“Anna Wolf, with a copy to Kanti Wolf and Knute.”
“Proceed.”
“I’ve been blown off course and will be several hours longer in finding Kanti than I planned to be. Kanti, if you check in, please call your mother and be patient. We need to talk.
Knute, the Bach I promised you should be in the mail. Konstantis out.” These same words would mean something different to everyone who heard them—he allowed himself a momentary grin at his own cleverness.
He tried to lose altitude, but the updraft got more fierce as he dropped lower until, stooping like a hawk with his wings straight up, he could get no lower. “With the flock the storm winds bring, you fly,” the Uther saying went. He faced the mists, held his altitude and waited.
Thirty kilometers from the coast, another opening below him revealed the tops of the low hills that formed the divide of the slowly sinking continent. The windward side had no real dry season. There, ancient river valleys widened by periodic glaciers had carved coundess lush, flat valleys.
He started to lose altitude now. He linked with Met Central and studied the map. He’d been aloft almost two hours and ached everywhere, but the front was weakening, and a few kilometers south was an L-shaped valley he thought he recognized. A recently-declared “harvesting reserve for the Fay-D-flat Seege.” What that normally meant was an area protected from other scavengers. Airborne hunters would spear a ceretridon, then fly in for the feast. Ancient competition with the Uthers’ ancestors and relatives left ground scavengers few and slow, so the kill would be safe until it ripened to Uther tastes. There were thousands of these reserves across the sunken continent.
Human distaste for such activities was well known, so if an Uther airlord was up to something he didn’t want a human to know about, Greg reasoned, a harvesting reserve was as good a place to hide it as any. The satellite view would simply show a pagoda tree forest, and robot surveillance flyers had to be used very sparingly for fear of malfunction and accidental technology transfer. Greg now had, he thought, as good an excuse to be in such an area as any human would ever have. When fate gives you a lemon, make lemonade. A yellow and green tethered balloon floated over the area—a hunting perch—or a guard station. He banked left and headed south.
Almost immediately, there were Uther in the air over the area, looking from a distance like giant tailless dragonflies. The forewings, though, were shorter in proportion and beat the air in a kind of undulating motion rather than stiffly. They had great vision; if he had been able to see them, he could be sure that they had seen him.
He banked and glided at right angles to the line between them, making it hard for them to judge his distance by parallax. His slow, deliberate course was, he hoped, nothing they would consider evasive or hostile. Time to call home, he thought. “Voice mail, for Knute.”
After a moment, his wing set computer responded in dry, standard tones. “The link wasn’t achieved due to the electromagnetic noise environment.”
This gear would punch through storm interference easily, and already had. He was being jammed. Quick students, these Uthers. Knute, Greg realized, was way behind the power curve on this one. Would some surveillance robot recognize the jamming as different from storm lightning? It probably could if it were looking for that, but looking for that would be the kind of purposefully creative act that, even now, artificial intelligence didn’t do very well.
The Uther guards, if that’s what they were, probably did that kind of thing very well, and would have immediately recognized his transmissions as artificial. Sure enough, they’d all banked toward him, in unison, like a flock of crows. He was far too tired, and the power level in his wing pack was far too low to try to run for it. He would learn as much as he could, and try to talk his way out of it.
He heard a faint tone, like the ones used to test hearing—it was his computer’s rendition of the Uthers’ sonar—like bats, they could range and image, roughly, with sound waves. They would expect him to react now, having announced their presence.
He began by assuming a long, flat glide toward the Uther and selecting his translator. Remembering the object-subject-verb version of simplified Uther-human translation grammar, he composed his greeting, then shouted, “I the storm blows-here. Tired I am. Help I must buy.” There was no mote in Uther for “give” or “receive without compensation.”
Beneath where the Uther had been flying was a large, roughly rectangular area of the preserve that looked different, somehow It took him a moment to place why. Then he realized that all the pagoda trees in it, though randomly placed, were the same height, causing the fractal-like dimpling of most of the forest to abruptly change into a kind of regular shading.
As he got closer, the Uther answer arrived—triad chords coming out milliseconds later as, “No closer you come. To ground-under you descend.” Ground-under meant “under the pagoda tree canopy,” as opposed to resting simply on anything attached to the ground, but Greg decided to misunderstand somewhat. The tree would be more comfortable.
Taranis poked out under the storm sky, painting the forest below gold. The sunlight glinted off the spearheads carried by the Uther as they flew in a slanted line toward him. He spotted a largish pagoda tree in the area below and banked toward it, losing altitude and turning away from the anomalous area, but continued in a spiral that brought it in view again.
From this lower angle he could see the trees were like nothing he’d ever seen on Epona—beneath their umbrella shaped canopies they were huge fat wedges, almost like Uther rocket shuttles, though twice the size of the usual. Nonsense, he thought. The area was about, what, fifteen trees wide, and over four times as long? There would have to be a thousand of the things.
He flared a few meters above the treetops and looked for his target, headed directly towards it and picked up a little speed. Then with a quick turn up, and a wing beat down with the last of his strength and power, he popped up over the broad drooping-ring leaf and stalled, dropping softly onto its trampoline-like skin. He lay there, wings askew, too tired to lift his pain-deadened arms. He had been aloft two and a half hours. Marathon fliers could do about four, but they trained for it.
Exhausted as he was, he couldn’t help but be impressed by the incredible beauty of the burgeoning sunset and the lush Eponan forest. There was a curious kind of exhilaration in his limb-deadened numbness, and a luxury of warmness after being so cold. Alien scents that reminded him somewhat of ginger and warm chocolate tickled his nose.
An entirely incongruous place to hide an armada of a thousand spacecraft. But that’s what they had to be, he realized. It all made sense now. D-flat Seege had an ace up his sleeve—one that leapfrogged human intelligence estimates. Their plan was not to demand the starbase—they meant to physically seize it with surprise and overwhelming numbers. The rockets were mixed in with some real pagoda trees, and the canopies were probably made of real pagoda tree canopy material. For that matter, the rocket hulls were probably composite organic and silica—there wouldn’t be enough metal in them to interest a sensor. From orbit, or the air, they’d be taken for odd pagoda trees—hell, he’d been almost on top of them and taken them for that.
They would be easy to blow out of the sky with any kind of advanced weapon, but the human contact mission had studiously avoided making weapons. The starbase mass beam itself would be a terrific weapon, but its real-time steering capability was in microradians—to turn it around would require turning the whole asteroid to which it was anchored. No, the base couldn’t be defended in a surprise attack—at best, the human crew might do some minor damage and escape; but if Knute got sufficient warning, it would be a different story. Replicators could make things quickly.