The closed aircar with the Alliance emblems touched down in the Fryes' field around noon. When its doors opened, a man in Army grays adjusted his holster and stepped out, followed by two men in the sort of dark nondescript suits worn by midlevel officials. They looked around, gazes lingering on Serenity, then proceeded toward the grounded ship.
River watched from a tiny gap between the closed doors of the maintenance shed, Matt Frye beside her. Only chance and the need for a salvaged part had placed her here at this moment instead of in the ship or the open field. She had almost stepped out of the shed, part in hand, only to find her way stopped by Kaylee's older brother. He had raised his hand, urging her silently back, then quickly drawn the doors shut as she heard the whine of the approaching vehicle's engine.
Matt looked through the gap over River's head. "Things are interesting around you, that's for sure."
"'May you live an interesting life?'" she said, quoting the Chinese curse.
"Didn't say I envied you. Little sister can have all the family's thrilling adventures."
The uniformed man pounded on the personnel hatch while the other two waited. The ramp swung down, forcing the three visitors to scramble aside. Captain Reynolds stood at the top. He exchanged words with the suited men at the bottom of the ramp. Their words were too far away to hear, but River caught the officials' impatience, and the slippery feel of Mal's evasions. Finally they boarded and were lost to sight. The sense of them diminished as well, but she had acquired an inkling of their purpose here already.
"They lookin for you?"
"They want the shuttle pilot from the other day," she replied. "They don't know it was me."
They watched for long minutes, but nothing further was visible. "We better stay put till they're gone," Matt said.
"Shiaa."
River studied Kaylee's older brother. He was half a head taller than his sister, and darker, rather more like his father than his mother. His eyes were dark as well. And even though they stood side by side, he seemed to be in deeper shadow. No. It's his mood that's dark. She watched his eyes as he peered intently through the door gap. Carefully, she loosened her filters and let his thoughts and emotions drift into her. She said, "You hate them."
He started to protest, then said instead, "That obvious?"
"No," she said. "But sometimes I can tell things about people." It had been Matt's inner voice at the wake, she now realized, that had bitterly opined that the Frye girls had not been important enough for the Alliance authorities to mount a rescue.
They were silent for some time. Finally Matt said, "My brother's got his hat cocked for you. He's harmless, but if he's a bother, say the word and I'll set him straight."
Did you ever talk to Rosh about their games in the hayloft? I think you did, because I don't think giving each other up was as quick or easy for them as she says. "I can handle him," she said. "He likes new things."
The young man raised his eyebrows at that, but only turned back to their peephole. He perked up. "They're comin out."
A knot of people appeared at the top of the ramp, talking. She could see Mal, and the three Alliance officials, but it was difficult to discern who else had come to see the visitors off. The officials, she noted, were doing a great deal of nodding, and that nodding got faster and more energetic the longer Mal talked. To her, they now seemed as impatient to get away as, earlier, they had been to confront someone.
Three dogs follow their noses to a hole in the cliff, but the cat-smell belongs to something bigger than they expected.
The three officials stepped down the ramp, and River saw Shepherd Book standing with Mal at the top of the ramp, smiling benignly down on them. He gave a friendly little wave to them, which they did not return as they hurried to their vehicle.
When the aircar had lifted and dwindled away, River pulled the shed doors open and marched to the ship, Matt trailing behind her. At the bottom of the ramp, she said, "I thought everything was already settled."
"It was," the captain replied, "till some midlevel with Three Planets Mining and Manufacturing lodged a complaint with the Port Authority. Seems your little jaunt forced a reroute that made him late for a meeting."
"Oh, gasp," said Matt under his breath. "Heads will roll for this."
"No, but we might have got our shuttles grounded."
The Shepherd smiled thinly. "Not likely, once you explained that one of those shuttles was the home office of a Registered Companion."
"Wasn't enough to get us out of the cookpot. They still wanted to talk to the pilot and check his paperwork."
River knew that, although Mal and Zoë were competent ship drivers and capable beacon navigators, their training was informal and experience-based; Wash was the only licensed interplanetary pilot aboard. And if that license were revoked or suspended, there were a great many places where Serenity would be forbidden docking – including Persephone.
"However," said the captain, "when the Shepherd stepped up, goin over our paperwork with a magnifying glass seemed to interest them a lot less."
"People like a man of God," the old man said diffidently.
River grinned. "Preacher man, you lied?"
"The Lord commands us not to bear false witness against our neighbors. But there's nothing in the Bible about bearing false witness for a neighbor." He smiled faintly. "I didn't have to lie very hard. I just made a few vague statements, and let them draw their own conclusions."
"Well," said Mal, "you can bet as soon as they get back to their fancy office, they'll be heatin up the message beacons to Londinium."
"And they'll find that I was issued a pilot's license decades ago, though I haven't renewed it in years. I'll be given a stern warning, no doubt, and maybe a small fine to pay, but it won't be much. Just a formality." He paused. "But there will be some questions about the incident I'll be expected to have answers for. And I really haven't flown in a very long time. I'll need some coaching before the hearing."
"Hearing?" Said Matt. "When?"
"Three days." Mal said to River in his most captain-y voice, "And till this shakes out, that shuttle doesn't stir. Dong le ma?"
"Ma dong," she said, heart sinking.
His voice softened. "If Inara gets back before then, we'll take Number One out for a few orbits. After filin all the traffic-control fei lao they're sure to shovel at us."
-0-
Jayne had searched the charcoal factory's grounds and buildings for clues. He had picked the Hensons' brains, both for details of the outfit's operations and for terrain features such an enterprise would need for those operations. He had studied his blurry maps, looking for the closest likely spots for the operation to move to. But there was still too much he didn't know.
Something seemed to be off about Ames's maps besides their focus. He knew better than to look for buildings among the foliage in the fuzzy images, but the areas cleared of trees ought to show, and there were none anywhere near. Even the camp they had visited, once he located it on the map, looked no different from the trackless forest surrounding, aside from the natural clearing. You'd think that from above, the second-growth stuff would look different from the older stands of trees, but there was no transition at all. And the weed-dotted clearing on the other side of the stream, with its row of buildings and blackened circles surrounding the kettles, was nowhere in sight on the top-down views.
The closest clearing that showed on the map was only a day's march away. But it was situated on the flank of a mountain; after the loggers had cleared the immediate area, they'd be lugging their wood upslope in every direction. And it was far from water. Next closest spot, miles farther away in the opposite direction, was located in a saddle, and likely had a stream running through it. Men had to drink, Jayne thought. But if he guessed wrong, it would add days to their travels that no one wanted to spend.
The camp they had come upon was located in a saddle with a stream. Men were creatures of habit. He chose the second option.
-0-
Wash said, "You know, I always meant to ask. Where did you learn to weld?"
Zoë didn't answer right away, being half through laying down a bead reconnecting the overhead strut by which an overhead module, presently hanging by its cable, was supposed to be attached. The tip of the welder sizzled white-hot, the light making the eye lenses of her face shield seem to glow. When she finished, she tossed her head to flip the mask up, and regarded her husband, who was working with his hands inside a bridge console a few steps away. "The Army. Some crosstraining feihua, guess they thought they might need a lot of heavy-equipment repairmen in a hurry." She moved behind him to the welding rig, rolling up her cable as she went. Wash couldn't turn to see, but he could hear her stowing the cable and powering down the equipment.
He hmphed and went back to his task, plugging in the electronic module he had just replaced. The work was all being done by feel, since he was working elbow-deep in the console. Fortunately, the half-dozen plugs were all different shapes and sizes, so mixing them up wasn't a possibility.
He smiled as he found another connection and seated it. Another fistful of sparky wires gone. The original design of Serenity's command, communication and control suite had been modular: easy and quick to repair, if you had the cash for replacement modules when they wore out. But after generations of ownership by fly-by-nighters like Mal Reynolds, the ship's C3 systems were full of dead modules and dodgy workarounds that reduced the ship's performance and responsiveness. Of all the people aboard who knew which end of a control yoke to grab, only Wash could fly the old girl in atmo with precision and grace. But if Ames's money held out long enough to replace all the black boxes under the hood and dial them in, Serenity was going to become a lot more nimble and user-friendly.
Still behind him, Zoë added, "Never used it, though. Alliance turned out to be a lot better at taking out our armor than we ever would have guessed. Our tanks were near gone by our second or third battle, and most of our rolling transport too. Before long, the Army started shoving guns in the mechanics' hands cause there was nothing left for them to work on."
Wash's hands clenched around their bundles of wires. As a pilot for the Alliance Navy, his first – and only – combat assignment had been with a ground-attack squadron. On his very first mission, as he had jinked and dodged Rebel fire at treetop level on his way to servicing his target, a sudden malfunction had sent his craft into a power dive straight into the ground. He had spent the rest of the War either in a prison camp, a Core World hospital, or a Navy classroom, without firing a shot except in training. Unless his craft had fallen on someone when he crashed, he hadn't hurt anybody in combat.
But his primary target that day had been a vehicle repair-and-resupply depot, and his secondary the barracks and staging area adjoining it, carrying an ordnance load guaranteed to turn the tanks to scrap and everything else to ash. At the height and speed which he was trained to do his runs, people were almost impossible to see; his targets were vehicles and structures, and it had been easy to think of them as objects no different from the mockups on the practice range. No doubt, if he had completed his mission, he would have whooped at the sight of the fireball behind him, and celebrated with his friends at the O-club afterward.
Wash had never asked Zoë if she had been part of the battle on Taylor. But that didn't stop him from imagining her in one of those camps, diving futilely for cover at the sound of his craft screaming in with its load of death.
"Wai." Her arms rested on his shoulders, wrists crossed over his heart. "I'm right here."
He took a breath and let it out in a huff. "How did you know?"
"I can tell when you've got that look on your face, even when your back is turned." Her cheek brushed his ear. "If I'd been there, I might have been riding one of our antiaircraft guns, doing my damnedest to blow you out of the sky. I think about that, but not much. Now is more important than might-have-been." She pulled gently at his earlobe with her lips, and started nuzzling the side of his neck.
Wash swallowed. "Lambytoes, I've got my hands in a box full of live wires."
"Sounds exciting," she breathed into his ear. "But it still seems like a waste of a particularly good set of hands." She chuckled softly. "We both know, if I let you finish up first, you'll still check your work three times before you close that cover."
Wash's breathing roughened, and he realized he had lost count of the plugs he still needed to connect.
"Always meant to ask," she murmured. "Where did you learn electronics? Your little blonde mechanic? What else did she teach you?"
"I learned this stuff after I got out of the camp. I kind of wanted to be able to tell for myself whether something was fixed right." His fingers searched for an errant cable. "And, by the way, she was nearly your height."
"So you always liked em tall." Her hand slipped inside his floral shirt, and her fingers stroked his nipple. "Bet I know why, too. It's a mystery to me, that a man can look at a woman, and only be interested in one part of her."
"I love every bit of you," he said. "Including what's behind your eyes. You know that. I'm just especially fond of those legs."
"Hm." Her knee rose, brushing the inside of his thigh till it bumped his pigu, then slid aside, her thigh stroking his hip in reminder of where it had been last night. "The legs are pretty fond of you too."
Wash released his work, pulled his forearms out of the panel, turned, and circled her waist in his arms. "The door. Kaylee might walk in on us."
"Not gonna happen," she said, unbuttoning his shirt and sliding it off his shoulder. "I'm fair certain she'll hear us first."
-0-
Royce Henson faced Jayne squarely from two paces' distance, his sons behind him, all in the same dark mood. "All right," he said, "got any more ideas?"
"He was right," Simon said. He looked around at the blackened clearing that still smelled faintly of smoke, and at the rolling ground all around, stubbled with stumps as far as he could see. "They just moved on before we got here."
"They could be anywhere now," said Dell, knuckles whitening on his rifle. "Hell, we might be farther away now than before we set out."
"Doubt it," said Jayne. "Notice somethin missin?" he kicked at the sooty soil and looked over the ring of black circles all around. "Looks like those cookers don't wear out at every camp. Was me, I wouldn't haul em any farther than I had to."
"So." Garrod looked from his father to Jayne. "Start all over, looking for the next likely spot?"
"And the next one after that?" Dell put in. He was about to say more, but his father gave him a dark look, and the boy subsided.
"I don't like the lost time either," the big merc said. "They'll be at the next one, for sure."
"Sure," said Dell, his neutral tone more disquieting than a shout.
"They will," Simon insisted. "The undergrowth here has just begun to come back. They haven't been gone long."
Royce said, "You an expert on plant growth now?"
"I saw what you called fifteen years' worth of it at the last site," the doctor said evenly. "How long do you think they've been gone?"
The father shrugged. "Six months, maybe a year."
"And you have to season cut wood for a year before you can burn it, don't you?"
"They wouldn't have twiddled their thumbs for a whole season," Garrod said. "No charcoal, no profit. They were probably at the next site cutting and stacking a year before the last one played out."
Jayne grunted and headed for the curved row of buildings that partly circled the burned ground. Simon, feeling the Hensons' eyes on him, followed.
The big merc's destination appeared to be a pair of somewhat larger buildings in the center of the row. Simon fell in beside him. "What are you looking for?"
"Somethin that was at the last camp. If it's here too, we got a way in."
"A way in?"
They reached the first of the two shacks. "We ain't gonna just march inta that logging camp shoutin questions. The hwundan might have friends there – or men who think they are, anyway. We gotta go in, find out what we wanna know, an get out quiet like." He pulled open the door, looked inside, and grunted, nodding.
Simon put a head inside. The cabin was divided into two rooms, front and back. In the front room, a long table ran along one wall, with just enough room to stand or sit between. Through the open doorway connecting the rooms, he saw a similar table placed in the center of the back room.
Jayne was already on his way to the second building. This one's door was standing open, with leaves and dirt drifted into the opening. He passed inside, and Simon followed.
The walls of the front room of this shack were lined floor to ceiling with shelves. A tall counter with a solid front stood beside the door. Jayne opened the door between rooms. The back room was lined with shelves as well.
Jayne turned to the doctor. "Know what you're lookin at?"
"A storeroom?" He glanced at the counter. "No. A store."
"Right. And the other shack's an office, I'm guessin." The big merc went on, "Company store's a good idea, in a setup in the middle a nowhere like this. Gives a man a chance to pick up stuff he can't get any other way, and it lets the company get back some of their money. Bet it brings in folks just passin by, too."
Simon nodded. "So that's our way in. But do you think we'll get our answers from the clerk at the trading post?"
"Prolly not. But that's just the start." He leaned against the door sill. "Think about what Garrod said. About the crew."
"He said they'd send men out to the next site in advance, to lay in a supply of dry wood for when they move."
"And what's the rest of the crew doin while they're doin that?"
Simon frowned. "Still cutting trees at the old site – no." He thought a moment longer. "They'd be cutting wood they'll never burn, unless they take it with them."
"Ayuh. Kinda defeats the purpose, neh?"
He thought it through. The loggers must stockpile wood, a year's supply of it, for the last year of their operations. Then when they first arrived at the new camp, they'd build a second woodpile for later, while they made charcoal of the stuff the advance party had laid in. That would assure them of a ready supply of wood in case of unforeseen events as well.
But after that, how did they keep the kilns fed? For ease of transport, the cutting would start nearest the camp and move outward, travel times increasing with distance from the camp. That meant ever-decreasing charcoal production, or…
He said to Jayne, "They can't maintain their output without continually expanding the crew, right up until distance makes the payroll costs of cutting and hauling the wood cancel the profit from the venture. Then they pick a new spot to harvest, start burning their stockpile, and send the cutting crew out to start the process all over again."
The big merc nodded. "And that means they'll be hirin."
-0-
It was the smell that led them to it.
Simon watched Jayne spread his map across his knees for the third time since they had left the second logging camp. Again, they had moved toward water and easy transport. But according to the map, there were several small clearings in this direction suitable for landing a truck, and none of the sites' topographies had a clear advantage or disadvantage. Jayne supposed the loggers might pick the one closest to where they were shipping the charcoal, but they didn't know where that was.
The big merc muttered as he shook the map and turned it in his hands. "I'm a bettin man, but I ain't no gambler. I like the odds in my favor. And I'm startin to feel like I'm playin a rigged game."
"What is it?"
"These gorram maps. Can't even find where ya are on em, much less something you're lookin for."
"He explained that."
"Yeah, well, I think he stopped a little short in his explainin." Jayne's finger touched a spot in the map's mottled greenery. "This is where we are, about. Meadow's here. So how come we don't see the cleared trees?"
"I guess the map isn't recent enough to show them."
"Ayuh. So how old is it?" His finger slid westward to a grassy spot devoid of trees. "That's their earlier camp." His fingertip circled the spot. "How come these trees ain't cleared?"
"There were trees when we went through," Simon reminded him. "Second growth, but plenty of them. Maybe the difference doesn't show from above, at least not through damaged optics."
"Look again, Three Percent. Here's the stream we crossed. Remember what was on the other side?"
"Oh, right." The row of buildings had been there, flanked by the meadow and a burned clearing that still didn't support any greenery. And the big kettles had been standing in a row in the clearing's center. He nodded. "The map predates that camp, then. Ten or twelve years, plus however long the loggers were there."
The big man's voice lowered further, almost to a growl. "And now that we know that…" The blunt fingertip traveled westward on the map, back the way they had come, to a familiar spot that changed abruptly from green to black. "Look closer."
It was the crater where Kaylee and Mina had been imprisoned. Simon studied the rough-edged black circle, then the gray ellipse of cleared land at its center, then the blurry rectangle of the shack's roof near the middle. It was still just as indistinct as ever. "What-"
"Don't stare so hard. Just look," said the tracker.
Simon took a little mental step back, trying to look at the whole site at once. All he saw was the black glass of the crater, the mottled gray of the cleared area, the darker gray of the weathered shingles and the shack's shadow on the ground…
Simon realized he was holding his breath, and let it out in a long soft exhale. "Shadows," he almost whispered. "Outside."
"Ayuh. Prolly just wash on the line along the side there, but…" Jayne's finger hovered over a spot behind the shack, as if unwilling to actually touch it. There was a shadow there too, rather like a nail paring. "There was a whole row of those when Kaylee was there. Ever hear when the first girl disappeared?"
"More than twenty years ago," he said. "But less than twenty-five, I think."
"Well, it looks like the umhuo finished with the first one and got another, judgin by the cairn and the clothesline." He snatched up the map and shook it. "So what the hell is Ames playin at, sendin us out to look for his kid with maps twenty years outta date?"
Simon felt ice in his spine. Could it be… But then another idea came to him, one that the mind didn't recoil from. "Maybe… these are the best maps he has." He went on quickly, before Jayne could interrupt. "He said the satellites are mostly dead. Maybe the one that overlooks the Woods has been down for that long." He went on, "When Ames bought the license to manage the network, it probably came with the ground-based hardware too, computers and such. That would include the database, all the satellite observations since they were put up. The Alliance wouldn't have any use for it, once the terraforming project was complete."
Jayne's brow knitted as he thought it through. "The topo maps, and the ones that show where the lodes are…"
"They wouldn't change. They're still accurate, whether they're five years old or fifty."
"Then that hwundan knows where all the lodes are arready. He's known since he bought the sats."
"Yes," Simon said. "Doubtless he edits most of that information out on the maps, so he can parcel out the strikes over time instead of giving them away all at once, to keep prices from crashing."
"Messin with the supply for profit," Jayne said. "That's Core World thinkin."
Simon shook his head. "He's not cheating his customers, Jayne. He's helping them, as well as himself. If he released those maps unaltered, every man on New Home who owned a shovel would be in the Woods digging up ore. It would glut the market, and they'd be forced to sell at a fraction of true value. A year later, the area would be played out, and everyone would be broke. Doing it Ames's way benefits everyone, by providing a stable price and a steady income."
Jayne tilted a head toward the Hensons, fixing a cold meal by the stream and filling canteens. "Doubt they'd see it that way."
"No," he said. "Maybe we shouldn't tell them. Ames is going to make them rich, but he won't get any gratitude from them for it."
The big merc smoothed the map out again, his expression dark. "Bet the prospectors just shrug off the feioo resolution on the aerial views, cause it ain't what's important to em. That's damn convenient, considerin the gag'd fall through if they was clear enough to make out details. Ya think maybe?"
"It could be just as he said," the doctor allowed. "The sats have been up there a long time, and the sky above New Home is probably full of grit. I don't think any of the other sensing equipment uses lenses."
"Hope you're right." Jayne folded the map and stowed it in his pocket. "Wouldn't like ta think Ames held his business secrets higher than his little girl's life."
-0-
"Hold up." Jayne shrugged out of his big pack and set it upright on the ground against the trunk of a toppled tree.
The deep forest they were presently traveling was mature growth: big trees, wide-spaced, whose greenery filled the sky overhead and left the ground in perpetual shade. The ground was mostly clear of brush, soft and springy with a thick carpet of leaves and occasional dead branches. The rest of the posse, spread out instead of walking in line, slowed to a halt and approached the big merc as he drew his maps out of his pack. Dell grumbled as Jayne sat on the trunk and unfolded the paper across his knees. "You can't change a deuce into an ace by starin at it, Cobb."
"Aright. We're about here," Jayne said, ignoring the boy; to Simon's eye, the big man was looking tired in a way that had little to do with sleep or exercise. "Got three spots look good for their next camp, and we're about equal walkin distance from all of em right now." He indicated the spots, lying in an irregular north-south line to the east. His finger touched the southernmost, the closest. "This one's closest as the crow flies, but there's a mountain between."
"I see it," said Garrod. "So what do we do? Flip a coin?"
Jayne looked up from the map, taking them all in. "I'm open to suggestions."
"This one." Dell's finger poked the middle site. "The way our luck's been running, we won't guess right the first time. That way, we'll lose the same amount of time on the next try."
"And if we guess wrong a second time? We've doubled the length of the third trip." Royce indicated the southern site again. "More, really. This one's only an equal walk right now because we're lined up with a pass over the mountain. From either of the other two places, we might as well go around to get there. That's days extra, maybe another week."
"If we go there first, it's the same extra walk to the other camps." Garrod scratched as his new beard. "Seems the likeliest choice – it's the one most like the other camps – but I sure would like better odds than one-in-three before I settle on it."
"We don't even know if these guys got something to tell us." Dell started to pace, gesturing as he spoke; one arm swept around him in a wide arc. "We been messin around in these woods for a week, and the hundan could still be anywhere!"
"You thought this was gonna be easy?" Jayne folded the map up, a little crookedly, and stuffed it roughly back into the pack; Simon was glad that it was printed on material a bit tougher than paper. "If catchin this umhuo was easy, ya think they'd a let him keep stealin kids for twenty years?"
"So long as they weren't the wrong kids," muttered Garrod. "The Feds would have burned the Wood to catch him, if they'd found some Core World exec's little girl under one of them cairns." He flicked a glance at Simon.
And there it is again, the doctor thought. Simon was no stranger to friction between himself and his co-workers. Both as a gifted student at the top of the class rankings and as a child of wealth and standing, he had dealt with plenty of jealousy and resentment in MedAcad's status-obsessed and cutthroat-competitive environment. He knew he had a reputation for being difficult to work with as well: he was intolerant of sloppy work, and angered by mistakes that could be avoided by study and preparation. He had learned that the best way to handle negative attitudes toward him was to ignore them – unless they actually interfered with quality of care. Then, a showdown was the only recourse, even if it meant not being on speaking terms outside of work with someone ever again.
"Don't expect me to argue the case for the Alliance, Garrod," he said. "Just believe me when I say that it doesn't care who you are – rich, poor, Core Worlder or Rim rat – if you have something it wants, or if you get in its way." He took a deep breath, about to say more, then stopped. He lifted his head, nostrils flaring. "Do you smell that?"
"Smell what?"
"It's the same odor that was all over the last site. Like burning wood, but different."
"Prolly just stuck to your clothes," Royce suggested. "I don't smell anything." The elder Henson glanced around at the others for confirmation.
Jayne inhaled slowly, exhaled, inhaled again. "Dunno. Maybe. Maybe I just want to."
Simon lifted his eyes to the greenery roofing them off from the sky. "If I can climb a tree, I can get above the canopy and take a good look around."
Jayne looked doubtful. "You ever climb a tree?"
"Since I was a child," he said. "River too." Though not for years, and never one ten stories tall. This is going to be a little different from stealing apples out of the neighbor's orchard.
Garrod said, "Considerin what we come here to do, a doctor might come in handy later, if he hasn't already fallen out of a gorram tree. Maybe somebody else -"
"I'm the lightest," Simon said. "I have the best chance of getting high enough to see something." He turned and started up the gentle slope. "It's a little late to start coddling me, don't you think?"
Once he reached high ground, he began looking for a likely tree. He couldn't gauge the forest giants' heights through the canopy, so he selected his tree by trunk girth, judging that the thickest one would also be the tallest. Like all the trees in this part of the forest, its lowest branches were six or eight meters from the ground.
Simon let out a breath, shrugged out of his pack, and removed from it the hatchet Rosh had provided him, which he had been using on the trip to dress firewood. At knee height, he chopped a flat-bottomed notch big enough to stick all the fingers of one hand into. The others came up as he was finishing. He said, "Give me your belts."
Garrod and Royce reached for their buckles. Dell said, "Whatcha want with our belts?"
"I know." Garrod put the tongue of his belt through his father's, making a double-length leather strap. "Do it, Dell. Hurry up."
Simon began cutting a second notch, this one at shoulder height. By the time he was finished, Garrod had all three belts put together and laid around the tree. He brought the free ends around the doctor's back and buckled them. "Ready to try it out?"
Simon nodded and put a toe into the lowest notch. He gripped the belt with a hand on either side and straightened, lifting him a meter off the ground, then snapped the belt upward and leaned against it, holding it – and him – in place. "Too far. Shorten it a bit."
Garrod pulled more leather through each buckle and re-fastened it, until Simon could touch the tree with his hand while keeping the band taut. Simon cut another notch, even with his waist, and put his lowest foot into it. He repeated the process, bringing him a full man-height off the ground.
"Looks rickety as hell," Jayne grumbled.
"I have to reach that bottom limb somehow," he said. "And I left my rocket boots back on Osiris." He began chopping the next notch.
Dell said, "They got rocket boots on Osiris?"
Garrod said, "See, this is why Pa never lets you go to town by yourself."
Simon worked his way up the tree, falling into a steady rhythm: chop the notch, put a foot in, lean forward slightly until the belt just slackened, then flip the strap upward as you raise yourself up. He resisted the temptation to hurry the process, making sure each notch was deep and wide enough to comfortably get the ball of his foot into; he was all too conscious of the fit of his borrowed boots. Half a lifetime of training as a surgeon had taught him to be methodical, and to spurn shortcuts. He tried to keep the bottoms of the notches level or angled slightly downward into the wood. He was very aware that, if his foot slipped out of its hold at the wrong moment, nothing would stop his fall but the ground. Eventually, with his right arm and shoulder aching and his legs trembling and his lower back rubbed raw from the belts, Simon's upper arm was brushing against the lowermost branch.
Here, he was faced with a problem. He couldn't climb higher than the branch with the band around him. He could haul himself up on the limb, but he couldn't let the belt drop because he would need it for his descent. To hang it off the limb, he would have to unfasten it; to Simon, that presented an unacceptable risk of losing it. Maybe he could reach a little farther around the trunk and bury the hatchet's head with the handle within reach of the limb. Then he could let go of the belt as he hoisted himself onto the branch, and the belt would drop onto the handle and hang there until
Pup- voooot.
The belt jerked and came apart, and he was falling backwards. Simon twisted toward the limb and leaped, getting one arm over it. He wrapped his arms around it and clung, feet swinging, while shouts came up to him from below.
"Simon!" Jayne's voice.
"I'm okay," he called, his voice rather muffled because of his chin being ground tight into the bark of the tree limb. He swung sideways and managed to get a knee on top. He pulled himself on top of the limb and looked down while he caught his breath. His four companions' upturned faces were pale blobs against the dark background of the forest floor.
"Ai ya. Damn hatchet landed a foot from my boot."
"Sorry," Simon said. "I didn't realize I let go of it till now."
"Yeah, well, you were a little busy."
He sat up, straddling the limb. "It occurs to me now, how yuh bun duh it was that none of us brought any rope."
"Yeah, hindsight's allus twenty-twenty."
"Looks like one of the belts stretched a little, and let the prong slip through the stirrup of the buckle," Garrod said. "Not sure it'd be safe to use now, even if we could get it up to you."
Jayne said, "Ichi shen hushi. Just swalla your heart and sit tight while we figure out a way to get ya down."
Simon braced himself against the trunk and stood. The next branch was at shoulder height, half a meter away. He jumped and got his upper body on it, then pulled himself up. "I'm sure you'll think of something before I'm back."
The climbing got easier as Simon ascended. The limbs grew thinner and closer together, making them easier to reach and grab. He picked up his pace. After a while, he looked up and down and was unable to see either the ground or the sky, only branches.
The trunk began to sway gently. Simon could hear the surf-like sound of wind in the trees, and occasionally feel the faintest stir of air on his cheek. And the smell he had noticed on the ground became stronger.
About the time it started getting difficult to find a branch that seemed large enough to support his weight, Simon noticed that his surroundings had brightened considerably from the gloom of the forest floor. He began getting glimpses of the world around him through the foliage. Most of what he saw though the swaying curtain of leaves was still green, but sometimes he saw bits of sky as well.
Finally, he could climb no further. He still wasn't in the open, but he seemed to have picked a tree that poked above the canopy, and he could see through the leaves fairly well. Simon was unsure of his direction, having circled and zigzagged across the trunk of the tree on the way up. The hazy daylight coming through the trees was no help. But remembering the topo features of Jayne's map, he tried to orient himself by what he saw through the gaps in the foliage as he worked his way around the tree.
In three directions, the landscape was a roiled ocean of deep green, flowing down and away. Toward what he took to be southeast, the trees pushed up into the sky on the back of the ridge. The wind seemed to be coming from that direction; Simon peered at the ridge, and saw a thick haze of cloud drifting over the top from the other side, dissipating long before it reached him, but remaining heavy as it flowed over the ridge. Not cloud. Smoke.
The descent was rather trickier than going up, and took longer. The day's end was nearing as Simon reached the bottom limb of the tree. "I'm back," he called down into the gloom.
"We heard ya comin," Jayne called up. Simon could just make out the movements of his companions gathered beneath him. they were holding the four corners of a blanket, stretched out.
Simon eyed the makeshift safety net critically. "No offense, but I don't think that's going to break a fall from eight meters."
"You think we're stupid?" Dell called up.
Jayne said, "This is just ta slow you down a little. We're holdin it over a six-foot hole filled with layers of blankets and dead leaves. It'll work. Just drop down on it, nice and easy."
He swallowed, eyed the tiny rectangle of fabric, and crouched. He leaned forward, and his feet slid off the branch. The blanket rushed up at him. He hit it feetfirst and took it with him, and he was swallowed in darkness smelling of dead leaves.
"Wai. You okay?" Jayne's voice, right above him.
"I think so," he said. "I may be a little shorter now." He squirmed and got an arm out, and the big merc grasped it and hauled him out like a doll.
The others gathered around as the doctor brushed off his clothes. Jayne said, "Well?"
"There's a thick stream of smoke coming over the ridge from the other side," Simon said. "It's not moving or spreading like a forest fire would. I think it's charcoal kilns."