The Privateer 2: AN HONEST LIVING Page 6

  The cart was carefully designed to permit disassembly and storage inside the flitter. Tess had also designed-in a hidden compartment, that would contain the off-world artifacts Cale had requested, and Tess's own addition: a first-aid kit.

  Their collection completed and agreed upon, Cale and Dee practiced assembling the cart twice before Tess pronounced herself satisfied, and the vehicle was moved to the flitter.

  It was tricky fitting the big wheels through the flitter's hatch, but they finally did it. With the cart and their trade goods stowed aboard, the humans were barely able to clamber into the remaining two seats for their flight to North continent. Still, Tess found room for one of her smaller "hands" to accompany them. It would guard the flitter while they were gone, and provide Tess with some ability to help, if necessary.

  They had decided to approach Nirvana from the direction of the Giant Forest, a dense stand of huge trees hundreds of meters tall, that stretched for thousands of kiloms and formed a natural barrier to the east of the old city. In the old days, the Giant Forest had been a favorite of hunters pursuing game carefully bioengineered to be dangerous. 500 years later, the former prey had become the masters of the forest, and few humans dared brave its dangers.

  Cale, Dee and Tess decided that a noisy fireball above the Giant Forest was unlikely to be witnessed from close range; any human luckless enough to be close enough to spot the flitter was certain to be much more interested in the activities of the predators stalking him. Of course, if the plan didn't work and they crashed, they would be the preoccupied ones!

  Despite Tess's confidence, Cale and Dee knew that the maneuver she planned was incredibly dangerous. Tess knew it too: a 70% confidence expressed by a pilot whose ship had literally been her body for over 400 years was hardly reassuring.

  They had discussed simply landing on the far side of the Forest and launching the flitter, but the far side was nomad country, and several tribes were active in the area.

  "Well," Cale said, "I bet we'll give their priests and witch doctors some powerful heavenly signs to interpret!"

  "Fine, as long as they don't interpret them to mean, 'kill the spacers'," Dee replied

  ******

  Dee's hand crept itself into Cale's. Sitting in a flitter staring at a piece of hull that soon would be open to the sky was unnerving. Time dragged as Tess took Cheetah suborbital to cross Jumbo's ocean, and then descended to a mere 1000 meters as they approached North continent. The huge trees of the Giant forest swayed in her wake and trembled with the impact until she could slow to subsonic speeds. But none of that disturbance penetrated to the cargo hold, where Cale and Dee sat in nervous silence.

  With great relief, they heard Tess's voice over the transceivers attached to their heads over the mastoid bone. The tiny transceivers were nearly invisible, and permitted two-way conversation up to several miles away.

  "Get ready," she said. "I have reversed, and nearly shed sufficient velocity. As soon as I assume a vertical attitude, I will open the hatch; but I won't eject you until I am virtually hovering. Timing will be critical. Hovering is not normally a feature of starships, and I will be seriously shaving safety margins. So, I may not be able to warn you before ejection.

  "Commencing rotation now!" Tess said, and the hatch slid quickly open, leaving Cale and Dee staring at cloud-strewn sky. A moment later, there was a click as the magnetic grapples released, and then the partial vacuum sucked their flitter into space, spinning end over end in the turbulent air before falling toward Jumbo.

  Cale wrestled with the flitter's rudimentary steering and repeller controls. After a few frantic seconds, the little vehicle straightened, but it took several long minutes before Cale could turn their fall into a glide. The flitter's repellers were only effective to 450 meters, (500 on Jumbo), so Cale's efforts were concentrated on maintaining a smooth glide down to the level at which its repellers would become effective and it could fly. When the glide finally leveled and the repeller gauges began to register, Cale breathed a huge sigh of relief, prompting Dee to release her own pent-up breath.

  Cale turned to her with grin composed of equal parts excitement and relief. "What a ride!" he exclaimed. Dee simply rolled her eyes, shook her head, and tried to stop trembling.

  Cale turned the flitter west, toward the ruins of Nirvana. Tess confirmed they were just over 1300 kiloms east of the old city, some twelve hours' flight time for the flitter.

  Mindful of the dangers of the forest below, Cale planned to hide the flitter less than a kilom from a human habitation. He was well aware that moving the loaded cart through the undergrowth would be no easy feat, especially since they would have to be on constant guard against predatory animals and even dangerous plants. He turned his attention to finding a break in the sea of green that made up the canopy of the giant trees below.

  Two hours later, they had still not located a break in the green monotony that was the canopy of the forest giants. Cale called Tess.

  "My high-def cameras do not show fine enough detail to locate a flitter-sized opening," she said. "But my sensors show a river about two miles south of your present position. If you follow it, the chances approach certainty that such an opening will be located before you reach Nirvana."

  "It had better," Cale muttered under his breath. He swung the flitter to the left, hoping they would be able to spot the course of the river.

  In the event, it was dead simple. The river's course was revealed by a "seam" in the unbroken carpet of the canopy. In less than an hour, they located an opening large enough to admit the flitter, and they dropped into the pervasive dimness of the forest itself.

  It was like dropping into another world. The bright sunlight above was instantly replaced by a gloomy dimness. Their eyes took a few seconds to adjust, but finally the filtered sunlight lost some of its gloominess, became less threatening. But the change was still shocking. Before, they had been in clear blue sunlit skies above a carpet of endless green; now massive tree trunks surrounded them on nearly all sides.

  Cale set the flitter to hover while they absorbed the changes in their surroundings.

  There was plenty of undergrowth, but this was a temperate climate; it did not approach the density of a jungle. The tangled growth stretched only about three meters from the ground, though thick vines climbed high on the massive trunks of the forest giants. Many of the plants displayed very large leaves, to capture every bit of the filtered sunlight. Clearings and game trails were abundant. Zant had added a sensor suite to the flitter's nose on Santiago, and it had leapt to life, showing heat signatures of dozens of creatures in the immediate area. Some were running away, disturbed by even the nearly silent flitter. Others were still, apparently sleeping nocturnals. Others ignored the flitter and simply carried on with the day's routine of life and death.

  The river flowed lazily through the underbrush, its surface dotted with floating leaves and sticks. Like everything else on low-gravity Jumbo, the river was large, over a hundred meters wide here, forming an aerial highway for the flitter.

  "We can't afford to be seen," Cale told Dee. "I'm going to fly as high as possible without losing the sensor data, and slow enough to keep from overrunning the sensors. That should give us maximum sensor coverage. Your job is to monitor the sensors. There aren't many man-sized creatures here, and we're not going to take any chances; we're going to avoid them all. If we're lucky, we'll be able to follow the river almost to a town."

  "Then what?" Dee asked. "Forest towns will mean lots of hunters, skilled at reading tracks, and it's not going to be easy to get that cart assembled and pull it to the nearest road. We're going to leave lots of tracks. How do we prevent some smart boy from tracking us back to the flitter?"

  Cale shook his head. "I've been worrying about that, too. How about this: We circle around any villages, and keep heading toward Nirvana. The closer we get, the more settled it should become. When we're getting near the edge of the forest, we locate the road or trail they're using, and try to sneak
in close to the road. Hunters don't hunt near populated areas, they get out into the wilderness. We park the flitter 15 meters or so off the road in a patch of heavy underbrush. I doubt there will be much traffic on the road. We'll monitor it, of course, and make sure we're not seen. We assemble the cart, pull it over to the road, and approach the village from the city side. That will even help with our trader image. And since the flitter will be near the road, we should have less trouble sneaking back to it."

  The first sign of human habitation they spotted was apparently a hunting camp; a single shabby wood hut. There was no smoke coming from the chimney, and they did not get close enough for the sensors to register life signs. Cale swung wide around it, moving dead slow while Dee and Tess's 'bot scanned the sensor screens.

  Cale tried moving parallel to the river but 100 meters to one side, picking a gingerly way between the massive tree trunks, But the life sign readings became too numerous to examine in detail; so he was forced to again follow the river's course.

  Finally, of course, the moment came. "The sensors are reading wood smoke," Tess reported through her 'bot. "I recommend a detour of at least a kilom."

  "So do I," Cale muttered under his breath. He was getting concerned. It was late afternoon by now, and he was worried about spending the night in the endless forest.

  He wasn't alone in his concern. "Tess," Dee asked as the flitter swung away from the river again, "Where are we? How far from the ruins?"

  "You are about thirty kiloms from the edge of the forest," Tess replied. "But I have no way of knowing the number or locations of any settlements. My sensors cannot penetrate the forest canopy. It will begin getting dark in about an hour. I recommend you circle around this village and back to the river, and then begin looking for somewhere to spend the night. I'm sorry. I know it will be uncomfortable."

  "That's a monumental understatement. Flitters are made for taking commuters to work, not for camping. We'll probably have to take out those wheels, at least, just so we can fit. But it's still going to be damned uncomfortable."

  "At least you will not have to stand guard," Tess replied. "My 'bot will stay on the roof of the flitter to frighten away any predators."

  Dee shuddered. "Let's hope they frighten easily!"

  Cale grinned. "I'm not worried. We still have our laser and blaster."

  Dee's expression turned to exasperation. "Yes, but a pitched battle only half a mile from a village is bound to attract attention."

  Cale frowned. "True. So our choices are a loud hooting or a blaster discharge. Not good."

  "Perhaps not," Tess replied. "I have read that humans are sensitive to subsonic vibrations. Perhaps animals will also respond to them. Once you ground, we may have an opportunity to try it. My 'bot is capable of generating sounds from subsonic to supersonic."

  Cale's frown remained. "I guess that's all we can do. We'll just have to be lucky."

  It was uncomfortable. The pervasive gloom was already beginning to deepen by the time Cale found a small clearing and landed the flitter. They struggled to remove the big, heavy wheels to provide room for the humans to curl up and try to sleep.

  'Try' was the appropriate word. Besides the contorted positions imposed by the crowded flitter, the forest was far from silent. There was a constant litany of cries, whistles, roars and screams audible even through the flitter's canopy. Neither Cale nor Dee got more than an hour or two of sleep.

  Ironically, the night had the side benefit of improving their disguises. By morning, both were wearing creased, wrinkled, dirty clothing. Cale's depilatory was still effective, so he wasn't showing beard, but his hair was rumpled.

  Dee exclaimed in horror when she saw her reflection in a puddle, but Cale convinced her that her disheveled hair was in character, and would help keep people from noticing its cleanliness. She contented herself with running her fingers through it, with no noticeable effect.

  By the time they got the big, heavy wheels back into the flitter, they were also dirty. Tess complimented them on their resemblance to the passersby in Valhalla, garnering surly, ungracious replies from both humans.

  An angry, icy silence reigned in the flitter until Dee again detected human habitation, and Cale began his circuitous detour.

  "You are only about a kilom from the edge of the forest," Tess reported. "This may be the village you wish to visit."

  Dee nodded. "We're having to detour more widely this time," she said. "That means it's probably a larger village than those we've been seeing."

  Cale almost failed to detect the road in time, and barely avoided flying into it.

  It wasn't much of a road; more of a two-wheeled cart track, framed by deep, narrow ruts, with a surface of trodden-down vegetation. But for the Giant Forest on Jumbo, it was a superhighway.

  Flying slowly only a few feet above the undergrowth, Cale searched for the clearing they needed. After ten minutes, he found it.

  The clearing was small, only slightly larger than the flitter. Most importantly, the side facing the road featured a large tangle of undergrowth, rising almost four meters from the ground.

  While the 'bot manned the sensors for signs of approaching humans, Cale and Dee emptied the flitter. Then the 'bot drove the flitter straight into the tangle of underbrush, causing an explosion of fleeing small animals. The 'bot would remain in the locked flitter, guarding it. Tess claimed the 'bot would be able to chase away any curious humans with its subsonics.

  Cale looked longingly at the rear of the flitter, wishing he could have kept the laser and blaster. But he knew that would not have been wise. After a moment, he sighed and began rearranging the disturbed brush to conceal the flitter.

  It took them over an hour to assemble the cart, and another hour to load it. But finally they were able to push, pull, and curse the cart to the road. Once there, they paused long enough to cover the signs of their off-road travel.

  Not only was the road crude, it was also not heavily travelled; During the almost three hours they had been working, there had been no travelers on the road. In fact, some of the vegetation in the center of the road was beginning to straighten.

  Chapter 4

  They had decided to return to the village they had just avoided; it would give them a chance to try out their personas in an isolated location with fewer onlookers. It would also let them find out if their flitter had been seen. For a moment, they were unsure which direction to take, but Tess was able to set them on the correct path.

  The village consisted of a gaggle of log huts centered around a trampled-down clearing. There were no large fields, but most of the fifty or so huts had a small garden. Nearly all of them, though, featured large frames near the front door opening, on which animal skins were stretched and drying.

  There seemed to be a fair amount of activity in the village, but most of it stopped as they emerged from the forest. After a moment, most of the twenty-odd people visible went back to their activities, but a large, heavily bearded man approached them.

  The man wore a fur vest over leather trousers. His feet were adorned in laced-up, soft leather boots, without visible soles. His graying black hair was long and matted, gathered and tied at the back. He was over two meters tall, barrel-chested and hairy.

  He approached with a friendly grin. "Get lost traders? Take a wrong turn?"

  Cale answered the man's grin with one of his own. "Aye, we did. In which direction is the ruins?"

  The man laughed aloud. "Ha! You'll be lookin' for Ham's Town, right? Market day's tomorrow."

  Cale nodded. "Yah. Ham's Town. Can we make it back there today?"

  The big man's head bobbed. "Oh, easily. 'Tis only three kiloms down th' road, just over the bridge. I'm surprised y'could get lost between here and there." The man's manner was bluff and hearty, but his eyes revealed a shrewd intelligence.

  "Actually," Cale said in a rueful tone, "we've been lost in the forest for three days. I can't tell you how glad I was to stumble across the road this morning."

  Th
e man's eyes narrowed slightly. "Three days? You've been workin' a cart through the forest for three days?"

  Cale nodded wearily. "Aye, and it wasn’t easy. But all we own is on that cart, includin' our emergency supplies."

  The man looked doubtful. "Still . . . " he began.

  "We still might have left it," Cale added hastily, "but a few weeks ago we stumbled on some ruins that had never been looted. We've made our fortunes if we can get our findings to a large trading center." He mentally kicked himself. He had just told this man that no one knew where they were, and that their cart was laden with rich booty. If the man were anything but perfectly honest, it would be very tempting to make the 'traders' disappear, and to take their loot to Ham's Town himself. And the laser and blaster were in the flitter.

  Cale looked around pointedly. "Will you be taking trade goods to Ham's Town tomorrow?" he asked.

  The man laughed heartily. "Oh, aye. We've a great lot of furs to trade."

  Cale smiled craftily. "Well, can we see them?"

  The woodsman's lips spread in a gap-toothed grin. "Oh, aye. I s'pose you have some things to trade, as well."

  Cale shrugged, smile firmly in place. "I'm a trader." He said simply.

  The man barked a laugh. "Come on, then. I'll show ye my own catch." He led them to one of the larger huts. Naked, dirty children scattered as the adults approached, only to stop a few feet away and stare solemnly at the strangers.

  The woodsman led them to a roofed, unwalled shelter under which an animal ate contentedly at a pile of vegetation. On a makeshift table nearby was a large, irregular bundle. The man untied a leather thong, and revealed a pile of animal skins. Cale picked up the top one. The hide was very large, almost three and a half meters long. It was soft and supple, and had a soft, lustrous, multicolored fur some four cems long. Dee stepped forward and brushed a hand across it. Her eyes lit. Cale turned the skin over. It was soft and supple, but he realized he knew nothing about how to judge the quality of furs. "Smell it," came Tess's voice through his mastoid implant. "It should not smell sour or spoilt."