eyes) can be tuned to the thermal infra-red. Angel took a heat-wavelength look down one of the shafts, and claims that it isn’t vertical at all. It spirals down in a helix, which rules out the natural rain-channel idea. We’ll soon have a better explanation, I expect, because we’ll be going down one. I hope that I’m around after that, to send you a description. Anyway, whatever happens to us our ship ought to be receiving a full record of it.

And more about Travancore, too. Naturally we’ve thought about nothing else since we got here. There are plenty of mysteries not even mentioned in the briefing documents. For example: gravity and air. The surface gravity is only a little more than a quarter of Earth’s. So now can it hold onto a substantial atmosphere, and support this massive cover of vegetation? The air should have bled away into space long ago.

Well, according to S’glya, Travancore has its atmosphere because of the strange vegetation layer. The canopy of plant life is so dense and continuous that it can trap air molecules within and beneath it. We know there is something close to a pressure discontinuity up near the top here.

And of course it’s a chicken-and-egg situation because the atmosphere is absolutely necessary for the vegetation to exist! The plant cover must have developed very early in Travancore’s history. And if S’glya is right, the shafts we saw can’t go down uninterrupted all the way to the solid surface, because otherwise they could act as escape vents for the air. So we may have to cut our way through barriers, one more little difficulty. But just to add to the confusion, Angel says that S’glya’s idea about the relationship of the atmosphere and the vegetation is wrong — for six reasons still to be specified.