Cliff smelled an acrid tinge and watched the remaining primates panic. They scattered, bunches breaking up. Some fired arrows but most fled.

The Birds ran them down. Some they did not shoot with the quick, darting beams, but instead ran up behind them and leaped high in the air, coming down on a primate in a crushing fall. Cliff could hear bones snap.

The last primate turned and howled at the Birds and they simply ran it down, trampling the body again and again.

The Birds danced on the bodies. Their mouths opened wide and they emitted sharp, harsh calls, like trilling fire alarms. With their stubby beaks they stabbed the primate bodies. Some danced on the dead. Spindly long arms shot toward the sky, jerking with joyous energy, and they circled, making a quick-footed dance, shrieking in a melodious chant.

Cliff backed away from the spectacle, shaken. He straightened up a bit and retreated, duck-walking backwards. Terry came alongside him and whispered, “My God.”

“Yah. Yah.” Cliff could barely absorb what they had seen.

The party came together, united in a single purpose—move fast, get away.

Cliff remembered thinking that this place was a park, in a way.

Certainly not for mere primates.

TWENTY-NINE

Redwing dipped into Meal 47, a pomegranate-rich sauce and artificial meat mix with long grain brown rice, green vegetables on the side. It tasted the same as always, of course—pungent, hearty. And since he’d had it more times than he could count, boring. Still, its savory tang was somewhat enjoyable because it appealed to the dimmed senses he had developed in the austere, rumbling caves of SunSeeker. And every meal reminded him of their dwindling supplies.

Any semblance of a sensory life was heartening in the ceramic claustrophobia here. At least when the ship was driving through interstellar plasma, noise-canceling headphones could subtract most of the sound. Not here, now, when SunSeeker was laboring hard, its Reynolds bosonic drive coughing in electromagnetic stutters. Some crew said they just forgot about the engines’ steady din, but Redwing could not—though he hid this, of course. He had to seem calm, steady, oblivious of their desperate uncertainties.

Getting contact with the Beth group had been their sole breakthrough. Before that, Redwing found himself commanding a ship that had constant navigation problems and no contact with the ground. He had nearly written off the whole landing party.

Redwing raised an eyebrow at Ayaan Ali, who came and sat at the mess table, waiting respectfully. Ayaan was an Arab woman who dressed in deck uniform like everyone else, but occasionally at dinner wore a stylish veil and glinting emerald earrings. “Ah, good,” Redwing said formally. “Report?”

“We’ve got the high-gain antennas ganged together.”

“How’s Beth’s signal?”

“Strong and—”

“Can you get me visual?”

“Hell, Cap’n, we’re working with a damn field phone signal here!”

“Answering my question comes first, then the complaining.”

Ayaan’s face stiffened and there was a three-beat silence. Then Ayaan said slowly, “No, sir, don’t really know yet about visuals. Doubt we have the bandwidth.”

“It’s a bandwidth problem, or a signal to noise and coherence mapping?”

“At this stage, that’s rather a moot point.”

“Ah.” He looked at the slabs of illos she showed him in a long silence. “Good, then. No complaint?”

Ayaan blinked and her mouth firmed up. “No, sir, and no excuses.”

“Excellent.” Redwing permitted himself a slight smile.

Ayaan laid out a diagram on his slate, pointing to the array she had mounted outside, jury-rigged from interior structural beams. “As soon as we work the kinks out of ganging the dishes, and optimize Beth’s incoming, we’ll have a coherent, linked system.”

“Which means you can go after Cliff?”

“Yes, but remember, we don’t even know what gear they have.”

“Field phones, too, as I recall.”

“But have they hung on to them? I’m getting no pings back at all.”

Redwing understood the tech enough to know that grouping all their microwave range antennas together outside was a hell of a tough problem. Software and hardware together had to gang the antennas so they were coherent in phase, like making them into one big eardrum. Doing that on a constantly moving platform swooping above the Bowl, and focusing them on spots in the moving landscape—he couldn’t even begin to imagine the problems. “You’re doing a great job, Ayaan. I know the problems. Just keep trying for a ping.”

Ayaan blinked rapidly at the notoriously rare Redwing praise. “Yes, sir.”

Redwing nodded and strode with visible energy—more performance for the crew—the five meters to the bridge viewscreen. The whole hemisphere had been converted into a complex display that could flit from real images to overlay dynamics charts. Look too long at them, flip back and forth, and you had to sit down and let it seep in. He had ordered that their interior centrifugal grav be Bowl normal, 0.8 g. They would all be ready to go down and help, if that was necessary. But he wasn’t going to put another boot on the ground until he knew more.

He felt a sudden surge, twist, and correction strum through the deck and walked over to the operations chair.

“How’s the induction coil?” Redwing asked the pilot, a short man named Jampudvipa, always shortened to Jam.

“Sputtering. I got it back right, using the three-zone thrusters. We’re getting barely enough plasma to keep the system from going into parasitic oscillations.”

“Damn. Can we make the delta?”

Jam wrenched his face around and shrugged. “Perhaps.”

The Bowl image spread across most of the glowing hemisphere. It always made him stop and stare.

The landscape unfolded at speeds hallucinatingly fast, because they were moving at about ten kilometers a second over it, orbital speed. So much wealth: forests brimming with green promise, clouds towering a hundred kilometers high over shallow seas, spare bare deserts of golden sand, crawling muddy rivers snaking through valleys rimmed by low hills. Hurricanes roaring and churning across continents larger than Earth itself. An immense, impossible geography. A contraption devoutly to be wished, yes. But, by whom? By … what?

He watched the comm bands. Beth’s signal was down to zero, but her party had gotten through earlier for a few minutes. To keep Beth within range, Redwing and Jam had to maneuver the ship constantly, spelling the watch with Clare Conway, the willowy blond copilot. But the solar wind here was a puny wisp, barely enough to keep the induction chambers from shutting down. Space was everywhere a very good vacuum, but the red star’s wind was even thinner than Sol’s. Plasma blew off stars, but this smaller sun’s somehow got swept up into the jet. Magnetic focusing, apparently, though how it was done seemed a mystery to the engineers. Indeed, Redwing thought, this whole weird place was an implied slap in the face to human endeavors. Even SunSeeker was a mere bauble compared with it. A huge bowl whirling around so fast, it covered a perimeter about the size of Earth’s orbit, every nine days.

Jam’s job in all this was to keep them close enough to the Bowl’s atmosphere to let Beth’s weak phone signal get through to them. He steered them so close, the land seemed like a flat plane below them, an infinite wall of blue green dotted with clouds hundreds of kilometers high, of seas bigger than any planet. All of it hung under the constant glare of star and jet, which cast different glows across the deep atmosphere, in long blades of shadow and radiance.

Redwing could see the strain in Jam’s face, but the man would never mention it, of course. “How long can we keep doing this waltz?”

“A day, perhaps two.”

“Then what?”