“Now then—” He checks his wristwatch again, “—we’re running slightly behind, but I think after all you’ve been through, we owe you at least a question each. So go on—right here, right now, if there’s one thing you’ve been dying to ask, here’s your chance. Nothing’s out of bounds except what comes next in the training; I can’t touch on that. So who wants to go first?”
I do, but I’ve a thousand things I want to know. Sifting through them to find one is tricky. I’m going to wait till the end if I can.
“I do, Dad.” Lys leans forward, perching on the edge of her chair. “You’ve never told me what happened to you and Mum—why you didn’t age for like a century. You always said you’d tell me when I was older.” She swallows hard. “So I’ve been wondering...did it have something to do with...all this? With the Initiative?”
He hits her with a stern, accusing gaze, as if she’s just insulted him, but then quickly softens into his usual easy-going self. “Yes, we’ve both been involved with the Initiative...all that time.”
“That’s a politician’s answer,” observes Sergei. “Just like when Jim and I first met you. You pick at the truth. What she wants to know is...how did you do it? How did you last a century without ageing?”
“That’s a complicated—”
“It’s okay, Dad. You can tell me when we’re alone if you want.” She gives an angry finger-slice-throat gesture across the table to Sergei.
“That’s probably best. But after you ace your final assessment.” He throws her a wink.
Lohengrin puts his hand up. “Sir, while we’re on the subject of parents, I’d like to ask...are mine safe?”
“Last I heard, yes. The enemy incursion hasn’t reached the Wing Worlds yet. ISPA is rallying the IC fleet, but several warp gates have been knocked out, so it’s going to take some time for us to get there. From what I understand, Their Highnesses are busy organising the defence of Rhea. Without the warp gate relays, though, communications are slow. As soon as I find anything out, I’ll let you know. Okay?”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”
“No problem. Anyone else? It’ll have to be quick, I’m afraid.”
“I have a question,” says Rachel.
“Go ahead.”
“Do these damn suits come in any other colour?”
We all laugh at that. It’s something she’s griped about before—the lack of fashion choices.
Thorpe-Campbell blinks at her a few times for comic effect. “No. Next?”
“I have a question,” says Sergei.
“Go ahead.”
“Can I marry your daughter?”
“Hell no. Next?”
The Minsk Machine pouts for a moment, then grins to himself as he fends off mortified looks from both father and daughter.
“Trillion, one last question. Make it a good one.”
I want to know what he knows about my secret—the dragonfly, the sanctum, the blink-and-you'll-miss-them visits to other worlds—but we’ve only time for pop quiz questions. “Okay, sir. What’s the meaning of life?”
“Right, get moving, all of you!” After throwing his hands in the air, which again makes us laugh, he ushers us out of the room. “Pick up your feet, you horrible lot. By the way, that’s the meaning of life right there, Trillion—get your ass in gear, or else.”
“Yes, sir.”
It’s not until we’re assembled up top in the ice cave, waiting for the shuttle to land, that I realise—maybe he isn’t joking.
CHAPTER 14
Rock and a Hard Place
It’s a familiar experience by now, as buggos, to have little idea of where we are, what we’re meant to be doing or how it’s going to turn out. “Thrown in at the deep end” is a phrase that’s come up a lot over the past six months, and boy, is it apt this time!
The five of us—that’s Lohengrin, Lyssa, Rachel, Sergei and me—are in the airlock of a shuttle identical to the one I flew north in over six months ago. It probably is the same one. We’re strapped inside some kind of spherical lifeboat, a carbon fibre cabin protected by several huge, inflating ballonets. We can’t see the ballonets but we can hear the hiss of the gas inflating them all around us outside, and we can feel the sphere tilting on their rising shoulders.
“We’re almost there, guys,” the pilot announces via the lifeboat's comm speaker. “Make sure you’re buckled in tight. The chute will soften your landing, but unless it’s on water you’re gonna bounce and maybe roll as well. Just pretend you’re back in the Hex, on one of the spinning rides. After that it’s all up to you. Your objective, as you know, is to escape the confines of the valley before the other team does—all five of you. You have forty-eight hours. Good luck.”
The knots in my stomach tighten as wind rushing in through the airlock doors buffets the outside of our lifeboat. The screechy warning alarm doesn’t help. Neither does my oxygen breather—it’s telling me to either slow my breathing or check if I’m using the auto-correct exertion function. I’m not. It’s currently set to manual: At Rest/Gentle Walking. To shut it up, I plump for the auto. At least let me panic in peace!
“Hey, Jim,” Lyssa has to yell over the racket, “is that a sick bag over your shoulder?” She does look pale.
“Um, no. I think it's a body bag,” I reply.
She closes her eyes, crosses herself. I throw Sergei a wink. He leans across and high-fives me.
I try shifting position to make sure I can’t when a sudden downward lurch heaves my lunch dessert, rice pudding and strawberry jam, up into my throat. About that sick bag? My eyeballs bug out and we start to spin: insane, Crazy Ivan-style reversals and flips and way too many g’s after eating. I shut my eyes and thank God my harness is secure. All the worst parts of the gigs, all at once, have nothing on this. It crushes me against the hard shell of the lifeboat as if that’s the only solid thing left in a universe exploded into swirling chaos.
The spin stops with a sudden, righting wrench. The lifeboat dances and swings on the strings of its parachute, like a yo-yo enjoying the last gentle spirits of its spent momentum.
It sets us down safely...somewhere. The ballonets catch our fall, then spring, bounce and finally skid us to a complete halt. It sounds like we displaced a few rocks with our landing.
No food, water, communications or weapons of any kind. Then we probably shouldn’t wait around. The others agree. In no time at all we’re out of our harnesses and scrambling over each other in an effort to keep ourselves, and the lifeboat, upright. It’s trickier than you’d think; a big shift of weight inside the cabin could easily start us rolling again.
“This has got to be a part of the test,” says Lyssa, scragging Lohengrin up by his collar to stop him from slip-sliding on the curved floor. “Teamwork. We need to keep this thing balanced while one of us opens the hatch. Sergei—” The whole vessel rolls about twenty degrees as he clambers up one of the walls like a hamster in a ball, “—I said balanced.”
“I’m trying to reach the hatch.”
“Well, warn us next time, so we can coordinate.”
“Sor-ree.”
At the sphere’s current centre of gravity, Lohengrin gingerly rises to his full height. “Rachel, you’re the lightest. Switch places with Sergei—but slowly, very slowly. Good. Now, on the count of three, I want everyone to take a small step toward the hatch. If we all move together, we should be able to keep this thing under control.”
We do as he says, but nothing happens.
“Okay, same again.”
This time the lifeboat shifts and, with a slight bounce and a jerk, settles again. We’re all perched on the balls of our feet, holding our arms out for extra balance, just in case.
It’s Rachel, closest to the exit, who gets to pull the hatch release handle. She doesn’t wait around. We all duck at the sound of a gunshot. It’s really just the ballonet blowing out outside. The hatch doesn’t open right away, though, like we assumed. It waits until all the other ballonets are deflated as well, which
should have occurred to us. This is a lifeboat after all, designed to keep its occupants safe.
Once the cabin has stabilised itself, the door flips open and we see the unmistakable stark red of Martian rock. Rachel climbs out, does a quick scout, then pokes her head back in. “Guys, whatever you do, don’t rock the boat.”
“What’s wrong?” asks Lyssa.
“It’s precarious. Like you wouldn’t believe. I think there’s something gone horribly wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“You need to see for yourselves. But take it easy—we’re right on the edge.”
And just when things were starting to look up...
I peer out.
We’re on a rock shelf high above the floor of a large canyon, facing a fifty metre vertical drop! To be fair, the lifeboat might not have rolled over the edge even if we’d overbalanced. The parachute has snagged on the cliff wall above us, and would likely have held the cabin fast in any event.
It’s a wide, downward trending trough of a canyon. Roughly five miles long and curved, it’s blocked at the south end by what looks like a bottomless crevasse. We can’t see the north end because it’s hidden by the curve, but I’m betting that will be blocked too. The mission would be too easy otherwise. The cliff sides are uniformly high and sheer. A fast-running, rust-coloured river bisects the canyon floor, which was smoothed and carved out by a much larger water flow in a more temperate epoch of the planet’s ancient past. This current river is nothing more than melted polar ice, re-allocated around the planet by its new water cycle, a by-product of human terraforming. Going off its colour, it probably won’t be drinkable. But it’s feeding one hell of a waterfall at the south end.
Lohengrin reckons we might be somewhere in the Kasei Valles, but his reasons for thinking it are sketchy at best. To me, it seems more remote than that. And I doubt Thorpe-Campbell would risk leaving us anywhere so touristy.
Rachel’s right about the “gone horribly wrong” part for another reason, too. A couple of miles to the south, right next to the waterfall, smoke rises from a crashed vessel. It hasn’t just crashed into the canyon floor; it’s been ripped in two. And it looks remarkably like the shuttle we flew here in!
“Nah, it’s part of the test,” Sergei assures us. “A simulation, to make us think this is real. They planted it there.”
“Seems a bit...elaborate for a stunt,” replies Rachel, crouched on the cliff edge, hugging her knees.
“We didn’t exactly have a textbook landing either. What if something did go horribly wrong?” Lyssa’s input leaves us all wondering.
Sergei waves her concerns away. “Listen, they’ve been playing you for six months, all of you, seeing how you’ll react to every little obstacle they put in front of you. Like rats in a maze. And this is the final assessment. You seriously think they wouldn’t go to all this trouble?”
“He has a point,” I have to admit.
“Then we have a decision to make,” says Rachel. “Either try for the crash site, to make sure if it’s fake or not, or continue with the mission, which is to climb out of here.” She studies us one at a time. “I vote we go down to the shuttle. If Sergei’s wrong, there might be somebody in there who needs our help.”
“Yeah, we can’t just assume it’s fake. That’s too big a risk,” Lyssa sides with her girlfriend.
Sergei is having none of it. “Put it this way,” he says. “There are two teams in this thing. Right now Sarazzin, wherever he is, is having this same discussion. And we all know what he’ll decide.”
“Do we?” says Rachel. “Do we really? I mean what if he knows something we don’t, about this being a genuine crash? What if his lifeboat landed before ours and he saw our shuttle go down? Maybe we should try to find him. See what he says.”
“Who? Sarazzin? This is a guy who does whatever it takes to win. While we’re chasing our tails up here, he’s already started climbing out. I guarantee it.”
“Either way,” Lohengrin interrupts him, “we can’t climb up from here. We don’t have any gear, and it’s just too dangerous. So we’re going to have to go down and find another way out of the canyon. Might as well swing by the crash site, like Rachel says, just to make sure. Jim, what do you reckon?”
As much as I want to agree with Sergei—and he might be right—there are some things you just can’t ignore. “Yeah, we need to know for sure, guys. Whether this is all part of the test or not, I don’t care. Unless we’re a hundred percent certain it’s a fake crash, we have to check it out.”
“Then it’s settled.” Lohengrin’s already busy testing the various nooks and cracks in the cliff wall below our ledge for promising footholds. He keeps shaking his head as he glares down. From a puzzle-Meister like him—Lohengrin has one of the highest IQs in the bughouse—it’s not a good sign. If there was an easy way down, he’d have spotted it right away.
“Anything?” I ask.
“Maybe. If we can get to that ledge about twenty metres down, there’s a fracture in the cliff, a bit like a chimney.”
Before I can ask how we reach it, Sergei picks out a slate with a sharp edge and clambers up onto the lifeboat. He starts to saw through the incredibly tough parachute cords. The rest of us search out cutting rocks of our own. It takes us about twenty minutes to cut all the lines free and tie them into one long climbing rope. After triple-checking each of our knots, Sergei secures one end of the line around a vertical outcropping at the rear of our ledge. That’s our anchor, and we all pat him on the back for a job well done—all except Lyssa, who slaps him on the butt.
“All right, who wants to be brave?” I say, stepping back.
There’s a brief, awkward silence before Lohengrin grabs hold of the coiled rope and tosses it over the edge. He swallows as he watches it plummet. “I guess it’s my turn.”
No one argues.
We remind him to use his feet to trap the rope, so it can take his weight. And he does. We tell him to be careful. And he is, inch by breathless, methodical inch, until he’s standing, now kneeling, now lying flat-out with relief on the platform below. He crosses himself, then waves up, and we know it’s going to be all right.
One of Sergei’s most ingenious contributions to our descent is the way he looped the rope around the outcropping: loosely, near the peak of the rock anchor. Because of this, by the time we’ve all rappelled onto Lohengrin’s ledge below, Sergei gives the rope a solid, whip-cracking yank and is able to free it. The loop falls neatly on top of us, ready for us to find a new anchor for the final stage of our descent.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can use on this platform. No jutting rocks, nothing. So Lyssa, being by far the best rock climber of the group—and probably the only one who could make it down from here without a rope—volunteers to be the last to go.
Our solution is a simple one. We all lower Sergei down first, because it will take four of us to hold his weight. Then Lohengrin goes next, lowered by the remaining three. Then it’s my turn, at the hands of the girls. And lastly, Lyssa lowers Rachel, who’s the slightest and lightest of the group. That leaves Lyssa to make the rope-free descent on her own. It’s close to thirty metres, but despite our concerns, she insists she can do it.
No one’s more relieved than her when we share a group hug on the canyon floor, about an hour after exiting the lifeboat, having all gotten down without serious injury. Lyssa’s hands and knees are the worst casualties, owing to the sparse and sharp footholds and handholds she had to seek out. So far, though, we all agree, it’s been a good team effort.
Now comes the tricky part.
“I can’t see any sign of the others.” Lohengrin cups a hand to his brow to shield his eyes from the sun. His gaze follows the river northward, but he can’t see beyond the eastward bend about a mile ahead. The rest of us agree: if Sarazzin’s team is here in the canyon, he’s either deliberately keeping them hidden from us, or they’ve been dropped off at the north end and they haven’t seen us either.
�
�They might even have been in the ship when it crashed,” says Lyssa, making sure our mission glass stays half empty.
Sergei sighs at her. “You all know what I’m gonna say, so I won’t bother saying it again.”
“Smart move, Lunkhead,” replies Lyssa.
“Okay, now I am gonna say it.” The big guy rakes a hand through his hair. “This is so obviously a set-up it’s embarrassing. We just happen to land on a ledge, with just the right amount of parachute cord for us to make a rope to climb down. Then there’s a crashed ship within walking distance. Just enough of a hike to distract us from our mission. I’m telling you, The Initiative has planned this Catch-22 scenario for us. Think about it. We ignore the crashed ship and escape the canyon, we lose, for all the reasons you guys are giving. There could be someone injured or dying in there, and we just leave them without making sure, ohmyGod, how could we, yadda-yadda-yadda. Or we choose to ignore our mission and investigate the crashed ship, and we still lose. Why? Because we took too long and the other team beat us out of here.”
“Yeah, but it’s the same Catch-22 for Sarazzin’s team,” Lohengrin argues. “If this is all a set-up, then they’ll be faced with the same dilemma. It’s like we said, if this is a test, it has to be a moral test. And if it’s real, then it’s still a moral test. So the question is, here and now, what’s the right thing to do?”
Lyssa raises her hand like we’re back in the classroom, then remembers where we are and sheepishly puts it down. She ignores Sergei’s snigger. “As much as I hate to agree with Lunkhead here, I can kind of see his point now.”
“You don’t think it’s our duty to see if the crash is real?” Lohengrin asks.
“I think that’s what you think they want you to think.”
Rachel and I share a puzzled glance.
Star Binder Page 17