Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

at his ship. He turned the breaking 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 half 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 viewpoint 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 viewpoints were filled with dragonfly faces, boxed in glass. Armored claspers hammered at the hull.
    “We’re covered with them,” Lydis said. “They must have swarmed over us when we jolted them loose.”
    “How many?”
    “I don’t know. Tens of them, maybe.”
    Jao assumed a noble pose. “We can’t take them back with us. We’ll have to—”
    “Too late,” Bram said. “Some of them are already breaking free. They can drift down to Yggdrasil on their own.”
    “There’s only one thing to do, then,” Lydis said. “Deliver them to one spot.”
    She conferred by radio with Jun Davd. The outside defenders were alerted. They were all keeping their eye on the approaching tug. A flare went up to indicate where Lydis should try to land.
    It was tricky. Fortunately, they were headed toward the leading edge of the tree crown, so there was no danger of sliding down the effective side of an accelerating object and falling into the photon stream. But Lydis had to contend with a rough landing field whose surface was rising toward her at an increasing but unknown rate and whose counterfeit gravity was mounting by the second.
    Jao tried to help her with the variables and derivatives until she told him to shut up and let her concentrate.
    Below, where the flare had been, Bram could see a ring of bobbing lights—men and women with torches. The ring expanded, dispersed, as the defenders scrambled outward, away from the touchdown point.
    From all directions, other lights converged on the target ring as other defenders abandoned their positions and came to help.
    Bram waited out the descent, sweating. A nymph scrabbled at the viewport opposite him and seemed to be making progress in creating a loose place for prying away the frame.
    Then the nymphs were hurling themselves away from the hull, abandoning the tug before it touched down and spreading outward to get away from the rocket blast.
    “Hold on!” Lydis cried.
    She cut the drive twenty feet up, motionless in respect to Yggdrasil. But Yggdrasil continued to accelerate, and when it met the undercarriage of the tug, there was a respectable jolt. The tug settled into a nest of charred leaves, broke through smaller twigs, and came to rest at a crazy angle.
    Bram hoped the landing had been as hard for the nymphs that had jumped ship before the impact. He saw one snatch at a twig, miss it, and smash its glass helmet against a projecting branch. But other nymphs were managing to land right side up or to grab branchlets with their four legs and abdominal claspers and swing themselves around.
    “Let’s go!” Jao roared, and he headed for