Acorna nodded. “Yes, I see what you mean. Given the direction of the signal’s probable source, it is likely that the salvage is the distressed vessel whose broadcast we just received. The LAANYE translated the last word before the message was interrupted to mean ‘Mayday.’ Possibly the signal we intercepted was a general one sent as the ship’s systems were failing during some sort of accident or attack. I feel sure we received it only because we were within range of their emergency transmitters. If the signal had been meant for us, the broadcast would have been in Galactic Standard or in Linyaari.”
Becker shrugged. “Yep. That’s the way I’ve got it figured. Don’t get your hopes up, though. We’re probably not going to find the cowboy who was transmitting the mayday alive, or anybody else. None of those blips on the scanners look like an intact ship. But we may be able to tell what got him from the fragments. The time stamp on the message is a couple of days ago-if the problem was indeed an attack instead of an accident, whatever nailed them seems to be long gone.”
So we will check the situation out and report exactly -what happened to the Federation?” Acorna asked.
Yeah, eventually,” Becker said. “But mostly -we’ll know what to avoid ourselves.”
Intricately twisted vines and stems joined and twined, braided, knotted, and separated before bursting into jewel-toned rainbows of richly hued blossoms, reminding Acorna of pictures she had seen of the illustrated borders in Celtic holy books from ancient Earth. Except that this vegetation was no mere border, but a lush tropical jungle so interconnected that it was impossible to tell where one plant stopped and the next began.
At first, the tangle of plant life looked impassible. She, Captain Becker, RK, and Aari had stood on the lowered platform of the robolift, overwhelmed by the sight of it. Becker was fingering the sharpened blade of his machete while Aari held the portable scanner, waiting for it to indicate the hiding place of the large piece of salvage that had shown up on the Condor’s screen.
Acorna was busy cataloging the minerals and elements that made up this planetoid. She had already notified the others that no breathing apparatus would be required-the atmosphere was void of any substances lethal to carbon-based life forms and far richer in oxygen than Kezdet or narhiiVhiliinyar, and the soil was as rich in nitrogen. Of course, that was just her scientific opinion. In practice, once she was actually faced with it, the air was so heavily scented with the aromas of the flowers it felt too thick to breathe, laden with a heady mixture the like of which she had never smelled before. She detected elements of the incenses that had perfumed Uncle Hafiz’s palace, like cinnamon, cloves, vanilla, and the kind of human cooking known as baking, and also smells like mint, rose, violet, lavender, gardenia, and lily of the valley, but all were much deeper and mixed together with new scents-things she’d never smelled before. The end result was so intense that it almost took on substance and color.
Captain Becker said the place reeked like a high-priced bawdy house, which seemed to please him. Aari had sniffed curiously. “I have no basis for ascertaining the validity of your comparison, Joh, but I defer to your knowledge of such matters.” For their excursion dirtside, Aari had removed his Holmesian baseball caps and pipe in favor of a colorful scarf tied around the top of his head and a plaskin patch, inked black, over one of his eyes. Acorna deduced, Watson-like, that he had been reading Treasure Inland and -was assuming a piratical disguise in lieu of his Holmes persona. Though he was giving the soil a very Holmesian inspection, what he could see of it from where they stood.
Soil was clearly foremost in RK’s mind, too. The ship’s cat leaped off the platform and hopped through the vines-which parted, almost as if the cat’s reputation had preceded him, to allow him to pass easily through them. The roots and trailers along the ground seemed to shrink away as RK pawed the soil, turned his back on his work, and deposited his own ecological contribution to the planet.