Acorna started after the cat but Becker touched her arm and said, “Wait. Let us see if he gets out again okay.”
The cat pawed backward to cover his work but the vines and other ground cover were already creeping back across the pile. Roadkill looked behind him, saw that this -was happening, gave a little shake that could have been a cat’s version of a shrug, and bounded back through the path that had cleared for him on his way in. He then hopped up onto the robolift platform and proceeded to wash his whiskers, as if they had been somehow affected by his previous chore.
“Okay, then,” Becker said.
“That way, Joh,” Aari informed him after consulting the scanner, and pointed in the direction from which the cat had just come.
“Well, then, onward.” Becker raised the machete in one of the dramatic gestures he was fond of and pointed. RK leaped to his shoulder and the four of them dismounted the platform. As they set out, the jungle growth shrank even further away this time, leaving a wide lane open before them. It gave Acorna an odd feeling to see the plants moving and shifting out of their way. Becker walked over to one side and raised the machete to hack at a thick stalk, but the stalk bent in the middle to retreat from him.
“Wait, Captain,” Acorna said. “The plants seem to be trying to accommodate us by getting out of our way. It hardly seems right to cut them.”
Becker gave her a look. “Yeah, well, we don’t know how long it will take us to find the ship. And we don’t know what wrecked it. We might be looking at the cause of the trouble right now. How do we know these plants “won’t close up around the Coru)or and bury it so deep we -won’t be able to get it loose again? They’re several stories high, after all. We -wouldn’t even be able to see the suns if they had decided not to part for us.”
“I think ‘decided’ is a relevant term in this case,” she said. “These plants seem to have some kind of limited sentience, or at the very least the ability to react quickly to stimuli. I think it might be wise to sheathe the machete. Maybe we had better not make them angry. Besides, we could find the ship with the portable scanner, couldn’t we?”
“Yeah, but I always like to have a backup plan,” Becker said, -while putting the long knife away.
Aan dug in the pocket of his shipsuit and pulled out a ball of shining thread. “I have just the thing, Joh.” He tied one end to the robohft and held the rest in his hand. “We can leave a trail behind us, like Theseus seeking the Minotaur in the labyrinth. This also works very well in eaves when searching for lost cascades of gold and jewels.”
“Caskets, buddy,” Becker said.
“As you wish,” Aan agreed amiably, and began unrolling his ball of string.
“Ow,” Becker said as his shoulder -was punctured by the claws of the suddenly hyper-alert ship’s cat, -who hunkered down and switched his brindled gray and black tail, his ears perked and his eyes intently following the gleaming thread as it unwound behind Aari. “Belay that, mister,” Becker said.
The cat immediately leaped from Becker’s shoulder to Aari’s. “Aaargh,” Aari said, rolling his as instead of his rs. “Avast there! It is my faithful paro, Pol.”
RK made a dive for the thread. Acorna intercepted the cat and received a few scratches for her trouble.
“I am sorry, Khornya,” Aari said. “I think Riid-Kiiyi does not wish to be a paro.”
“It’s all right,” she said, cuddling RK up close to her body and scratching him gently under the chin. He immediately abandoned his quest to play with the string in favor of purring and rubbing the side of his face against her skin.
The small party set out into the jungle. The vegetation now made a path as wide as the Coru)or, the stalks bending almost flat to avoid contact with the people passing among them. The heady fragrance turned to an acrid stench.