Gambiel unslung them, laid two on the ground, and spread one in his flat hands.
“This is an adjustable five-point harness. Over the shoulders, around the waist, between the legs. The takeup reel with motor winder clips on here.” He thunked himself in the chest, just below the sternum. “The hand unit—” He picked up a gun-shaped object, “—launches the grapple with a gas charge that vents backward to stabilize your reaction. That’s because this rig was designed for freefall, remember.”
Cuiller picked up the grapple. It had a point and three spring-loaded tines—all sharpened. “We’d use a thing like this around vacuum gear?”
“The original head has a suction pad and magnets. This is a terrestrial modification.”
“Right.”
“What about drag from the trailing line?” Krater asked.
“For one thing, it’s all monofilament. Weighs about three grams to the kilometer. But you got to watch out—put it under tension and it’ll take your fingers off. Handle the line only with the winder, or with steel-mesh gloves.
“The other thing is, the line goes with the grapple, paying out from a cassette.” Gambiel showed them, taking one from his pocket. He fitted and locked the spindle-shaped cassette into the base of the grapple, drew out a meter or so of the nearly invisible line from its end, and clicked the grapple into the gas gun. “Attach the free end to a spare reel on your winder.” He took that from another pocket. “Fire the gun—” He pantomimed shooting up into the trees. “—and when the hooks are anchored, jerk it once to set a friction brake on the cassette. Then reel in and up you go.”
“What happens when all your line is wound in on the takeup reel?” Cuiller asked.
“You retrieve the grapple, discard both the old reel and cassette, fit new ones, take aim and fire again.” Gambiel shrugged.
“How much line in one setup?”
“Ten kilometers.”
“Okay. Simple enough. Let’s get into those harnesses now.”
“Why?” Krater asked, her eyebrows coming together. “Evasive action,” Cuiller answered. “If we meet anything down on the ground here, we may not be able to outrun it. Or outfight it. Our best course might be to disappear. Up into the treetops.”
The Jinxian nodded. “When you shoot, try to put the grapple as close to a main trunk as you can. Thicker branches there—more likely to hold your weight.”
“But the canopy held our whole ship pretty well,” Krater observed. “For a while.”
“True,” Gambiel said. “So, suit yourself.”
Cuiller stepped into the harness, found the adjustment points, and pulled them snug. He fitted the winder motor to his chest, figured out the simple lever controls for its reversible gearing, and clipped the first empty reel onto it. He put a cassette in the grapple, fed out a meter of the silk-like line, and found a loop at the harness belt’s left side to hold the grapple. The gun fitted into a flat holster on the right. The three of them divided up their supply of gas cartridges, cassettes, and reels.
“What happens when these run out?” Krater demanded, counting her share with her fingers.
“We won’t be here that long,” the commander said. He looked to Gambiel. “We still walking that way?” Cuiller pointed the direction, angling his hand around one side of the pentangle of underbrush.
The Jinxian paused, considered some inner sense, and nodded.
They walked along, deviating from a straight line only to pass around any trunks in their way.
“Whoop!” Krater shouted.
She suddenly floated away from Gambiel’s other side. Cuiller caught a glance of her white jumper flashing past and in front of them as she soared into the trees. She covered the ninety vertical meters in about twenty seconds, moving so quickly that at the end of her arc Krater barely had time to cock her feet up to reach for a toehold. The lieutenant disappeared into the canopy with the barest rustle of leaves.
“Serve her right if she cracks her head on a branch,” Gambiel said. “Should we follow her up?”
The commander pointed ahead. “Our goal is over that way. We’ll reach it faster walking on the ground.”
“We might lose her.”
“We’ve got visibility of what—?” He looked around. “A hundred meters down here? And less than ten meters up there in the leaves. If she gets lost, she can always drop down and we’ll spot her.”
“If we’re looking in the right direction.”
“She’ll probably scream or something,” Cuiller said.
“Yeah, she probably will.”
The two men walked on through the trees.
The sound came from Navigator’s panel. It was a strange burring—full of enough sonics to make a kzin’s neck ruff stand out from his chin. Nyawk-Captain searched his memory for a sound like it and finally decided it was not part of normal ship’s operation. Perhaps a malfunction? A small, 1st motor vibrating out of its bearings? But coming from inside the solid-state circuitry of the panel…? Then a wrinkle of memory surfaced, a significant detail from his early simulator drills with the Vengeance-class interceptor.
“You have a return from the hardsight,” he snarled over his shoulder.
“Wh-what-sir?”
“Wake up, root breath! Your station is active—and signaling you.”
“Ah, yes, Nyawk-Captain. I see that now. Sorry, sir.”
“Vigilance, Navigator. Now, describe the sighting.”
“It is still several light-hours distant…”
“Wake up, damn you! Give me facts in the order I need to know them. Is the anomaly along our prescribed course? Or somewhere off in the starfields?”
“The sighting’s deviation is… fourteen degrees from our projected—”
“So we would not otherwise have walked across it. Describe the contact.”
“Contact?”
Navigator’s surprise was genuine, because kzinti battle referents were precise. Passive objects might be “sighted.” Enemy vessels were a “contact.”
“What does your training say?” Nyawk-Captain replied. “This ship was designed to cruise with its hardsight range detector automatically probing along our forward path. Why else—if not to detect the Leaf Eaters’ improbable hulls?”
“To seek out Thrintun boxes?” Navigator replied brightly.
“Fool!” Nyawk-Captain spat.
“A witticism, sir! I abase myself.”
“For a Navigator who sleeps at station, you should have no comedy available to your mouth.”
“I humbly abase myself.”
“Describe the contact.”
“The hardsight return is in close proximity to a star, but not within its photosphere. So the contact is either in orbit itself or lodged on a planet—although the surrounding return is too weak to show such a body. There is one object… No, correction. At extreme gain I observe two contacts. One is sharp. The other is fainter and… fuzzy. It may be merely a reflection of the first. It certainly is close enough for that.”
“What are the dimensions?”
“At this range, Nyawk-Captain…”
“Is either one big enough to be a hull?”
“One of the reflections may be, but the distance…”
“Very well. Bend your fullest attention to refining your observations.”
“Shall we alter course? If we could draw nearer—”
“I will decide, when you give me further useful information.”
“As we move to pass that system, it’s possible that the two signals might show some degree of separation. From that we may learn—”
“Provide me with facts, Navigator.”
“Such is my only objective, Nyawk-Captain.”
“Very good. Be vigilant—and wakeful!”
Sally Krater hitched her feet up, pivoting about the liftpoint at her solar plexus, where the takeup reel whined and throbbed, After the soles of her moccasins broke through the leaf veils of the lower canopy, she slipped the clutch on the winding mechanism. The pull against her chest halted abruptly, but her mass continued to rise in a flattened arc. With Beanstalk’s reduced gravity, she slowly topped out, pitched forward to the length of her remaining line, and fell gently back through the leaves, swinging on the grapple anchored above her.