by Nick Cole
And G232 had listened to their every word.
“If our navigational tracking was unable to establish the master’s course, I do not believe the super-destroyer will be able to do better.”
Lyra sighed. She’d had this discussion with the bot before. And while G232 didn’t seem to tire of repeating itself, she longed for something new. Something more substantial. “The nature of Tyrus’s departure and the high alert of all forces in the sector in the aftermath of the mech’s rampage would have allowed the gathering of enough data to provide likely jump solutions.” The AI was quick to add, “Not for one hundred percent certainty, of course.”
“The master and his… acquaintance could be off on a wild goose chase, miss,” G232 reminded her, with no small amount of sobriety.
They had discussed this possibility and many others in the hours after Rechs’s escape. Lyra was concerned for her captain. He had departed the ship without his usual array of weapons and without any of his armor, the latter of which the little Nubarian bot had fawned over while attempting some sort of repairs.
“In my experience with the master…” G232 stopped itself. “I mean the captain, I have found that it is best to simply do as he says. It is undeniable that he attracts a high volume of blaster fire and animosity. The likelihood of him being in a blaster fight at any given moment is far above that of an average humanoid. However, once that fight begins, I assure you the math is quite in our master’s favor.”
“I believe he is in danger, G232,” said Lyra. “We have the tools he needs. I believe that in our service to him it is advisable that we power up in time to leave storage and follow the super-destroyer to its destination. I contend that in so doing, we will likely find Captain Rechs.”
G232 paused as if considering. “Ah, I see your point, miss. I find myself agreeing with your conclusion. However, should we get close to the… er, captain, the overwhelming firepower possessed by the Republic super-destroyer will surely be aimed at us. I am not programmed for combat. And I do not wish to be.”
The engines of the souped-up old freighter began to hum to life.
G232 looked around as if this was a sound it had never heard before. “I see you’ve made your choice, miss,” it said, rather morosely.
The bot leaned close to the nav computer and whispered, “One wonders why we weren’t afforded a vote.”
***
The first thousand feet up the side of the rock was a study in madness. The staircase got narrower and narrower until Rechs was literally inching his way up the curving face, following the hewn rock as it climbed steeply into the mist ahead. The swirling greens seemed to have followed him up—they were everywhere now—and Rechs found himself unable to see more than a few meters ahead.
Eventually the stairs widened, allowing Rechs to relax his cramped and tension-racked muscles. But with that relief came a new obstacle that almost made the bounty hunter long for more of the narrow stairs. What could only loosely be referred to as a bridge swung before him. Its ropes were frayed and mildewed, and its boards looked rotten and none too stable. But there was no other way to go besides down, and if Rechs was going to move in that direction, he might as well make the trip a fast one.
He started across the suspension bridge, hoping it would hold his weight at least long enough for him to leap across to the rock wall on the other side of the gap. But not ten feet out he was rewarded with the thunder-clapping snap of an ancient board giving beneath his boot. His stomach dropped as he held tightly to the two guide ropes and shifted his weight onto his back foot. He looked down in a vain attempt to watch the broken board tumble to the bottom, but though he heard it clattering against the mountainside, its descent was veiled by the mist.
And then the board he stood on—what he imagined to be the stronger board—snapped as well.
Rechs felt all of his weight go out from underneath him. He hung, suspended over the boiling cauldron of green mist, a hand gripping each rotting guideline. How well would these now hold him? His muscles began to tremble as his feet dangled in midair over a thousand-foot drop.
With a quiet creak, one of the ropes began to fray and unwind. The bridge dipped down several feet at once.
His heart racing, Rechs pulled himself forward. He planted a foot on the next ancient board just as the frayed rope gave out. The remaining guideline was far from sufficient to hold Rechs’s weight on its own, and snapped in two behind him. Just like that the bridge split in half, and Rechs, gripping the ropes with all his might, flew down and toward the far wall of the gap as though swinging on vines between trees.
He turned his body so his shoulder slammed into the rock, but still the collision caused an agony of blunt pain. The ropes frayed further, dropping Rechs and causing his shoulder to scrape against the mountainside. His shirt tore, and blood trickled from scoured skin.
He scanned the rock face frantically. The ropes could not be relied on for more than a few seconds more. He spotted handholds in the rock and leapt to them just as the bridge lost its moorings and tumbled down into the misty depths.
Chest heaving, breath coming in gasps, Rechs clung to mist-moist granite. He needed to catch his breath. He was red-lining on fear and adrenaline. Though his fingers ached, in time his breathing stabilized, and he heard nothing but the soft sigh of the wind as it moved the mist along the rocks.
It was a lonely sound, made more so by the state Rechs found himself in. Clinging to the face of a massive rock, no trail in sight. But he knew which direction he needed to go.
Up.
He knew that much.
And then he heard the laughter, dry and smoky like the crackle of burning leaves in fall. It drifted down from high above the upper reaches of the jagged crevasse. And then it was gone.
Rechs craned his neck to look straight up. All he saw was mist.
Maybe that’s for the best, he told himself. It meant that he was hidden from the laugher just as much as the laugher was hidden from him.
He didn’t like the idea of someone waiting up there for him, but his body told him he couldn’t hang on the side of the cliff face forever. It was time to move.
Shut up, I’m climbing, Rechs responded. Willing his body to fight past the pain and fatigue, he ascended.
It wasn’t the worst climb he’d ever experienced. He’d done tougher. But as he worked the face from position to position, testing rocks and crevices to see if they would hold his weight as he levered himself up along the wall one hold at a time, he decided that it was the most ill-prepared he’d ever been for a climb. At least in those other experiences he’d had gear. Picks, carabiners… power armor. Even chalk. Free-climbing was a whole different animal. Just your fingers, boots, and the stone.
At last, breathing hard, he pulled himself up onto a ledge and just lay there. The mysterious laughter was in the back of his mind, telling him to be ready, because in this weakened condition, he could be undone. But the only sound in the deeps of the high misty canyon was his own panting breath. Still, he pushed himself to his knees and looked to see where he should go next.
It was apparent that the only way forward was going to require some faith. The side of the crevasse was devoid of any further handholds or fissures. It was as though the monks had specifically taken pains to remove anything that would aid a climber. At least, anything that would aid a normal climb.
What they had provided was a series of square-cut, horizontal pillars carved out of the mountainside. Rechs could jump from his ledge onto the first of these pillars, and then jump again to the next one, each pillar rising a little higher than the last. It was a trail meant more for a mountain goat than a man.
But Rechs had no other options.
He leapt to the first pillar, miscalculating how wet it was. He nearly slip-slided right over the far side, saving himself only by buckling his knees and falling straight on his rear. The pillar was perhaps a
meter square, and Rechs sat at the very edge. Looking down, even with the mist below, was vertigo-inducing, so Rechs maintained his gaze on the next pillar.
He rose to his feet and made three more leaps, each larger than the last, before he needed to rest.
The canyon walls had come close enough together for Rechs to see that he was climbing up inside some kind of wide fissure. He’d lost all sense of measurement and had no idea how high he’d climbed. Or how far he would fall if he made even the slightest mistake.
And who was to say if he was even on the right track? What if he was just off climbing some natural phenomenon? Or an ancient trap in the course that had been laid out to deal with the un-enlightened?
Or simply a dead end?
A gust of wind carried away the gathered mist. Rechs heard the sound of canvas flapping in the breeze, recognizing its sudden drumbeat. The sound grew in frequency, if not intensity, as though more flags—or whatever they were—were being caught in the wind.
Rechs peered up into the thinning mist and spotted three dark figures, hooded and wearing robes like shrouds. They were coming down the mountain walls on ropes that looked to be little more than black and gray sheets tied together in knots. They were rappelling, bouncing down the rock face, with an ease that didn’t seem possible. That seemed almost reckless.
Then, almost as though unrolling itself from some carpet, the lead figure came at Rechs, its line of rope flaring out like a tongue of black fire. The man looked to be in free fall.
He moved with such surprising speed that Rechs wasn’t ready for the kick aimed at his face. The bounty hunter had to windmill his arms to keep from going over the edge. He grabbed his face and felt blood pooling in his mouth.
The attacker had already spun away, swung off to the opposite canyon wall, and was rebounding to come back in for another strike. Above, the other two were unfurling their scarf lines and dropping in fast.
Rechs leapt, forcing his powerful legs to elevate him above the first attacker. He took hold of the line, dangling above the man, and cut the rope with a savage yank.
The man fell into the fog below. He didn’t scream as he was swallowed by the greedy mist, but his body sent up a resounding thump as it crashed against some hidden rock, a farewell before continuing its tumble to the bottom.
The other two, seeing what had happened, halted their descent by some unseen means and drew swords. It was clear to Rechs that they had decided to treat the bounty hunter to a taste of his own medicine by cutting the line he now swung from.
He planted his feet against the mist-slick side of the crevasse, but rather than pushing off to engage, he began to haul himself up hand over hand along the rope of scarves. The fiber they were made from felt unlike anything Rechs had ever experienced. Cool as silk, and tough as Legion cord, the rope glided through his hands as he raced to get ahead of the ninjas now swinging in.
The first one beat Rechs by a slim margin. He wrapped his arm in Rechs’s rope and his leg in his own, then swung his gleaming, curved blade at the thread of life from which the bounty hunter dangled.
Knowing what came next, Rechs let go of the line and grabbed the man’s free leg. Using his knife like a climbing hammer, he slammed it into the man repeatedly, pulling himself up with each strike as the ninja screamed. The attacker dropped his sword, and his limp body would have fallen to the bottom with Rechs along for the ride had he not wrapped his arm and leg in the ropes.
Rechs pulled himself over the dying man’s shoulders, grabbing both ropes now. The ninja, pale from the bloodletting, could only feebly watch as Rechs cut him loose, sending him down into the fog to litter the bottom of White Plum.
The remaining ninja, on the other side of the crevasse, let go of his line and leapt like some fantastic puma for the wall above Rechs. Miraculously, he held on and began to inch along the wall toward Rechs’s lines, his sword still on his back.
Rechs thought about how much easier this might have gone for him if he hadn’t left Jacobson his blaster.
He pushed himself off the wall with both lines and swung back to the other side of the crevasse, only taking his eyes off the ninja above long enough to land with both boots. He was cold and tired and didn’t feel like there was much left in him. But he ignored all the weakness his body screamed on about. He knew firsthand just how much farther he could go. There was no room for weakness up here on the rock, high above everything. There was no room for it in the galaxy.
When he looked up, the ninja was on his lines.
33
“Ball, old man?” asked the ninja above Tyrus Rechs, both lines in his hands.
Rechs hung there, completely at the mercy of the hooded man.
Ball.
“You’re…” The Dragon.
“We knew you’d visited us,” said the Dragon, his voice sounding clear above the mist, above Rechs’s heavy breathing. “Not then, but later. Once they allowed us more access to the galaxy, to better become you. We understood then.”
Rechs said nothing. If the Dragon wanted him dead, he’d be dead now. He might as well do what he could to find a handhold in the rock while he still had the chance. But there were none. So he began to climb the ropes, staying in the game until he was forced out of it.
“On that day,” the Dragon continued, seemingly uninterested in Rechs’s climb, “when I came into the forest to find the ball we were using for our game…”
Every time Rechs looked up, he seemed no closer to the Dragon. He was always the same distance away. The Dragon was obviously climbing to stay above him, but was showing no signs of exertion.
“… I only wondered who the stranger was.”
Rechs’s fingers were cramped and numb, and a small dark cloud kept trying to push itself into his vision. He fought hard, controlling his mind and forcing himself not to look at the cloud. Because the cloud said…
Let go. Just drop and it’ll all be over.
You can rest while you fall.
“Imagine my shock,” the Dragon continued, almost conversationally, “when as a legionnaire in Basic, they taught us the history of the Legion. Y’know that one course where you learn about the battles and the dead who earned the Order of the Centurion. About the flags and their meanings. The hall with all the portraits of all the dead heroes. Imagine, General Rex, when I found out it was you in the forest that afternoon.”
Rechs’s arms shook uncontrollably. It took the last of his ebbing strength to keep his hands closed tight around the ropes.
Imagine, the raven whispered in his mind.
No, Rechs roared at himself. Not a raven. The Dragon.
Anger surged into him. Meaningless anger he had no right to. But it was what he needed if he was going to get off this rope and reach flat outcrop.
Ten more meters to go. Dig deep. Fight.
How dare this kid start another war!
“And with enough digging,” the Dragon continued, “we figured it all out. The ones of us who were left at the time. There are even fewer now. But still… we figured it out, General. Who you were. Who we are.”
Ball.
Papa.
Rechs had called his own father that long agomillennia before. Back on Earth, when such a place still existed.
“I was wrong,” grunted Rechs as the final embers of his strength looked to be quenched and he had nothing left but all the old sins that had come to haunt him. “I should have fought them. I should have fought for you.”
The Dragon.
Jacobson had called the kid… his son.
“Imagine that,” said the Dragon, a definite chill in his voice.
Rechs’s strength was gone. He could climb no more. All he could do now was hang on the lines. For a long moment he twisted there in the soft wind that had come up through the crevasse, pushing the fog around to curl and writhe along the face of the gray rock all about.
When he finally looked up, the Dragon was gone.
But Rechs heard his voice.
“Go home, old man. You were nothing to me then, and you’re nothing to me now.”
“Then,” Rechs managed to croak out, “why?”
“I owe you enough to let you live. This one time. Go home. There is a war coming.”
Rechs heard the padding of the Dragon’s feet up the crevasse wall. And then it stopped. The Dragon called down, his voice much more distant now. “You should have fought for us, General. We would have loved you. We would have died for you.”
And then Rechs hung there alone, drifting from side to side, gently swaying in the breeze as he waited for his strength to either return and save him… or forsake him as the Dragon had.
***
Rechs’s comm chimed.
Jacobson was on the other end, able to reach him in a comm-to-comm transmission. “So that’s him. Target confirmed.”
“Yeah,” grunted Rechs, still not feeling up to the climb.
“You’ve been a help to me, Tyrus.” Rechs noted she wasn’t calling him General anymore. “So I’m going to do you a favor in return. In about five minutes you’re going to see a super-destroyer overhead. You should surrender when it arrives. And if you can convince the Dragon to do the same… so much the better.”
“I knew you sold me out.”
“I never bought in, Tyrus.”
Rechs grunted.
“There’s no way off this rock for either of you. But this can still happen the hard way if that’s the way you want to go out. It’ll end very badly for a lot of people, though.”
She didn’t know the half of it.
Rechs wanted to lower his head and lean it against the rope. Just swing for a little while, feeling sorry for himself. But there wasn’t room in the galaxy for that kind of weakness. It would eat you up. So he started climbing.
