Donald Moffitt - Genesis 02

the air lock with a grappling hook in his hand.
    “Stay inside!” Bram said sharply.
    Jao turned slowly around, an incredulous expression on his face.
    “We’d only get in their way,” Bram said. “We’re inside the circle with the nymphs.”
    The curator sat with his teeth chattering, hugging his portfolio to his knees. It would have been an injustice to say he looked relieved.
    Bram went with Lydis and Jao to look out the main port. Methuselah leaped off his shoulder and scampered ahead of him, taking a lively interest in the proceedings. “That’s right, old fellow,” Bram said, patting his head. “We’ve got lots of friends out there.”
    The circle of torches converged inward, making a pool of light as big as a teamball field. Bram saw the flickering nymph figures darting back and forth amidst the shadows of leaves.
    One of them made a run at the perimeter of the circle. It was met by a hail of small thrown objects. It scuttled back and forth, trying to escape, but several missiles found their target. The glass helmet flew apart in fragments. There was a brief greenish snowstorm within the square frame, and the long tubular body curled up in the agony of death.
    The circle of lights moved inward. Bram could see more lights rising above the sharp curve of the branch’s horizon and approaching in ragged lines from the longitudinal directions.
    Another dragonfly made a rush and was driven back by brickbats. The circle of lights contracted again.
    “Throwing things,” Bram said. “That’s what Ame says our treetop ancestors were good at. It gives us a longer reach than creatures like these. They don’t understand throwing.”
    “They’re learning,” Jao said. “Any minute now it’s going to occur to them to rush in a group, and then some of them will break through.”
    Bram glanced at the approaching lights. Reinforcements. He wished they would hurry up.
    “We’d better get out of this system fast,” Jao went on. “Because the next time we meet these things in space, they’re going to be wearing wire mesh over their helmets.”
    Two dragonflies charged the line of defenders, one behind the other. The first one went down, but the second reached the perimeter. Bram saw a man go down, then there was a flurry of activity as a dozen humans swung at the insect with bats and pikes until it stopped moving.
    By now the contracting circumference of men and women had closed up the gaps in the line, and more people were arriving every moment. A hard rain of missiles filled the circle. Bram heard metal ring off the hull of the tug, and something sharp and fast made a small star in the plastic of the viewport.
    “What a pitch,” Jao said. “There must be a lot of teamball players out there.”
    “The gravity keeps changing,” Lydis said. “It must be hard to judge.”
    “The human brain’s a marvelous computer, Lydis,” Bram said. “You ought to know that.”
    The pelting shower of hard objects grew thicker as more people joined in. The nymphs, with their wraparound eyes and their superb ability to detect motion, were good at dodging. But it did them no good when they were bracketed on all sides.
    The flat trajectories of the missiles became shallow arcs as gravity increased. But by the same token, the rain of brickbats from above grew harder and harder.
    The pitchers were learning to act in unison—picking out one or two targets at a time and concentrating fire on them. By the time the nymphs made the concerted rush that Jao had predicted, there were too few of them left.
    These, too, went down under the concentrated stoning.
    The fact that they were bunched together even helped the humans. Bram tuned into the common wavelength and heard a cheer go up. The defenders swarmed all over the battlefield, making a muddle of light. When Lydis opened the air lock door, quite a crowd was waiting outside.
    The elongated figure in the old-fashioned accordion-jointed space suit was Jun Davd. A transparent sack that still held a few unused lumps of metal and ceramic dangled from his hand. He grinned at Bram.
    “Did you get them all?” Bram said.
    “Yes.”
    “There were some that jumped free early. And there are clouds of nymphs out there that the bubble ship shed when we bumped it. They had a net vector toward the tree at the time. I doubt that any of them could survive impact at what the relative velocity was at the time, but…”
    “We’ll search the tree. We’ll hunt them down. We won’t