‘Yet you ended up here, with us,’ Onizuka said.
Martha didn’t reply to that. On Per Ardua, and even back on the ship, Yuri had noticed, it was a peculiar kind of bad manners to poke into why and how your companion had ended up in the sweep.
Instead, Martha stared up. ‘Look at that canopy. See how static it is? And every tree seems to have three big leaves, just three, radial symmetry, one, two, three. See? Every one of them pitched perfectly up at the sun, which is never going to move. If the light condition isn’t going to change, if there are no seasons, I guess you may as well grow just a few huge leaves to capture all the light. Hmm. Why not just one leaf per tree? For redundancy, I guess. There must be something that would chomp on a leaf, even high up there; you would need a spare or two while a lost leaf grew back. Those leaves look like they have the usual dull Arduan green on the sun-facing side, paler on the shadow side, to conserve heat, I guess. Maximum efficiency of usage of sunlight – and that’s why it’s so dark down here. Come on. I think it’s brighter that way—’ she pointed north ‘—maybe some kind of clearing.’
She led the way, and the rest followed. The trees began to thin out, and Yuri started to see more open sky – free of cloud, but a deeper blue the further north you looked, towards, he supposed, the terminator, and the lands of endless dark.
Something clattered through the canopy overhead. Yuri looked up, flinching. He had an impression of something big, fragile, a framework with vanes flapping and whirling. It was like the ‘kites’ he had seen over the lake, but much bigger. The kite ducked down towards them, maybe drawn by their movement.
Onizuka lifted his crossbow and shot off bolts, without hesitation, one, two. Onizuka had been practising with the weapon, with Harry Thorne and Martha.
The first shot missed, and went sailing up into the canopy. But the second ripped through the flyer’s structure. Yuri thought he heard a kind of screech as fragile vanes folded back. The flyer, driven forward by its own momentum, smashed into a tree trunk and came spinning down towards the ground, tearing and clattering, to hit the litter on the deck with a surprisingly soft impact.
Onizuka whooped and raised a fist. ‘Got you.’ He led the way, jogging through the leaf debris.
The fallen creature was a jumble of broken struts and ripped panels of a fine, translucent, brownish skin, like a crashed Wright Brothers aeroplane.
‘Wow,’ Lemmy said. ‘Its wingspan must have been three, four metres when it was in flight.’
‘But that’s the wrong word,’ Martha said. She knelt, pulled at a panel, unfolded it to revealed ripped skin. ‘ “Wingspan.” These weren’t wings. They’re more like – what, vanes? They were rotating, like chopper blades.’
Prodding at the fallen creature, they pieced together its structure, or anyhow a best guess at it. There was a stubby cylindrical core body, itself not solid but a mass of rods and fibres. When Yuri plucked a strut at random from the core carcass, it looked just like a stem, one of the reeds from the lake. There had been two sets of vanes, each a triple set – threefold symmetry, like the great leaves of the trees – that had each been attached to the main body by a kind of ball-and-socket joint, lubricated by what looked like tree marrow.
Martha poked at the main body, working a finger in through a cage of stems. When she withdrew the finger it was sticky with marrow. ‘Yuck. I’m guessing that’s some kind of stomach in there. There’s a mass of stems, and skin stuff, and marrow.’
‘Maybe it feeds on the big tree leaves,’ Lemmy said.
‘Maybe. Or on smaller critters.’ Martha shrugged, and glanced up into the canopy. ‘Who knows what’s up there?’
Another rustle, a scrape, this time coming at them along the ground. They stepped back from the flyer and pulled together, instinctively.
In the canopy shadow Yuri saw creatures moving, built like tripods, maybe a metre tall, each a clattering construct of stems and skin panels, like a toy of wood and canvas. They moved in whirls like spinning skaters, a whole flock of them heading straight for the fallen flyer.
Straight for the human party, in fact.
Again Onizuka raised his crossbow.
Martha grabbed his arm. ‘You don’t need to kill everything we come across.’
‘The damn things are heading right at us.’
‘Then get out of their way.’ She pulled him aside, into the cover of the trees, and Yuri and Lemmy followed.
The tripods ignored the humans. Seven, eight, nine of them, they descended on the fallen flyer, and whirred across its body, this way and that, efficiently cutting it to pieces. Yuri saw fine limbs – each multiply articulated, like a spacecraft manipulator arm – pluck at bits of the disintegrated carcass and tuck them into the mesh-like structures that were the cores of the tripods’ own bodies. Yuri had seen beasts like these out on the plains and around the lake, but these were smaller, compact, faster-moving.
‘Messy business,’ Martha murmured. ‘Like butchering a carcass by running at it with chainsaws. Bits flying everywhere.’
‘Yeah, but look,’ Onizuka said, pointing.
From nowhere, it seemed, smaller creatures were appearing, some ground-based spinners like the larger scavengers, some flapping flyers like the downed canopy beast, though much smaller. They were all put together from rods and sheets of webbing, as far as Yuri could see. They fell on the big corpse, a cloud of tiny workers processing the remains of the flyer in smaller and smaller fragments.
‘They didn’t break off when they came running towards us,’ Lemmy said. ‘Maybe they don’t see us.’
Martha said, ‘We must look strange, smell strange – if they can smell at all. They don’t recognise us as a food source. And not as a threat either.’
‘Not yet,’ Onizuka said, hefting his crossbow. ‘Give them time. You know, I’ve got some experience of the deep ocean. No rich daddy for me, Martha. I made my money from the reclamation trade, deep-diving for precious metals and such from the drowned cities of mainland Japan. I got a taste for the ocean . . . When you get down deep enough, you go beneath the layers where light can reach and stuff grows, plankton and so forth. If you live deeper than that, down in the dark where nothing can grow, you spend your whole life waiting for stuff to come sailing down from above. Scraps, whatever. And when something big comes down, a whale carcass or such, you get a feeding frenzy.’ Onizuka glanced up at the canopy, the huge static leaves. ‘Same principle here. Down on the ground you must get years of darkness, no light to grow. That’s why there’s no undergrowth to speak of, no saplings. Most times it’s just like the deep ocean. And so you get these very efficient scavenger types, just waiting for their moment when something comes falling down from the light.’
The cluster of scavengers was breaking up now, those big waist-high spinning-tripod types departing first with a hum of whirled limbs, and then the cloud of flyers and the little runners polishing off the scraps, before fleeing too. When they had done, Yuri saw, you’d never have known the fallen flyer had been here at all, save for some scuffed forest-floor debris, and a few patches of hardening marrow.
The group pressed on.
CHAPTER 16
They reached the forest fringe, pushed through a last screen of skinny saplings – some of which, barely grown, looked just like the stems back in the Puddle – and emerged into a clearing, centred on some kind of big rock-jumble hollow in the ground, with the forest continuing as a drab green wall on the far side. Out of the forest’s shade the air was hotter, more humid, and Yuri felt sweat prickle.
They moved forward more cautiously, some instinct, Yuri supposed, prompting them to stick together in the open. Both Martha and Onizuka hefted their crossbows. Yuri had expected to find evidence of fire, something that would produce a clearing like this – the aftermath of a lightning strike maybe, and there were plenty of those on this stormy world.