Something was pressed against the bark a few degrees to Lacaille's left and slightly above him. I doubted that he could see the thing from his angle. It eased toward him.
"Freeze, Lacaille!" I shouted.
"What?" he said. "What?" His voice rose an octave on the second syllable. He didn't move, though.
The thing was a dull golden color with blotches of brown. It could almost have been a trickle of sap like the one Lacaille had noticed, thirty million years short of hardening to amber.
Almost. It had been creeping sideways across the bark's corrugations. The creature stopped when Lacaille obeyed my order to freeze.
I drew the grapnel from my belt, then paid the line out in four one-meter loops.
"What's happening, Moore?" Lacaille said. He had his voice under control. He was trying to look down at me without moving anything but his eyes.
"Not yet," I whispered. Lacaille couldn't hear me. I was speaking to calm myself.
I lofted the grapnel with an underhand toss. It sailed as intended through empty air past the creature.
The thing struck like a trap snapping. Its head clanged against the grapnel's slowly rotating hooks and flung them outward-with the creature attached.
"Watch out below!" I screamed. The snakelike thing streamed past me, dragged by the weight of steel where it had expected flesh. I let go of the line.
The creature was a good ten meters long, but nowhere thicker than my calf. Tiny hooked legs, hundreds of them, waggled from its underside.
I heard the ensemble crash into the ground. A cutting bar whined. The blades whanged momentarily on metal, probably the grapnel's shaft.
"What was it?" Lacaille demanded. "Can I move now? What was it?"
"It was a snake," I said. "I think it was a snake."
I wiped my eyes again. "Stephen?" I called. "Tell them to hitch the hawser to Lacaille's line where it is, will you? We've gone as high in this tree as I want to go."
"Roger," Stephen said, his voice attenuated by distance and the way the foliage absorbed sound.
I looked at Lacaille. "Yeah, it's all right now," I said. "I hope to God it's all right."
I stepped away from the 2-cm hawser so that Dole and his crew could begin lifting the camouflage net. Lacaille knelt beside the creature a few meters out from the cone of roots. The snake had slid the last stage of its trip to Stephen's cutting bar.
Stephen looked from the creature to me. "Don't touch the damned thing unless you want to get clawed by those feet," he said. "I think it's dead, but it has a difference of opinion."
I squatted beside Lacaille. The creature's skull was almost a meter long. Stephen had cut it crosswise, then severed the back half from the long body-which was still twitching, as Stephen had implied.
"I should've taken a bar with me," I said. "I was crazy not to."
"This worked pretty well," Stephen said. "I don't see how you could improve on the results."
He tilted up the front of the creature's skull on his bar. A bony tongue protruded a handbreadth from the circular mouth. The tongue's tip had broken off on the grapnel. The sides of the hollow shaft were barbed and slotted. The tongue was designed to rip deep through the flesh of the creatures it struck, then to suck them dry.
"Wonder if it injects digestive fluids?" Stephen mused aloud.
Lacaille stood, then doubled up and began to vomit.
"Get him back to the ship," Stephen suggested quietly. "Guillermo can find some slash if you can't."
"I can find something," I said. "Come on, Lacaille. I need a drink, and out here is no damned place for anybody who feels as queasy as I do right now."
"I'm all right," Lacaille muttered as he cautiously straightened. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand before he turned to face me.
"Any one you walk away from, hey?" he said with an embarrassed smile. "I suppose I can walk."
He could. We could. Dole's men were raising one end of the net by the hawser Lacaille and I had drawn into the branches on Lacaille's grapnel line. We'd wired a pulley to the limb as well. It wasn't strictly necessary, but it made the lift a lot easier for the men below.
I was only half kidding about needing a drink. Since the snake stalked us, I'd trembled while we continued to work high in the tree. Seeing the creature close up made the fear worse.
We stepped over the rolled net. The bosun was arguing precedence with Salomon, whose men were laying hoses to the river. Both men paused and nodded to us. Piet, examining the tree that would anchor the other end of the camouflage, waved cheerfully.
"You saved my life," Lacaille said in a low voice.
"That fellow might have decided I looked juicier," I said. "He wasn't anybody's friend."
We had to pick our way carefully across the burned patch surrounding the Oriflamme. Dense roots withstood the gush of plasma and lurked within the ash, ready to turn an ankle or worse.
"Look," Lacaille said. He stopped and waited for me to meet his eyes. "I won't fight my own people."
"Nobody asked you to," I said. "Christ's blood, d'ye think we can't do our own fighting?"
Lacaille grimaced and shook his head in frustration. "Look," he said. "McMaster? You should have left him where he was."
"You're not the first to think that," I said slowly. I glanced around. I didn't know where McMaster was. I couldn't find him outside nor among the party shifting gear in the hold ten meters from where Lacaille and I stood. "Piet's. . soft-hearted, though."
"Tonight," Lacaille said. "When shortwave propagation's good, McMaster's going to signal the North Island base on the backup commo suite aft."
Salomon's men joined Dole's on the 2-cm hawser. It would be easier to slide the hoses under the hem of the camouflage net than to lift the roll, so the teams were combining to do the jobs in sequence.
"He told you?" I asked without emphasis.
"McMaster brags about things that nobody would admit!" Lacaille said. "Not just this, terrible things! He's a terrible man."
Piet walked toward us, probably wondering what we were discussing.
"Yeah, I can believe that," I said. It wasn't surprising that a man who'd been swimming for years in the filthy slough of President Pleyal's colonies would be unable to recognize that Lacaille might have feelings of gratitude toward those who'd saved his life. Far more surprising that Lacaille's personal decency had survived.
"Ah. ." I added. "Don't say anything to Piet, though. All right?"
Lacaille nodded in relief. "You'll tell Mister Gregg?" he asked.
"Stephen's got enough on his conscience as it is," I said, putting on a bright smile to greet Piet. "I'll see that this one's handled."
We sat at trestle tables sawn from the local wood with cutting bars. The boards' surface was just as rough as you'd imagine. The afternoon's downpour had driven the ash into the clay substrate in a butter-slick amalgam. We'd spread cover sheets over us, but the rare chinks of evening sky we could see were clear.
"You know. ." said Dole with a mouth full of tree-hopper, maybe one of the trio that'd startled me. It had peeked down at the commotion, this time where Stephen could see it. "That fellow out in the lake might not have steaked out so bad."
"Not for me, thanks," I said, thinking about the monster's teeth. At the other table they were eating a ragout of the local "snake." I didn't even look in that direction.
"Precooked, even," Piet said with a grin. He looked as relaxed as I'd seen him in a long while. We'd have known by now if a Fed on Clapperton's far side had chanced to notice us sliding into the forest. "Well, we had other things on our mind."
Winger, the chief motor mechanic, said, "I don't like the way the main engine nozzles are getting, sir. We've switched out the spares aboard, and they're getting pretty worn themself."