by Peter Telep
"Great vertical and near-vertical faces present some of the best challenges, wouldn't you say, West?" Kyoko asked.
"Are you a professional climbing guide or just trying to make me feel better?" he said weakly.
"She think she knows what she's talking about," Penny answered.
"This place kind of reminds me of the El Capitan simulator on the Haldeman. Although the angle's off about five degrees. Which makes this mountain—" Her voice abruptly cut off.
Nathan checked his com panel: system nominal. "What was that, Kyoko? I didn't hear you." He tossed his head back to see her.
"Why didn't they run one on the other side of the mountain?" Penny asked.
"Maybe they did. Maybe we came in so wide that we avoided it," Kyoko said.
"Mind clueing me in?" Nathan snapped, his tone conveying a lot more of his irritation than he had intended.
"Finish the pitch and you'll see for yourself," Kyoko said.
Nathan swore to himself, then yelled, "Up rope!" It was just like Kyoko and Penny to withhold information regarding his life until he was able to see it for himself. What was it about them? Why did he always have to see it?
When he reached their location, he saw it all right, a string about ten meters below them of what could be mistaken for a horribly concealed electronic trip wire. Each glowing, blue, stake-like marker rose six inches above the rock here, the snow there. Spaced about two meters apart, the standard length for a Chig trip wire, the markers raced away into the shadows below them, dividing the lanes of a psychedelic freeway.
As he studied the markers, Nathan noticed a slight fluctuation in the air about a meter above them, a fluctuation that appeared not unlike the heat haze rising off a sun-soaked airstrip. If this is an elaborate array of trip wires, he thought, then the energy field between the markers wouldn't rise any higher than the markers themselves.
"Never seen one of these," Penny commented. "Not your usual buzz-beam field."
"It's the latest in alien defense. And it's exactly what we don't need," Kyoko said darkly.
One of those sudden bursts of wind that she had labeled spirits came howling up the mountain, lifting pockets of snow from their perches and launching them toward the air above the markers. Writhing eels of blue light flickered as the snow vaporized. "Call this electronic concertina wire, ladies," Nathan said. "And call us screwed."
Kyoko reached over her shoulder and unclipped the Motion Tracker from her rucksack. She thumbed on the device, then aimed it at the barrier. "MT estimates the field to be one-point-seven meters high."
"We can't get over that," Penny moaned.
"How long is it?" Nathan asked.
"There's not enough snow blowing into it at the far end to get a clean signal," Kyoko said. "It does run from the base of the duct up here, then it wraps westward around the mountain. It might even make a full circle."
"Well, we can't take out a marker. A break in the barrier would send a signal right back to our buddies below," Nathan pointed out. "Basically, what we have is a six-foot obstacle below us. Maybe we can rappel over it."
"Yeah, and the second one of our ropes touches that field, it's cut just like that," Penny argued, snapping her gloved fingers but producing only a muted sound. "And interrupting the field will probably alert the Chigs."
"Damn, if we just had our chutes, we could base drop over it," Kyoko said.
Nathan looked at her as if what she had were contagious. "A base drop? You mean just push off from this mountain with only five hundred feet and the pull of a rip cord between ourselves and eternity?"
Kyoko covered her freezing nose with a glove and nodded. "Be the fastest way down, wouldn't it?"
"Let's not debate things we can't do," Penny said.
"Agreed," Nathan answered. "The height thing's getting to me. We gotta do something."
"We could follow the markers west and see if they descend," Penny suggested. "Or we could follow them down to the aqueduct and try to do what you said earlier: pass under it. Maybe we can circle around the thin ice there."
Kyoko's brow lifted over the idea.
Nathan fixed both women with a steely look. "I say we didn't climb this far to go goose chasing. I say we get over this damned thing right now."
Staring into her thoughts, Penny said, "If there were just some way we could fix a line over it—"
"In case you haven't noticed, there's nothing below us but the mountain," Kyoko said, peering over her shoulder into the windswept abyss.
"You know, I've been thinking about something," Nathan began. "When my squadron inserted on planet, we made a heck of a lot of noise up there. I was fired upon by one of those sentry satellites."
"Then the Chigs already know you're here," Penny said quickly, an edge in her voice. "They already know we're here."
"Not necessarily," Kyoko said. "Don't forget about the com problems posed by the solar flares. All signals, including those from drones, are affected."
Penny shook her head. "I say it's safer to assume they're on to us."
"Why assume?" Nathan asked, then drew his pistol from its holster, took aim, and fired at one of the markers, blasting it into thousands of glittering splinters. Unlike cheap Christmas tree lights that fail in strings when one bulb burns out, the other markers of the fence maintained their power glow. "Let's move out."
"You are a fool, West," Kyoko said.
He cocked a brow. "Why don't you call me Nathan?"
"I'll stick with fool for now," she said, then leaned over to set a temporary anchor into a horizontal seam in the rock.
"We'd better rappel our asses off," Penny warned. "You can bet they'll send up a fighter."
Kyoko checked her anchor, then turned to face Penny. "It's about five hundred feet down. I say we can do a hundred feet a minute."
A gear ground to a halt in Nathan's stomach. "It was nice knowing you guys."
With that, they set up silently for the drop, and, after exchanging a few concerns, shoved off. Nathan tiled to envision himself as mechanical and designed for the single purpose of kicking off the rock and sliding down the rope, but his concentration faltered as the wind buffeted him and his heartbeat rang in his ears. As he had discovered in class, the hardest part of the rappel is at the beginning. He had to lean back against the anchor at an odd angle for the first few feet until he was down far enough for the line to ran parallel to the surface. This he did slowly, but having opted to go first and therefore being the one to set the pace, he tried his first takeoff and rapid brake, which made him lose his breath in fear.
Rappelling, while purportedly easier than climbing, taxed the nerves to the point of a breakdown. The thought that there was only the temporary anchor standing between him and oblivion probably had something to do with that. Plus, up near the anchor, the line was presently sawing against a not exactly dull protrusion of rock. Kyoko had decided upon the location of the anchor a bit too hastily.
"You're cookin', West," Penny said encouragingly.
"Yeah, for a man who's hanging on a rope that might snap."
"This line's been chemically treated," Kyoko said. "I know that anchor placement is a little off, but don't worry; that rock isn't cutting anything." She had barely finished speaking when an alarm beeped from above. Nathan looked up and saw Kyoko pause to regard the Short Range Radar unit clipped onto her utility belt. "Chigs got a bird in the air!" she said as the SRR's warning tone rose in pitch.
Nathan looked in the direction of the airfield. The plane was just a speck, an ember rising innocently into the leaden sky. But then, with menacing speed, it appeared, a sleek, heavily armed recon fighter, its diamond-shaped frame flashing bits of reflected light from Bulldog's dimly burning sun. The fighter hovered as maneuvering thrusters turned it to face the mountain, then the alien pilots ignited the main engines even as the laser cannons swiveled to bear.
And Nathan had a feeling his problem with constipation would soon be a memory.
"Go! Go! Go!" Penny cried.
Mustering all the force his legs had to offer, Nathan pushed off the rock wall and made a tremendous, zooming drop of at least thirty or forty feet, the kind of drop his instructor had said was made by cocky climbers who had become euphoric about rappelling, the kind of drop that killed most climbers because they did not regard the exercise with both suspicion and respect.
But Nathan didn't have time to regard anything but the great curtain of rock and snow before him. He could already hear the approaching hum of the Chig fighter's engines.
"Don't let up, Nathan," Kyoko said.
"Believe me, I'm not," he answered through clenched teeth, then adjusted the carabiner clip through which his line ran.
With another mighty push-off, Nathan let himself fall. Then, suddenly, his boots hit ground. Out of the shadows had come a rock ledge which protruded some two meters from the wall.
"Get around it," Kyoko said.
"Don't be a backseat driver," Nathan told her, singing the words as if they were the lyrics of a dark, foreboding tune.
Many schemes existed for getting past overhangs. Trouble was, Nathan hadn't had the time to actually practice any of them in class. He had only seen the videos. He could leap into the air with slack in the rope or ease over the ledge, which would put less strain on the rope system. The latter was the preferable method; now, however, the safer path was once again the slower.
After gathering a half dozen meters' worth of slack in the rope, Nathan seized the top line with one hand, the trailing end with the other. He whispered a good-bye to his parents and Kylen. Then he sprang off the ledge.
The rope whipped through his hand as he fell, and when he could have braked he decided to keep plummeting. The rock wall scrolled upward at a rate that made him dizzy, so he looked away, and a tiny tingle in the back of his mind told him to look up.
Penny had narrowed the gap between herself and Nathan to just a meter. Whether she had done so consciously or not hardly mattered. At any second she would collide with him. "Slow it up, Penny!"
"You kidding? Here comes that fighter!"
"Jammer set for multiple frequencies," Kyoko said. "Jamming its scans. Now."
A searchlight wiped over the rock face, passing about twenty or thirty meters west of the group. Nathan suddenly felt like bait dangling on a line, about to be swallowed by Chig laser fire.
And then he came to a jarring halt. His gaze flicked down to his waist. The knotted end of the rope was tightly jammed against his carabiner. They had used up all three hundred feet of line. "Kyoko! Rope's up!"
"Figured that," she said tersely. "Second anchor's already in. Watch your heads. Detonating first anchor."
A tiny explosion, no louder than a single firecracker, echoed off the rock, trailed immediately by falling pebbles which pinged off Nathan's helmet and shoulders. Kyoko had blown loose the first rappelling anchor and was already attaching the rope to the new anchor so that the line would reach bottom. In standard mixed climbing such a switch-over was done carefully, each anchor, knot, and locking clip checked and rechecked. Nathan knew that Kyoko was damning safety measures to hell, and he didn't feel good about that; but to slow down to take precautions only to get blown away by the Chigs would be a brand of irony appreciated only in an afterlife.
"Line's set," Kyoko reported. Here comes your slack. Rappel! Rappel!"
Nathan had to wait until Penny had pulled the slack through her carabiner clip, and then he had to draw the rest through his. If fate had a face, it was presently winking at Nathan, for the moment he was ready to drop, the Chigs found him with their searchlight and fired into the ghost of his presence. The wall where he had been a millisecond prior burst into a cloud of dust and rock fragments that rained down on him even as he dropped away.
"They won't miss the next time!" Penny cried.
Shifting his gaze between the line and the materializing landscape below, Nathan tried to ignore the falling stone chips, the heat building in his gloves, and the renewed knots in his bowels. He grimaced, stopped, pushed off again, and found himself descending more slowly than before.
The searchlight returned, passing over the rock wall somewhere above him. Then he heard Kyoko scream as an orb of yellow fire flashed, then struck the mountainside.
But she was all right and still coming down, the Chig's shot having gone high and wide. Instinctively, Nathan looked over his shoulder in an effort to spot the fighter so that he could ready himself for the ship's next pass.
And he was suddenly blinded by intense light, caught in the headlights like a doe on a desolate mountain road; however, he was anything but mesmerized. He closed his eyes and loosened his grip on the rope so that he would drop even faster. The wind rushed up around him.
A second later, a pair of Chig laser bolts struck the wall in turn. The line jerked left and right and Kyoko shouted something, but he couldn't hear her over the clatter of falling debris.
Out of the corner of his eye, Nathan spotted the tumbling silhouette of what had to be a huge fragment of rock that had been blasted away by the Chigs; it whipped by him on its way toward the snow- and crag-dappled basin about a hundred feet below.
But then he tracked its descent and realized it wasn't a rock. Praying that his eyes had failed him, Nathan looked up to confirm the horror he had just seen.
Penny was gone. The line where she had been was smoldering, and her carabiner clip and melted sit-harness were still attached to it.
Before he could ponder the image further, he detected the incoming whine of Chig thrusters. A meter below him, the rock wall abruptly exploded.
nineteen
"Dammit, Hawkes! Remain in position!"
Shane ordered, wishing she were in Cooper's bunker so that she could choke-hold the lieutenant into obeying.
"But that's Nathan up there!" he shouted back, taxing the limits of her comlink. "I'm reading the signal from his rucksack. It's clean. It's clear. What the hell more do you want?"
Hunkered down on a ridge on the west side of the duct, Shane stared through her NV binoculars at the two figures descending rapidly. Above them, the Chig fighter swooped down for the kill. "Listen, Hawkes. You're reading his gear, and I'm reading his PLB," she started, tossing even a little more steel into her voice. "But they've blown their cover to hell. We're not blowing ours."
"We got no more cover! You kidding me?"
"No, I'm not! We don't have an SSM. Our M-590s would be a joke against that Chig. And that mountain's about a quarter klick away."
"Let's at least meet West and that woman there. Chigs are gonna send out a ground force. We can help them get away."
"Negative."
"They've lost one Marine already! Come on!"
Wang's voice came over the link. "Shane, it's fourth down and twenty. And we gotta go long."
"There. You're outnumbered this time," Cooper said. "Maybe you can sit here and watch your friend die, but I can't! We can't!"
Wincing, Shane watched as the Chig opened fire once more, this time severing the line which held the two climbers. They fell the last twenty feet to the ground, disappearing behind a cluster of outcroppings. They had more than likely survived, considering that they had both dropped feet first.
Turning sharply away from the mountain, the Chig made a single pass over the Marines' location, then shot off toward the airfield.
"Now's our chance, Shane," Cooper urged.
"Silver Bullets. Fall back behind the snowbank for cover," she said. "Then regroup at Wang's position to move in."
"Thank you," Cooper said emphatically.
Shane whispered a curse as she slipped on her rucksack and buckled the waist strap. How the hell was she supposed to explain to Hawkes that she probably cared about Nathan and the rest of them more than any other souls in the galaxy. They had become the family she had lost to the A.I.s. Yes, her sisters were alive, and she often shared in their lives, but they treated her as a guest, an outsider, the tough one who had joined the Marines. She feared she couldn'
t take Hawkes's arguing for much longer; but what she feared more was the idea that something might have happened to Nathan. She could already hear Hawkes's condemnation: "He's dead because of you, Shane. Because of you. There's no one else to blame. You killed him."
Hunched over to remain obscured by the ridge, she jogged farther westward along it, mentally replaying the whole situation of losing Nathan and how she had handled it. Maybe she should have listened to Hawkes. Maybe they should have delayed the mission until they had been able to find Nathan. But they wouldn't have found him. He had obviously landed somewhere north of the duct. They would have been searching in vain for hours, days even.
Yet the fact that she had chosen to go on without Nathan said that she considered him expendable. And she hated herself for that. Why did the damned mission have to come first? she thought. If Nathan's dead, maybe it is my fault. Maybe it is.
What she had tried to do, in order to live with herself, in order to function as a commander, was to bury all thoughts of Nathan and keep busy. And busy they had been, escaping from the Chigs through the ravine and then running intel from the snowbank. But failing to think about Nathan, to acknowledge the loss, to grieve, even, left her drowning in a whirlpool of guilt. Maybe she would apologize to Nathan. Apologize to all of them for what she had done. Would that change anything, though? Would it relieve the feeling that wore her out and made her want to drive the squadron to the brink of collapse? Probably not. It might even make her feel worse.
Balling her gloved hand into a fist, Shane kept running, wishing she could catch up with the accursed devil that plagued her. She had a goal in life: to reveal and exorcise that devil. But it was like trying to get a grip on running water.
Panting, she arrived at Wang's position, a spot along the snowbank similar to her own. Damphousse had already arrived, and her attention was focused through her binoculars. Wang gazed solemnly at his digital compass. "I don't read Nathan's PLB anymore."
Shane waved a hand. "Doesn't mean anything."
"I hope you're right."
"It'll be another minute before Hawkes and 404 come up from below," Shane said, steering the exchange well away from Wang's pessimism. "Do you have any suggestions on how I should pose the question to him?"