Saturn Rukh (23 page)

It was like crash-landing on an island covered with black palm trees. The heavy capsule fell through the canopy of tree-sized feathers and came to a rest, the broad base of the conical capsule nestled among a forest of nearly transparent quill shafts.

“Look at those tree trunks,” said Chastity as
Sexdent
settled itself in amongst the feather quills. “Most of them are over a meter thick.”

The deep roaring noise continued. All during their long fall and crash landing, the rumble had become louder. It had started out with tones so deep that they were more felt than heard. The roar rose in intensity, as higher and higher tones were added to it, while the deeper tones continued on, as if someone were pulling out all the stops on a gigantic organ while simultaneously pressing on all the keys, in rolling chord after rolling chord that started at the bass notes and ended with the highest-pitched pipes. As the organ-like roar grew louder, a rolling and bucking motion started underneath them, shaking the capsule on its base.

“The poor creature is suffering!” screamed Sandra from her habitat. “You must have burned him with the rockets.”

“The rockets were off long before I made contact,” replied Rod. “It must be something else.”

“It’s the reactor!” said Seichi. “It’s still operational! The radiators must be burning the inside of its mouth! I hope I still have control... Seichi quickly brought up the icons he needed on his scottyboard and closed down the reactor. The lights in the capsule flickered slightly and then resumed their normal glow.

The roaring of the giant beast slowed and finally halted.

“We’re on internal backup now,” Seichi announced.

“How long are the batteries good for?” asked Dan from his habitat, concerned about the future health of his charges.

“We have some small batteries for emergency lighting,” replied Seichi. “But our primary backup power supply is a thermophotovoltaic cell similar to that used on the reactor. This one, however, is powered by heat from the decomposition of meta.” He took a quick look at the fuel gauge. “We have enough meta fuel for a number of days.”

“Days!” exclaimed Chastity, now discouraged. “Perhaps I should have cut us loose from the tether and gotten it over with—”

“What are we going to do now?” squeaked Sandra, her small voice echoing in the silence.

~ * ~

Petra and Petro were both awake. The pain signals radiating out from the stinging sensation in Petru’s gullet had wakened Petra from her normal deep lighttime sleep. After a quick thinklink to make sure Petro was awake and functioning, she let him continue to control Petru while she merely tapped off feelings from the stream of nervous impulses coming from various parts of their body.

Petru was hurt badly. There was a hot heavy lump in its left airtube. The giant body was roaring involuntarily in response to the intense pain, its voice sounding like a thousand ruus singing the death-dive song in a thousand different dialects. Fortunately, the stinging sensation soon stopped. Petru’s body calmed down and came back under full control of Petro. Although the heavy lump no longer hurt, it was still stuck inside Petru’s airtube.

~ * ~

“That was a close call,” said Pete from inside the meta plant. “Calls for a celebration. I think I’ll have some laser juice.”

“No you don’t!” said Chastity in a firm voice. “We’re not safe yet! We’re going to need every clear head we’ve got to figure a way out of this predicament.”

Rod, who had been thinking through every possible future scenario that could evolve from their present situation, finally spoke.

“We’re not falling—that’s good—we have hours to solve our problems instead of seconds. Seichi has the backup power operating—that’s good—we have a few days to solve our problems instead of hours. Seichi has control over the reactor and it’s still in working shape—that’s good—but he can’t turn it on without damaging our means of support—that’s bad—but we should be able to figure out a way to free the reactor in a few days’ time. We have no meta in our fuel tanks—that’s bad.. He raised his voice and turned toward the pickup for the radio link to the meta plant. “Pete! Provided Seichi can get the reactor going again, can you make meta riding on top of a rukh?”

Sandra was pleased to hear that Rod had pronounced it right this time.

“Almost positive,” Pete assured him. “The meta production units were designed to stand higher gee loads than our landing, so they should all be working. I’ll need to check and make sure the heat radiators weren’t damaged during the landing, but even if some of them were damaged or we have to limit their temperature to avoid toasting our host, it would just slow the production rate a little.”

“Then there’s still a chance we can get home!” said Dan, face lighting up. The good news cheered everyone.

“And collect our billion!” added Pete.

Suddenly, everyone was thrown to one side as the floor beneath them tilted and the capsule slid sideways. Black feathers now filled two of the holoviewport windows.

“Provided we don’t fall off this bird first,” said Rod, suddenly galvanized to action. “Seichi! Tell Mouser to cut us a bunch of ten- and twenty-meter-long tie-lines from the tether mending reel. Then have Jeeves use Mouser and Kitty to fasten
Sexdent
to the quill roots. Chass and Doc! Follow me to the airlock. We’ve got to get outside and help the mechbots tie this capsule down before this bird realizes it can get rid of us by simply doing a barrel roll. Sandra! Come down and cycle us through the airlock! Pete! Meet us outside!” He headed for the ladder and the airlock below.

The outer airlock door lowered and Rod, Dan, and Chastity stepped out onto it. Although the air was relatively warm, Rod had insisted that they be fully protected, so they wore the full saturnsuit: neon yellow insulated jacket, tights, gloves, boots, and helmet. It was dark under the canopy of layered black feathers, and they had to activate the image intensifier holo-visors in their helmets. They looked around. The large black feathers dominated the scene; their quills, a meter or more in diameter, rose up out of large follicles in the semitransparent skin and arched off to the rear. Underneath were smaller down feathers.

“Not quite like a forest,” said Dan. “The feathers are layered and pointing toward the rear of the bird. More like a forest that’s been blown over in a windstorm.”

“We won’t have any problem in determining direction, anyway,” said Chastity. “South is the direction the feathers are pointing.”

They climbed down the rungs in the side of the conical capsule that led from the airlock door platform to the base of the ship where Pete was waiting for them on the catwalk between two of the engines.

“This heat radiator is in good shape,” Pete said as he patted an array of metal vanes located behind one of the main engine rocket bells. It was now obvious that the capsule had landed on one of the down feathers, squashing it flat. Pete stepped off the catwalk onto the “ground.”

“Look at this!” he said in surprise, as he jumped up and down. “It’s like a trampoline!” The others soon joined him.

Jeeves and Seichi already had the two outside mechbots busy. As they watched, Kitty would first tie a line to an engine mount or safety ring, then scurry off across the smooth skin to fasten the other end of the line to the base of a quill root. Mouser came scuttling down from the nose of
Sexdent
carrying a number of coils of line.

“Let’s get busy and help Kitty get
Sexdent
secured,” said Rod, handing out segments of line to the others. Soon the four were bounding back and forth across the rukh’s skin, threading lines between tie-down points on the capsule and the nearest quill roots. The crew experienced an occasional fall when they got too exuberant with their bounds and came down off balance, but they bounced right back up again unhurt. The quill roots were hollow, very much like the hollow quills on Earth bird feathers, except that the outer surface of the rukh quills was a thin membrane rather than a thick shell. The rukh quill used high internal pressure to achieve the rigidity needed to serve as the shaft of the long feathers.

“Hey, Dan!” called Rod from where he was attaching a line to a quill. “Look at this. Is it a new feather sprouting?”

Dan came over to look. Right beside a large quill, seemingly growing out of the same follicle, was an elongated balloon.

“It’s a balloon—inflated until it’s rigid—just like the feather quill,” said Dan. “But the color and texture are different.” In order to compare the internal pressure in the two objects, he tapped first on the quill and then on the strange object. At he touched the small balloon, the strange object moved! It quickly burrowed down deeper into the follicle, then inflated itself until it was tightly wedged between the quill root and the follicle wall.

“It’s the rukh equivalent of a louse!” said Dan, pleased at the discovery. He started to reach down to drag the vermin out of its hiding place so he could obtain an image to be stored in Jeeves’s ever-accepting memory.

“Watch out!” warned Rod. “It may bite!”

Dan paused. They finally settled on the technique of working two lines around the creature’s body, forming each line into a lasso, and pulling the two loops tight around the “waist” of the vermin. By standing on opposite sides of the opening, Rod and Chastity now were able to use the lines to pull the creature out. Once out, the two long lines pulling in opposite directions kept the creature from reaching either Rod or Chastity, while Dan could safely get close. Dan was just starting to collect images with his holovisor when the vermin gave off a loud whistle and shot straight up in the air. Startled, Rod and Chastity let go of their lines and the vermin shot off into the sky, trailing the lines and a fine stream of particles behind it. Dan managed to track down one of the particles and picked it up.

“What’d you find?” asked Sandra, who had been watching from the holoviewport window high up on the nose of
Sexdent.

“A tiny version of the jet-powered rukh louse that just left,” said Dan, putting his find into a sample bag: “When the parent gets big enough, it jets off into the sky and spreads its young to the winds. If they are lucky, they land either somewhere else on the rukh that the parent just left, or perhaps on some other rukh in the flock. I suspect they usually time their seeding flight for the right conditions, but since we disturbed this one, it decided to jet off now.”

“Jet-powered rukh louse ...” repeated Sandra. “Succinct description. Jeeves? What’s that hard-to-pronounce Latin name for louse?”

“Phthir
...” replied Jeeves. “If you would like a proper Latin name for the creature, I would suggest
Phthirjactus rukhester,
or louse-jetter rukh-dweller.”

“That’s enough science for now,” said Rod. “Let’s recheck and tighten up all the tie-downs, then get back inside and plan our next step over lunch.”

“You three check the tie-downs,” said Pete. “I’m going back inside the meta factory and check out the production equipment. See you at lunch.”

“Don’t come back with laser juice on your breath,” warned Chastity. “We’ll have a party
after
we get the reactor out and running.”

~ * ~

Petra could sense that the injury to Petra’s windpipe had been a strange one. Sometimes, during a hunt, Petra would swallow a slimswimmer that managed to fly between the sharp mouth-feathers hanging down from the roof of Petra’s mouth. When that happened and the slimswimmer struck the back wall of Petra’s airtube, its sharp-edged body would inflict a cut on the airtube wall before the slimswimmer escaped through the jet outlet. This was not a slimswimmer cut. It hurt too much for that. Also, the stinging hotness was caused by a very dense and very heavy object. The object was much too dense to fly, so it must not be a normal prey animal that the flock would hunt.

“Hot ... dense …” mused Petra. The stargazer in her makeup then remembered the time, many dimmings of Bright ago, when she, in her nightly climb into the heavens, had seen the fall of a meteor out of the sky. It had passed right through the flock, glowing brightly as it fell. From the speed of its fall it had to be dense. Perhaps Petro had chased one of those meteors and had Petru swallow it. She would query him about it later. Right now he was busy deep inside Petra’s left mouth, trying to dislodge the object from Petra’s airtube.

Petra could feel there was something else bothering Petra. There was a heavy weight sitting right in the middle of its back. This was a minor problem compared to the painful object stuck in its airtube, but it was annoying Petra, so Petra decided to investigate. She lifted her head and extended her neck until her eye was high in the air. She looked back over Petra’s wing but could see nothing at the point where the sense of heaviness came.

“It must be under the feathers,” she thought to herself. “I’ll go see.” From the sides of her head arose two air bladders shaped like wings. The headwings cut into the air flowing over Petra’s back and lifted her head into the air. Using the headwings to control her direction of flight, she let her head be blown toward the rear. As the head left its normal cradled position at the top front of the keel, her neck sacs inflated, one after the other, causing the compressed neck to expand and extend. At each joint between the neck segments, the two clawed feet for that joint released their grip on the featherroots on either side of the long cradle they had lain in. The head glided to a landing in the feathertops of Petra’s wing and Petra started the long crawl back to the rear across the top of the forest of black feathers that covered Petra’s back, the claws along her neck reaching and grabbing the feathertops in synchronism. Soon all of Petra’s neck was out of its normal cradled position and each segment sac was filling, as Petra elongated her neck to reach the position where Petra reported heaviness. She used her four large front claws to part the feathers above the heavy spot, and adjusting her eye for near-vision, she peered down.