The Smoke Ring

In present time, Booce and Carlot and Rather were on watch while the others slept. The CARM moved through a patch of thin fog. Fog didn’t block the CARM’s senses. Kendy noticed the anomaly some time before the crew did.

He saw birds of unfamiliar type. They had lungs (the CARM’s sonar could see the triple cavity), but they had retained part of what must once have been an exoskeleton: an oval of hard sky-blue shell covered one side. Fourteen of these birds, each about the mass of a boar pig, were strung in a line across the sky. They were folded into themselves, fins and wings and heads folded against that oval of shell. Sky-blue blobs, cool in infrared, comatose or dead.

Booce had noticed now. He shook Jeffer awake. “A whole flock of dead birds. What killed them?”

“Nothing that can touch us with the airlock closed.”

Jeffer’s fingers danced. “Outside air’s okay, nothing poisonous. Well, treefodder!”

“What?”

“The temperature. It’s cold out there.”

Kendy had already found the source of the cold.

The present-time transmission showed Jeffer easing the CARM alongside one of the big birds. The other crew were in and around the airlock. Debby sent a tethered crossbow bolt into the bird. It twitched. She loosed another…

…while Kendy set a blinking light around the image of the pond.

Only Jeffer was there to see it. He said softly, “Stet.”

They had pulled the bird aboard. Clave said, “Well, it’s dead now.”

“I’ve got something,” Jeffer said. “Clave, there’s a pond in that dense cloud. Do you see anything odd about it?”

“No life around it. That cloud’s awfully thick for being so small. What does it mean?”

“I don’t know.”

Ice. The pond was a core of foamy ice within a shell of meltwater. Ice was rare within the Smoke Ring. The pond was huge now, several hundred thousand tons, but Kendy guessed that it had been bigger yet. A tremendous pond must have been flung out of the Smoke Ring by a gravity-assist from Gold. In the near-vacuum of the gas torus it would have boiled and frozen at the same time, and later fallen back, reduced by evaporation, reduced further by reentry heat. Now it cooled the sky around it as it melted. Kendy could hear the pings as bubbles of near-vacuum crumpled within the ice core.

“I don’t like it here,” Booce said. “It’s too strange.”

“Your wish is granted. Strap the bird down and take your seats.” Jeffer waited while they did that, then fired the aft attitude jets. The CARM surged away.

Carlot pointed into the aft view. “Look!”

The shieldbirds tumbled in the CARM’s hot wake. One by one they fluttered, then spread a rainbow of wings and tails and fluffy feathers. They basked in the heat, catching as much of it as they could. Now their shells were no bigger in proportion than a warrior’s shield. As Discipline moved out of range, the birds were lining up and flying west, putting distance between themselves and the melting glacier.

“There’s no point picking out a tree till you’ve got honey,” Booce said. “You can find a tree a hundred klomters from the Clump and still go half a thousand klomters to find your sting jungle.”

Their catch was moored by cargo hooks, divested of skin and guts and some of the scarlet meat. Booce was holding raw bird flesh sliced thin and rolled around a stalk of lemon fern. He used it to point into the dorsal view.

“And that is a sting jungle. The green dot, straight out.”

“Stet.” Jeffer tapped attitude jets to life. The CARM turned. Carlot squeaked and grabbed Rather, startling him awake. Booce dropped his meal to snatch at a seat back.

Jeffer hid a grin. These sophisticated Admiralty folk found the CARM as unsettling as Jeffer’s own citizens did.

He aimed the CARM east of Booce’s green dot. East takes you out… “Half a day and we’ll have honey. What else do we need?”

“Some way to collect it,” Booce answered.

“We’ll put Rather in the silver suit. No treefeeding insect will sting him through that!”

“Right. Better than armor.”

“Tell us about the Admiralty,” Clave said.

Booce closed his eyes to think. Then: “You’re lonely out here. There’s too much space. Everything is dense in the Clump. Think of a seed pod, and think of the Admiralty as the shell. There are more people in the Market alone, any time of day or night, than you’ve ever seen.

“We pull the logs back to the Clump over the course of a year or two, and we arrange an auction in the Market. Twice we’ve been attacked by happyfeet bandits. Once we got back just as another log was being docked, and we got half what we expected for the wood. But over the years we put enough money together to buy my retailer’s license. This was going to be our last trip. We were going to settle in the Clump, and I’d work the wood myself and sell finished planks and burl, while Ryllin set about finding good husbands for our daughters. That was the point: they’re reaching that age…”

Clave asked, “Can we really make the Admiralty believe we’re loggers?”

“We’ll be loggers,” Booce said. “Rebuilding Logbearer’s no problem. We should have more weapons in case happyfeet come by, and it all has to look like Admiralty gear…and we still won’t look like a typical logging family. But we don’t have to, because I’ve got my retailer’s license.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we don’t have to sell the log straight off. The Navy ships will escort us in and give us a berth. I can set up shop in the Market and sell wood, and hire anyone I like; which means that the rest of you can be workers hired off a happyfeet jungle, or bought as copsiks. Some of the happyfeet keep copsiks. The Admiralty doesn’t, so you’d be free if I bought you.”

“Free, but not citizens.”

“Right.”

“Why can’t you have hired us off a tree?”

Booce thought about it, and smiled. “You have a gift, Clave. Tell as much of the truth as possible. Debby, you’re from Carther States, directly. You were stranded in the sky, you made your way to a tree, and now you want to live in a jungle again. Okay, Debby?”

Debby’s lips were moving as she silently repeated the details. “Stet.”

“We’ll have to say Citizens Tree is close to the Clump. Otherwise we got home too fast, and we’d have to explain about the CARM.”

Clave nodded. “So then we sell the log. How?”

“Set up in the Market and a

Clave exclaimed, “Half?”

Jeffer said, “Taxes?”

“Taxes,” Booce said, “is the money the Admiralty takes to run itself. Everybody pays, but the rich pay more. A good log is wealth. For the price of the CARM you could be very rich indeed.”

“The CARM is what makes us what we are. We won’t risk that,” Clave said.

“Then don’t take it into the Clump. The Navy won’t want something that powerful floating around. They’ll pay well, but they’ll buy it whether or not you’re selling.”

Jeffer tapped the forward jets awake. They were pulling near the sting jungle.

Certain mooring loops fit the silver suit too perfectly, as if it were their specific purpose. Four sets. For four suits?

Jeffer pulled it loose. “The silver suit is yours, Rather. I’m going to teach you everything about it.”

Rather had seen the silver suit as a mark of rank. He hadn’t thought of it as an obligation. “Did Mark show you how to work it?”

“I’ve watched him. Lift this latch. Take the head and turn it till it stops. Pull up. Turn it the other way. Lift. Now this latch. Now pull this down…pull it apart… good.”

The suit looked like the flayed skin of a dwarf.

Legs first, then arms. Duck under the neck ring. Rather closed the sliding catches, the latches. “Do I have to close the head?”

“Cover yourself. You don’t want to be stung,” Booce said. “Those little mutineers can sting a moby to death.”