Donald Moffitt - Second Genesis

“Come on, let’s go,” Jao said.

He picked up one of the scavenged dragonfly air tanks—a ribbed ovoid with a stopcock in the form of two levers meant to be squeezed together—and slipped one arm through its webbing. Bram screwed the curator’s helmet back on while the man fussed at him. After a moment’s thought, he replaced the curator’s depleted air bottle with his own half-full one; actually, any of them could breathe for about nine minutes on the cubic foot or so of oxygen-rich walker air trapped in their suits, but the curator wouldn’t know that, and Bram didn’t want the little man getting panicky and thrashing around.

Together, he and Jao grabbed the curator by the arms and hauled him bodily through the air flap. The Cuddly came tumbling out on the blast of released air and, making an agile recovery, landed on Bram’s shoulder.

The tug hovered a few hundred feet away, its nets spread like wings. Bram could see the mists of the hydrazine jets as Lydis nudged the behemoth toward them.

While the curator squirmed in their grasp, Jao aimed the nozzle of the dragonfly tank at a spot ahead of the tug and squirted polluted air into space. Lydis saw what he was doing and compensated her vector for lateral motion.

They sailed across the gap, with Methuselah riding happily on Bram’s shoulder, and slammed into a net with rather more force than was elegant. The curator’s mouth popped open as the breath was driven out of him. Methuselah went head over heels, caught a strand in his tiny paws, and scrambled back to Bram’s shoulder.

They hauled themselves and the curator’s wriggling form toward the open air lock door while Lydis positioned the tug for the return journey. She hardly looked up as they came squeezing through into the cabin.

“Strap yourselves down,” she said. “We’re going back in a hurry.”

The tug skimmed bare miles above Yggdrasil’s branches as Lydis followed the curve of the crown. Close—too close to the tree’s edges—was the vanguard of the dragonfly force. Bram saw the lead bubble, a whitish orb a half mile in diameter, floating to a landing in the treetop.

“Lydis,” came Jun Davd’s strained voice through the radio. “We’re about to start fusion. Smeth’s evacuated the probe, and all his technicians are aboard Yggdrasil. What are you doing?”

“Go ahead and start up,” she said through clenched jaws. “Don’t worry about us.”

“Get in to the trunk,” he said. “A docking crew’s waiting for you.”

“I can set down anywhere, even if we lose the tug. With no spin on the branches, I don’t need to rendezvous with the trunk. That’s the problem. Neither do those dragonfly hatcheries out there. How close is the first of them?”

Jun Davd hesitated. “We’ll be under way before it makes contact,” he admitted reluctantly, “but not by much of a fraction of a g.”

Lydis gave Bram an inquiring glance. He nodded.

“That’s not good enough,” she said. “If any of those … things … get inside Yggdrasil and start to breed…”

She shuddered, and Bram shuddered with her. The thought of a bubble alighting in the branches and disgorging thousands of voracious nymphs was too horrible to contemplate.

“Yes, the same thought had occurred to me,” Jun Davd admitted. “We have a number of armed groups waiting outside around the likeliest points of contact. But we’re no match for them.”

Bram leaned over Lydis’s shoulder and told Jun Davd about the glass helmets.

“Thank you, Bram,” Jun Davd said. “That ought to help. We can throw missiles. Humans are good at playing ball, at least. But we’re spread too thinly through the branches. We’ll be vastly outnumbered at any given attack site, until we can rush reinforcements—and that’s going to take too long under acceleration, using the internal transport system.”

“That’s why I’m doing this,” Lydis said.

“Good luck,” Jun Davd said simply.

“What’s going on?” the frightened curator asked. “Why aren’t we landing?”

Bram tried to calm him down. The little man drew himself up. “You don’t understand ,” he said with mustered dignity. “I’m not concerned for myself. But nothing must be allowed to happen to these Rembrandts.”

“If the dragonflies get into the tree, they’ll use them for napkins,” Jao said. “So shut up.”

The curator assumed an aggrieved expression. “If I can help…”

“I’ll let you know,” Bram said. “In the meantime, hang on to that portfolio.”

The tug rounded the curve of the treetop with a virtuoso application of lateral jets by Lydis. Ahead, the dragonfly bubble rose into view. Its pilot was applying the brakes with a skill that matched Lydis’s. It hovered a bare quarter mile above the crown of leaves, its chemical jets scorching the branches. The other bubbles were some tens of miles away, not yet a threat.

The opalescent sphere crowded the viewport. With sickening clarity, Bram saw hundreds of space-suited nymphs crawling over its surface, ready to swarm over the branches at the instant of touchdown.

The tug hit it broadside with its cushioned nets. The work vehicle was a mere speck next to the sphere, but its powerful engines had moved comets larger than this.

Bram saw a shower of nymphs wriggling against the void, shaken loose by the impact. The pilot of the bubble frantically tried to bring his own maneuvering jets into play—either to try to burn the tug or to slip out of its clutches. He and Lydis dueled, two masters of the pilot’s art. But Lydis anticipated every parry. Slowly she drove the hovering bubble off its landing pattern, moving it farther and farther along a tangent away from Yggdrasil.

The bubble’s main thruster was pointed down toward the tree, still spouting fire and helping Lydis. There was only one way the pilot could hope to break away from the mite that was pushing so hard at his ship. He turned the braking blast on full force, driving himself away from the tree so that he could start over again—and incidentally char the tug to a cinder.

Lydis was ready for him. The instant she felt herself losing contact, she spun the tug one hundred eighty degrees on its steering jets. By the time a haft mile of globe had slipped past her, she was zooming away at full acceleration. It was the dragonfly bubble that was licked by her flame.

Bram could see the cloudy orb fighting for control. They were still alive in there, but they were in trouble. The nymph pilot was trying to spin the globe around so that he could kill his outward momentum and dive toward the tree again, but his key maneuvering jets must have been damaged because he could achieve only an erratic wobble.

Again, he did the only thing he could. He cut the main jet to stop his headlong outward flight and began, slowly and painfully, to spin the sphere around by some internal means.

“Either they’ve got a whopping big flywheel in there,” Jao said, “or there’re thousands of nymphs running around an inside track.”

The globe receded into the distance. But the rest of them were drifting toward the giant tree like a clot of foam.

But by this time, Yggdrasil itself was moving beneath them. Bram saw the bright ball of the fusion sun in its cage, shining through the polarized disk that had appeared on the viewport to eclipse it. A brilliant pathway of hadronic photons reached thousands of miles into space, like a sword with the probe as its haft.

“Now to get down there before they build up to a g,” Lydis said through clenched jaws.

Her fingers flew over the console, and the tug began its downward descent.

An incoherent choking sound came from the curator. “L-look, they’re all over us!”

Bram whipped his head around. All of the viewports were filled with dragonfly faces, boxed in glass. Armored claspers hammered at the hull.