Kai struck off to his left where the heavily vegetated land slanted upward. He looked back toward the compound and saw Tor moving steadily on its search pattern. He wouldn’t be inconveniencing the Thek if he pressed his own search. He rather supposed that Tor would have a time locating the core no matter how efficiently it worked. There was always the possibility that the mutineers had retrieved the object.
He devoutly hoped that they hadn’t also retrieved the sleds. Or spitefully damaged them beyond use. But Kai reasoned the sleds would have been too valuable for wanton destruction. The mutineers would have been positive that they’d catch up with the people they considered inferiors: whom they’d left without any survival equipment. Nor would Paskutti have been easily deterred from an exhaustive search for the missing power packs. Which might well explain the giffs’
behavior yesterday.
Kai almost climbed past the sleds: they were so covered in vine that they looked like a natural rock formation. He tore at the vegetation, cursing as fine thorns ripped his hands. He used his knife then, and he broke a branch from a tree to pry and cut away the obscuring growths.
If only one sled was intact … Units were sealed: Even a heavyworlder would have had to grunt to bash the sturdy plasteel frame and body skin.
He was the one to grunt and sweat now, contending with Ireta’s heavy morning rain, which penetrated the leafy cover so that mud added to his problems: mud and the colonies of insects that had taken refuge in the shelter of vine and sled.
He felt, rather than saw, that the instrument console was intact, and disregarding the myriad of tiny life-forms wriggling from beneath his fingers, found that the sled floor was unbroached and the essential power connectors undamaged.
With a sigh of relief, he leaned warily against a tree trunk only to be brought upright as a spurt of flame angling upward into the misty rain told him that Tor had taken off.
Too stunned to react for a moment, Kai stared as the fog roiled and then covered completely the passage of the Thek vehicle. Half-blind with sweat and apprehension; Kai started to run back to the compound. Without that power pack …
Varian had had one glimpse of Kai, body arched over Tor’s mass, clinging valiantly to the improvised hand-holds. She didn’t envy him the journey. Then the Thek vehicle slowly turned in the cramped space of the cave, proving Tor’s expertise as a pilot. Of course, Tor ought to be expert, 21
Anne McCaffrey – Dinosaur Planet II – The Survivors considering it was intimate with its source of power and the vehicle no more than a surround. How convenient to be a Thek, she thought, impervious to all the minor ills that beset frail species like her own: long-lived, invulnerable to anything short of a nova. Someone had once told her that Thek created novas to tone up their inner cores. And there’d been that droll story she’d heard in advanced training, that the various planets claimed by the Thek as ‘homes’ were dead worlds covered with immense pyramidal mountains, in conical ranges. Elder Thek never died, they became mountains, too vast to move or be moved. And the asteroid belts common to most Thek systems were actually fragmented Thek who had not with stood the final journey to their chosen resting place.
She peered out between the vines to follow their flight and saw the reaction of the giffs. Those in mid-air seemed to pause, while those who stood preening themselves on the cliffs erupted into sound, bugling and whistling in tones that seemed to Varian both joyous and startled. Although there was no way a golden flier could keep up with a Thek-powered craft those in the air made a valiant effort and were followed by what must have been the entire adult population of the colony.
Varian gasped as a shaft of sunlight penetrated the morning mist and rain. The golden fur of the airborne giffs seemed a sheet of brilliant yellow suspended between cloudy sky and misted earth.
Only then did it occur to Varian that the shape of the Thek’s vehicle with its transparent canopy was vaguely bird-like, with swept-back wings. A further moment’s thought and she glanced at the basically ovoid shape of the shuttle and came to an inescapable conclusion. The giffs had been protecting the cave! They had granted immunity to what they thought was an incubating egg.