Icerigger - Mission To Moulokin Part 10

A harsh, husky screech sounded just to port. Ethan looked in that direction in time to see a pair of startled guttorbyn-winged, dragonlike predators-take to the air. For several minutes they paralleled the ship, hiss-ing and screaming imprecations at the crew, before veering off southeast. A flock would have attacked.

There being only two, and two surprised ones at that, they chose retreat over challenge.

The furry b.u.t.terflythings were abundant in the high vegetation, and once Ethan thought he spied something long and luminous, like a writhing sunbeam, slithering away from the ship's path with incredible speed. In-stead of screaming, it sang weird flute notes back at him as it vanished into the dense evergrowth, and Ethan never knew it was not the creature itself he had seen but its radiant shadow.

Below the tops of the pikapedan, the wind pene-trated fitfully. It was unusually quiet on board, not only from the absence of the familiar gale, but because each crewmember was attending to private thoughts as well as cooperative sailing. Ethan knew the Tran did not enter and explore the rolling forests of pikapedan. They did not do so because of its usual impenetrability, and because of herds of a certain creature which fed within.

Yet this time the Tran had an advantage. The masts of the _Slanderscree_ towered above the crowns of the forest. So did the spines of the animals they feared. From the several lookout baskets, those heaving backs could be spotted in time to give the ship a chance to escape.

Perhaps the lookouts were too intent on sighting that particular danger. Perhaps they might not have been able to spot the trouble anyway.

Suddenly the ship lost forward momentum with a violent shudder. Ethan and everyone else not holding on to something was thrown to the deck. Even as his bulging form was rolling around behind the wheel, Tahoding was shouting commands.

Accustomed to sudden, unpredictable gusts of wind, the sailors in the rigging had actually fared better than those on deck. None had fallen, though for several minutes a couple of those in the highest spars hung from a paw or two before regaining their footing.

Tilted twenty degrees to port, bow dipping drunkenly iceward, the _Slanderscree_ continued to lurch awk-wardly forward.

Back on his feet, Tahoding braced chiv against ice and bellowed orders toward the deck. The stern ice anchors were released. They immediately gouged a pur-chase in the ice and pikapedan stumps astern. Several seconds of screeching, teeth-sc.r.a.ping progress slowed the out-of-control icerigger to a crawl. She came to a full stop when the last sail was finally taken in.

Ethan, September, Hunnar, Elfa and Tahoding went over the side, made their way down a pikapina ladder. Detailed inspection wasn't necessary. Something had knocked the port bow runner badly askew.

It hadn't been torn completely away, but the duralloy rods which braced it to the ship's hull had nearly been wrenched from their moorings. Plates and bolts were missing, and the wood they'd ripped free of was torn and full of gaping holes.

While Tahoding began to direct repairs, Ethan and the others retraced the path of the _Slanderscree_.

They followed the path cut by the disabled runner, forced to walk single-file between walls of four-meter-high pikapedan stumps, constantly slipping and sliding over gelatinous globules of rapidly freezing watery sap.

They traveled less than a couple of hundred meters before coming on the cause of the crash. Small rocky spires, showing the mark of the broken runner on them, protruded from the ice. It wasn't any wonder the look-outs hadn't spotted them, buried as they were in thick vegetation. They were barely two meters high, too low to rip into the hull of the ship, but high and solid enough to wreck the impinging runner. Only good luck had saved the other runners a similar fate.

Hunnar bent, indicated a whitish groove in one frozen ma.s.s of granite. "See? 'twas here the ship struck. We were fortunate the islet was no larger than this."

"Islet!" September grunted. "Why, we're standin' atop a mountain, friend Hunnar. These spires go down to the bottom of this frozen ocean we're sailing across."

"We can't be sure of that, Skua." Ethan struggled to visualize, say, six or seven thousand meters of ma.s.s below their feet. "These could just be very large boul-ders frozen in the ice, deposited by glacial or ice action. Or maybe the ocean here is only a few meters deep. We might be traveling across a shallow sea covering an old desert. These could be rocks on a plain."

September looked disappointed. "Mountaintop's better. You sure can take all the romance out of speculatin', young feller-me-lad."

Ethan gave September a look which clearly said, believe what you want. He turned to go back to the ship, and fell flat on his face after taking only a few steps.

No one found it funny. For so short a journey, nei-ther human had bothered donning his skates, but that wasn't what had caused Ethan to fall.

Three? no, four, tiny cream-white tendrils had erupted from the ice and locked around his right an-kle. Now they were stretched taut, pulling him down-ward. Ice began to crack in sheets around his p.r.o.ne form. Ethan fought for a grip on the slick surface. His hips were already vanishing beneath the surface when he managed to lock both arms around a pikapedan stump. It broke off in his arms like rotten punk.

By then Hunnar and September had come up alongside him. Hunnar drew his sword, but Septem-ber waved him away.

"For G.o.d's sake, Skua, hurry up!" Perversely, Ethan clung to his fragment of pikapedan, though it was no better anch.o.r.ed than he.

September, sighting carefully on a point just behind and slightly to Ethan's left, depressed the stud of his beamer. There was the snaketalk sound of steam boiling away. It was followed, joined by a stench as of rotting pork. The tendrils wrapped around Ethan's leg did not let go, but the pulling stopped.

Meantime, Hunnar had moved around to grab Ethan's wrists. Digging his chiv sideways into the ice and using the stubby braking claw in his heel, he started to move slowly backward. Ethan came free of the hole in the ice. Attached by its tendrils to his leg, the almost-victor came out after him. It had a smoking gash in its side.

Others had heard the cries and the hiss and light of the beamer. A small mob of concerned Tran was bear-ing down on the three from the ship. EerMeesach, helped along by Williams, was among them.

Ethan, panting heavily inside his suit mask, turned on his back, sat up, and gazed in disgust and fear at the creature attached to his ankle. "What is it?"

Hunnar had his knife out and was slicing through the clinging tendrils. Ethan let out a relieved sigh when he saw that the powerful grip hadn't torn his survival suit.

Pale white with gray blotches and spots, the thing was three meters long, not counting the tendrils. It showed four wide, plate-sized eyes, two atop the dor-sal side and two on the ventral. The four tendrils were s.p.a.ced evenly around the blunt end of the head. Be-tween them, slack and open, was a circular mouth lined with triangular serrated teeth. The jaws were protruding outside the lips, showing wet and shocking pink against the whiteness of the epidermis. Ethan considered what those teeth would have done to his leg had he slid just a little farther beneath the surface.

"Tis a kossief," Hunnar replied thoughtfully, study-ing the ghostly corpse. This translated very crudely to Terranglo in Ethan's mind as an ice worm.

"They burrow just beneath the surface and wait for some unfortunate creature to stumble across their por-tion of ice, which they hollow out until only a thin layer remains above them." The knight kicked at the rubbery body. "They strike upward, break through the thin ice and drag their prey down into their bur-rows. Then they exude water through this," he indi-cated a protruding organ near the creature's rear, "and reform the ice sh.e.l.l over them."

Ethan studied the toothed worm with distaste as he ma.s.saged his leg where the beast had grabbed him. "I can see how they can cut their way through the ice, with those teeth."

"Neatly, too," said an admiring September. He was standing in the bowlike hollow that had been the creature's home. His head was just barely even with the surface.

"Are there others that live beneath the surface of the ice?" Williams was examining the dead worm with as much interest as Ethan had shown disgust.

"Many and various, my friend," discoursed EerMeesach. "We see them little around Wannome. They are more prevalent at the other end of Sofold Isle, where the pikapina fields grow. It is interesting to learn that they flourish also here, among the _juka_."

"Can we take it back aboard?" Williams looked hopeful.

"Why of course, we must," said the Tran wizard. Ethan said nothing. He gained some measure of satisfaction in learning that he wasn't alone in his squeamish att.i.tude toward the creature. The two men of learning had a hard time cajoling a pair of sailors to carry the rubbery body back onto the ship.

September had concluded his own examination of the kossief's house. Ethan gave him a hand out and thanked him simultaneously.

"I'd feel better about acceptm' your thanks, lad, if it'd been less of a near thing. I missed my first shot.

The ice here is pretty clear, but I could see just the barest outline of a shape down there and forgot to al-low for diffraction." He glanced back at the ominous hole. "Let's get back aboard-and let's both watch our steps?"

It took four days to properly repair the huge runner. They were in a race with the cutover pikapedan, which grew in behind the icerigger to heights of six and seven meters and pressed insistently against the bottom of the raft.

Williams paced anxiously about, trying to form bo-tanical and zoological expeditions to search out the secrets of the h.o.m.ogenized forest. Even EerMeesach had sensed enough danger to veto those suggestions. No man could tell what lurked in the depths of such dense aggregations of verdure. The horrors that were known, such as the kossief, were enough to keep a prudent man aboard his ship. No need for them to hunt up new, exciting ways to die.

The disappointed schoolteacher still found enough wild life nearby to keep him occupied. Like a child playing with a new toy, he watched fascinated as another kossief living near the first took a six-legged herbivore browsing among the dried-out stalks behind the ship. Its flat crab eyes rolled in terror as dull grinding teeth snapped futilely at the leather-tough tendrils dragging it downward.

Ethan watched also, his a fascination of a different kind. The herbivore's scream was no less pitiable for its alienness. He had a chance to see what his own fate would have been had September not rescued him.

As soon as the kossief had sucked enough blood out of the hapless grazer to immobilize it, the burrower generated heat. Ice melted beneath them both, refroze above them, sculpted and filled by water from the a.n.a.l nozzle Hunnar had pointed out. Safely pro-tected from scavengers and non-burrowing predators by a meter and a half of rockhard ice, the kossief settled in to enjoy its meal.

Ethan shuddered. Not a neat way to die. He made a personal promise never to venture alone where ei-ther variety of the triangular green plant grew.

On the last day the sailors sped their repairs at the news that a lookout had heard the distant, reverberant cry of a droom. Fortunately, the monster did not come near enough to be seen and the prevailing wind was away from the direction of the cry.

Small four-legged quns the size of Ethan's hand roamed up and down nearby stalks of mature pikapedan, burrowing and eating their way in and out of the thick trunks like mice turned loose in a king-sized cheese. They began near the crest of a stalk and munched their way downward, leaving nothing to waste. They preferred damaged or sick stalks, thus helping to preserve the vitality of the forest.

Ethan's favorite was a thing EerMeesach called a meworlf. It had a sausage-shaped body from which dangled thin, jointed, two-meter-long legs. A sack ran the length of its cylindrical back. When inflated, the sack swelled to balloon size. Maneuvering on the sub-dued breeze within the pikapedan, the meworlf would drift from stalk to stalk, anchoring itself with four of its ten wiry limbs to a selected trunk and us-ing the other six to pluck away bits of plant and con-vey them to the small mouth. When finished feeding, the meworlf would remain bobbing lazily in the breeze or release its grasp and let the wind carry it through the forest, bouncing like a ball from one stalk to the next.

Fascinating as the extraordinary fauna of the pikapedan forest was to Williams, it soon began to pale for Ethan. By the fourth day, he was as ready as any of the common sailors to be moving again.

But when full sail had been put out, the worst fears of the experienced icemen were realized.

"We're not moving," Ethan observed, concerned. He turned to the captain. "What's wrong?"

"I worried much on this, friend Ethan." Tahoding's expression was glummer than usual. "We had no choice, though. The runner had to be repaired."

"Of course it did." Ethan indicated the gently bil-lowing sails low on the masts, the gustily taut ones higher up, above the roof of the forest. "You mean, we don't have the momentum necessary to get us started?"

He saw the problem now. While the _Slanderscree_ was traveling at a respectable speed, she had enough energy to plow easily through the soft pikapedan. But once stopped, with the thick green pseudo-pods prac-tically growing over the railings, she couldn't get moving.

"So what can we do about it?"

"We cannot back up," said Tahoding solemnly, gesturing behind them. "The pikapedan has grown too tall and thick behind us while we have waited here."

"What about sending out a crew with axes and swords to cut a clear path ahead of us?"

"We may have to try precisely that, friend Ethan. But I wish I could think of another way. By the time our people could cut a path wide enough for the ship, a decent distance ahead of us, the pikapedan they first felled would be growing up stiff behind them.

"However," he said, executing a Tran gesture indicative of hopelessness mixed with resignation, "I con-fess I see nothing else to be done." He waddled off to give instructions to Hunnar.

Everyone not immediately concerned with the op-eration of the icerigger was sent over the side and was soon frantically hacking away at the forest ahead of the ship with axes, kitchen cleavers, anything that would cut. The huge stalks fell easily, squirting water and sap over the frenzied group of foresters, who knew they were racing against the growing time of the stumps behind them.

Even Ethan, using his sword, could cut down a ten-meter tall column of pikapedan in ten minutes or so, though the constant swinging was wearying to muscles not used to such activity. To provide a path expansive enough for a ship the size of the _Slanderscree_, it was necessary to fell a great many pikapedan. They couldn't stop. When the pikapedan behind them reached underbelly deck level of four meters, they would have to retreat and try to break out as best they could.

As it turned out, they had to quit before they wanted to.

All eyes, on board and in the work party, went to the mainmast observation basket, whose wicker-enclosed lookout was screaming while pointing fran-tically to the east.

_"Stavanzer!"_ "How far?" roared Tahoding, cupping thick paws to his lips.

"Twenty, maybe thirty kijat," the reply came back from the lookout.

"Coming this way?"

"It is difficult to tell, Captain, at this distance."

"How many?"

"Again hard to tell. I am sure of only one." A pause, then, "Still only one."

There was no need to give the order to abandon cutting and return to the ship. At the news of a sta-vanzer in the vicinity, a retreat to the raft was a mat-ter of instinct, not debate. Everyone was chivaning or running through the maze of felled pikapedan stalks without having to be told.

"What now, Captain?" Ethan asked Tahoding when he'd made his breathless way back to the helmdeck.

EerMeesach was standing at the railing, peering forward out of old eyes. "To most it hints of death's proximity, friend Ethan. But it could also be our salvation."

"How can that be?"

"Consider if the thundereater pa.s.ses close to us, Ethan. You know how the stavanzer travels by push-ing itself across the ice. In so doing it smoothes every-thing in its path as flat as a metalworker's forge."

"I see. So we can go out the way it comes in?"

"More than that, friend Ethan." Tahoding, over-hearing, elaborated. "Once we build up enough speed traveling back down the thundereater's trail, we can then turn the ship and continue in any direction we wish."

"It is the building up of enough speed that is critical," EerMeesach finished.

"Kinetic energy," Ethan murmured, and then had to try and explain the unfamiliar-sounding Terranglo term in Trannish.

"It will be not easy." Tahoding was talking as much to himself as to his listeners. "Even if we do pa.s.s successfully into the trail, there are other dangers to be considered." Ethan didn't press him for an explanation.

"We must make a decision. We do have a choice." He gestured within an arm toward the bow, his dan momentarily billowing with wind. "We have cut a path a kijat or two ahead of us. We can reset sail and make a run at the forest wall. If that fails, we will then have no room to maneuver, and it will be most difficult to try and back up for another run. Also, I should like to keep that option open, should the thundereater swerve and bear down on us."

"Seems pretty obvious to me what we do," said a new voice. September mounted to the helmdeck.

"We wait and try to slip in behind it."

Tahoding's gaze traveled around the little knot of decision-makers. His usual jollity was absent now.

He was all business. "It's settled, then," and he moved to the railing to issue instructions.

Twenty minutes of waiting followed the final prepa-rations. All sailors were at their posts, knights and squires ready to a.s.sist when and where they could. The quns had vanished into their holes, and a last meworlf battered itself like a crazed mechanical toy against the stalks as it sought to race out of the area.

Presently, a deeper sound rose above the windchoir, a periodic breathy grumble like a KKdrive slipping past lightspeed. From his single previous en-counter, Ethan knew the noise was caused by the stavanzer's method of locomotion. Expelling air through a pair of downward-facing nozzles set in its lower back, it could also pull itself slowly forward across the ice on its lubricated belly by means of the two downthrust tucks protruding from its upper jaw- though that rubbery formation could hardly be called a jaw.

The rumble grew deeper. The _Slanderscree_ quivered steadily as the ice beneath it shook to the rhythm of a monstrous metabolism.

Ethan experienced an unlikely urge to climb into the rigging, to get above the wavering crowns of pikapedan so he could see. But he stayed where he was, out of the sailors' way.

Murmurs drifted down from those in the highest spars, their eyes focused on something unseen. Their companions hushed them. Ethan let his gaze travel forward.

At the far end of the crude pathway they'd so laboriously hacked from the rusty forest a great ma.s.s slid into view. It stood perhaps twelve meters above the ice, a black maw inhaling felled pikapedan with Jobian patience as the h.o.r.n.y lower lip/jaw sliced off the nutrient-rich stalks flush with the ice.

Once, the upper jaw lifted and the huge tusks came slamming down into the ice hard enough to make the kijatdistant _Slanderscree_ rock unsteadily. Ice, roots, protein-rich nodules were vacuumed indiscriminately into the Pit: proteins and nodules and bulk to be con-verted into fuel and cells, ice to be melted and flushed throughout the vast metabolic engine.

Tearing unconcernedly into the wall of fresh pikapedan ahead of it, the ma.s.sive head vanished from sight. Like an ancient s...o...b..und train, the dark gray bulk slid across their path. Parasites and other growths of respectable size formed a fantastic foliage of their own on the leviathan's sides and back, a private jun-gle none dared explore. The fluctuating howl from the intake and expulsion of air was deafening now.

Fortunately, the thundereaters had poor vision and poor hearing. They had no need for these faculties, having nothing to be alert against. The beast slid past, its blunt tail-end vanishing in quest of body and skull, without taking any notice of the _Slanderscree_ or its anxiously silent crew.

It was gone, though they could still hear it eating its endless meal as it moved steadily off to the west.

Difficult as it was to be objective when confronted with so overpoweringly grand an example of nature's diversity, Ethan estimated its length at somewhere be-tween seventy and eighty meters. A mature specimen, but from what he'd been told, not an exceptionally large one. He'd seen bigger himself. He doubted this one weighed more than two hundred fifty tons.

They should have waited another half hour, to be safe, before getting under way, but the sailors were growing restless. Fear that the thundereater would perhaps change its path (they were notoriously un-predictable in their habits) and charge down upon them poisoned the sailors' blood with fear. Finally, even the patient Tahoding could stand the waiting no longer.

"All sail on, snap to the windwhips!"

The ice anchors had long since been hauled in. Ponderously, but with far more grace than the thundereater, the _Slanderscree_ began to move for-ward. Ship's bones groaned as the five duralloy run-ners broke clear their slight acc.u.mulations of drifted snow and ice.