“Glad to hear it.”
Two carbon fibre boxes, about the size of filing cabinet drawers, breach the surface a few minutes later. They’re buoyed by flotation bags. Sergei and Abs push them to our island and Percy fishes them out. Both boxes are watertight, undamaged, and bear the name Dalrymple.
“Both mine, in case you’re wondering, young ’un,” she says after seeing me clock the names. “Never did trust my dough to ones and zeroes, all that fancypants cyber banking. Fairy dust. What you can’t feel ain’t real, that’s what I say. Anyways, come on. Perce, you take care of the boxes. We might as well go straight to the station from here.”
The android detaches the flotation bags and carries the heavy containers to the dinghy, one under each arm, making them seem as light as kids’ lunchboxes. “You sure you haven’t forgotten anything important at your shack, Abs?”
The old woman shivers as she clips her life-jacket back on. “If I’ve forgotten it, it can’t be that important, eh?”
She ferries us to the far shore and hustles us into a dark passageway that branches off from the main tunnel leading into the station. With her wrist ink she accesses a steel door marked ‘Private—Transport Officials Only’ at the end of the passage. The room inside is stuffy and well-lit. Charts detailing the inflow and outflow of goods and mining ore, train and shuttle timetables, staff rotas, and the IC qualifying groups for the XXXIV Pacintic Cup (complete with final scores pencilled in) cover almost every inch of wall space.
A burly, bearded, middle-aged man sits alone on a tatty old sofa, drinking a slurpy through a straw, with his boots on the table.
“Who’ve you got here, Abs?” He looks and sounds so laid-back, you’d never guess the galaxy outside was going up in smoke. “I’ve only reserved us four seats, like we agreed—me and Jenny, you and Perce. I doubt there’ll be room for even one more, not once the civvies start bidding for last-minute places. You know how it is. Any more trouble out there, Perce? No eleventh-hour desperados?”
“No, Mayor Prendergast. The evacuation seems to be running in an orderly fashion.”
The bearded official gives the slightest of nods. “My guys have orders to retrieve the final vault boxes at 0930 tomorrow morning. I’ve moved it forward an hour. It should give those folks time to collect what’s theirs and make their final arrangements before the last train arrives. We’ll be long gone by then, of course. Long, long, long gone.”
“So, what about these boys?” Abs reminds him while she rifles through the fridge, picking out snacks for us. “I promised I’d help ’em get where they need to go, so that’s what’s gonna happen.”
Prendergast chuckles, dribbling slurpy into his beard. “Feisty right to the end, eh, Abs?”
“You’d better believe it, you shifty little snot—”
“Okay, okay.” He languidly gets to his feet and stretches. “Where you guys headed?”
“North,” answers Lohengrin. “We really need to get back to our climbing party.”
“Uh-huh. North, whereabouts?”
“Not sure what it’s called exactly. It was a pretty big canyon, steep cliffs, with a river running through it—probably the same river that ends at the lake to the east of here, where the levway goes.”
“Uh-huh. How many miles upriver are we talking?”
Sergei jumps in when he sees Lohengrin struggling to calculate (probably trying to be too precise). “About two days’ walk. We had a hard time escaping the caves, so we’re not a hundred percent sure if we followed the same river here. Do you think you can help us?”
The mayor winks at Abs, smiles at us. “Not personally, no. I’m out of time, I’m afraid. But while I’m here, I’m still Mayor. And the Mayor can loan out any civic-owned asset he sees fit. It so happens that Gunther’s has a halfway decent collection of short-range industrial ground vehicles. Nothing big or clever, but if you’re heading north over rough terrain, they’ll be just the thing.”
“Really? We can take whichever ones we like?” Sergei and I nudge each other when the mayor isn’t looking. We’re clearly more excited by the prospect of choosing our own machines than Lohengrin is. The prince nibbles at his chocolate-coated oatmeal biscuits, while we wolf ours down.
“You can borrow whichever you like,” Prendergast corrects us, a twinkle in his eye. “And because you’re likely the last guests Gunther’s Folly will have for a long, long time, we’re going to send you out in style. You’ll need a GPS terrain mapper, spare energy cells for your vehicles, food, water, tents, sleeping bags and...Abs?”
“Way ahead of you, Joe.” The old woman uses her sonic key to unlock one of the deposit boxes. She retrieves a handful of unclipped credit discs (C100) for each of us. “In case you don’t find your climbing buddies, make for either New Stockholm or Fanta Uno. These clips should be enough to buy you a ticket home. But for God’s sake, be careful out there in the red.”
“What she said,” adds Prendergast. “Don’t take chances. If you even smell the weather changing, find shelter immediately.”
“We will. And thank you so much for helping us.” Lohengrin at his most regal and sincere. “If there’s any way we can repay you...”
“You’ll repay us by staying alive and making it through this,” Abs replies softly, distracted by something as she stares at the linoleum floor. “Trust me.”
“Is everything all right?” I ask her.
She looks up at me, blinks moistened eyes. Ruffling my hair, she says, “Don’t stop, Sunshine. Never stop. You keep going and don’t look back. That goes for all of you. You wait around long enough in one place and it will swallow you up. It’ll take every damn thing you’ve got, believe me. Having roots gets you nothing but torn up in the end. So don’t let life get a grip on you like that. Don’t end up like me. Show the bitch your heels instead and see how far you get.”
There her words tail off, and she mutters to herself, nodding, until Sergei asks, “What happened, Abs? Who did you—”
“She lost her husband and two sons in a dry-ice storm one summer,” Prendergast answers for her. “The lads were about your age, tough, from strong survivor stock. But their father lost his way in the storm and none of them made it back. The dry ice deposits gassed out with a vengeance—two-hundred-mile-an-hour winds. No way to ride that out ’less you’re underground. That’s why we’re giving you all the help we can. So you can make it. So you can get home to your folks.”
“And those lads—they were friends of yours?” asks Sergei.
The mayor moves across to the old woman, shakes her arm playfully and tenderly, like a young child bonding, showing affection. “They were my cousins. Abs here is my aunt. This is where we belong—in Gunther’s—but you know what? We can always find someplace else to belong. After all, it’s only rocks and dust, right?”
Only rocks and dust.
That pretty much sums up our journey north in terms of terrain, and what I think of that terrain. As much as I belong to Mars, I don’t want to die here. What Mayor Prendergast and his aunt said about moving on—it’s just not what I figured long-term settlers would ever say. They’ve carved out their home, paid for it with time and blood and tears. They should want to defend it at all costs, against any invasion. But to then turn round and say: It’s only rocks and dust—that flies in the face of everything I’ve come to believe about the colonial spirit.
I’ve always thought our wandering lifestyle—mine and Sergei’s—is the opposite of what most people want when they colonize a world. They want to stake a claim and pass it on to their kids and grandkids. But maybe I’ve been wrong. Maybe they just start off wanting that, then somewhere along the way they realise it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, that a life on the move is actually better.
These are the thoughts distracting me as Sergei, Lohengrin and I rip our way north parallel to the cave-canyon-river system, in a no-brakes effort to rescue the girls (and those lesser buggos). Our vehicles are similar to sand bikes, but slower, more robust and w
ay more powerful. Each has a low-yield pyro thruster that gives one helluva kick if you choke the throttle too hard. They’re surprisingly sensitive on the turn. That’s because they’re really meant for pulling heavy loads in confined spaces where regular tow vehicles can’t cut it. Tough yet nimble, they seat up to three people apiece (plus supplies), so they were Sergei’s and my first and only choice. They’re referred to, industrially, as Pipe Devils. Abs said she used to hate piloting them because the screams their thrusters gave off in cramped mining tunnels used to give everyone splitting headaches.
Out here they’re perfect.
Lohengrin has the GPS terrain mapper attached to his handlebars. Based on our description, the Mayor’s best guess for our canyon’s location is a little over thirty-five miles upriver from Lake Helium. We arrive at those coordinates about an hour and a half after leaving Gunther’s Folly.
But here’s the catch: we’re outside the canyon, if this is even the correct one. Where our field assignment was to escape its confines, our task now is to get in. Luckily we anticipated this. And luckier still, Abs and her nephew more than lived up to their promise to supply us with whatever we needed for the trip. Otherwise we’d never have got hold of the most indispensable tool in any climber’s arsenal. The tasker.
None of us have used one before, but they’re remarkably user-friendly. The tasker is a kind of glorified grappling gun. Whenever you come across an un-climbable section of rock or ice, or you just can’t be bothered climbing any more, you fix the cross hairs on a spot you want to reach and lock the targeting system in. Then you can’t miss.
Sergei’s trying it out for the first time now, so I’ll describe it in action. He fires two shots, a few seconds apart, straight up in the air. The first harpoon’s trajectory is weird but wicked. The cliff wall’s on our left. Imagine we’re the dot at the bottom of a giant question mark. Now trace the shape of the question mark through the air from bottom to top. See how it starts to curve away from the cliff wall before it changes its mind and heads back, straight into the rock. Ping! The whole action is lightning quick, and that last part where it changes its mind and heads for the cliff wall—it’s like a super-powerful magnet in the rock suddenly switches on and sucks the harpoon in with incredible force.
It hits about six feet below the spot Sergei sight-locked. I’ll explain why in a minute.
Rows of rotating teeth burrow the spear tip into the rock and then lock it into position. Then he fires the second harpoon. This one remains attached to the tasker via a winch cable. It follows a similar path to the first through the air but pierces the exact spot Sergei wanted, six feet above the other. Ping! The shaft of this second—and higher—harpoon extends, in segments, to roughly a metre’s length.
Then the first—and lower—harpoon extends to a similar length, only this one sprouts metal ribs on either side. They fan out to form a semi-circular, silver platform.
Finally, with the tasker clipped to his harness, Sergei is hoisted up onto this new platform, a kind of metallic rung on his way up the cliff face. The maximum cable length for each harpoon is two hundred feet. So, in order to reach the summit of our cliff he’ll need several more rungs on his ladder.
Now we know how it works, Sergei can lower himself back down and we can plan our full ascent. All three of us. It might sound complicated, but tasker-climbing is really just a matter of being methodical. For instance, we soon work out how to pre-program up to twenty shots ahead, by zooming in to each successive spot on the cliff and sight-locking them in turn—digital rungs on a digital ladder. This way we can just fire the tasker from each successive platform and it will automatically find our next step up. Or down...into the canyon on the other side.
“What’s the final count?” asks Sergei.
“Three taskers, sixty harpoon pairs in total. That’s more than enough to get us in and out,” replies Lohengrin. “The spearheads all retract out of the rock, right? They’re reusable?”
“Yep. You can do it however you like: take ’em out individually as you go, or leave ’em all in till the end and the tasker can make ’em drop out all at once. Not bad, huh?”
“They’ll do.” The suddenly-hard-to-impress prince puts his game face on as he rifles through our supplies. “Spare harnesses?”
“Check,” I reply.
“Food and water—enough for seven more?”
“Check and check. Spread evenly in our rucksacks.”
“How about reading material for Sergei—” Lohengrin tosses me a wink, “—for when he gets to the top and realises he’s afraid of heights, and has to take an epic dump.”
I stare at our royal friend in utter disbelief. He just said what? The Minsk Machine reacts first, punching his palm in a playful-threatening manner. Then it happens. I can’t help it. The delayed reaction seals the deal. I explode in a fit of laughter that sends me to the ground and doesn’t stop for minutes on end. The others join in. Sergei’s belly laugh is already legend. Hearing it again, all the way out here, and over a joke at his expense made by the most polite and respectful prince who ever lived, is nothing short of priceless.
By the time we’re done, I’m hurting more than I ever did during the river ordeal. But it’s a glorious pain. One I’ll never forget.
We start the most dangerous climb of our lives with grins on our faces.
CHAPTER 19
JSL
Setting foot on the canyon floor again, about half way between our lifeboat and the crash site, is more than a little creepy. It feels like revisiting the scene of a crime. After all, I vaporized two men! Between us, we killed six enemies. There’s an eerie desolation here, as if the canyon hasn’t quite finished with us yet and has been waiting for our return.
We retrieve our harpoon heads and make for the crash site. It’s early evening. Very overcast. Visibility isn’t great.
My brain is so tired after the painstaking up-and-over, I’m practically on auto-pilot as I jog. Dead-awake. There’s no sign of our friends or of another craft. The crashed shuttle still smoulders after all this time, but the stork is a cold cinder.
Our caves appear empty. The bodies of the dead Sheikers are nowhere to be found. But is any of this good news or bad for Lys and Rachel?
“Three possibilities,” Lohengrin tells us. “One, they found a way out. Two, the Hex people rescued them. Or three, more bad guys arrived to abduct them. I think we need to look around for clues before we decide whether to stay or leave. Jim, see if you can find evidence of another ship having landed nearby. You check this side of the river. I’ll cross over and check the—Sergei? What’s that you’ve—”
“I think it’s been left for us.” He totes a small but heavy object shaped like a claymore mine. It’s bright orange. Two lengthy prongs stick out from its underside, while a sturdy antenna dish extends from the top.
“Where did you find it?” I ask.
“In the cave—the corner nearest us. You’d never find it unless you knew which cave to look in. So whoever left it had to know we’d probably find it if we ever came back here. No one else would, but we would.”
“What is it?” Lohengrin and I ask at the same time.
Sergei traces around the edges with his fingers, finds a switch of some kind on the side. He hesitates, looks at us to at least acknowledge this is a risk. Claymore mine, anyone? Then he flicks the switch. The entire front panel flips open like a door on a hinge. Inside, a digital touchscreen shines. It highlights a text message, simultaneously playing the audio.
It’s Thorpe-Campbell’s voice!
“This is a message for JSL. If any of you are alive and manage to find this, there’s still hope. We’ve had to abandon our search, but your original deadline has been extended for twenty-four hours. Repeat, you have a further twenty-four hours after the agreed pickup time to activate this beacon. If it transmits within that time, I will come for you. If not, no one will be left to hear it.
“Know that LRCJJOA are all safely back at base. Sorry the resc
ue took so long. The situation was out of our hands; there was nothing I could do. So, to activate the beacon, you just need to enter the eleven digit code I gave you. In case you forgot it, here’s a clue: It’s something a skivvy would say to J. Good luck and God speed. T.”
Another screen appears, asking if we want to replay the message or proceed to Activation Code—Manual Input. Lohengrin wants to see the message again. “You guys did say Sarazzin went over the waterfall before you, right?”
“For sure. About ten seconds before us,” I confirm.
But he points out Sarazzin’s first initial—C—in the list of rescued names.
“Sonofa—” Sergei sounds more than a little impressed. “He must have found a way out before us, made his way back. At the bottom of the first waterfall—maybe he got out straight away, found something we missed? Then when Thorpe-Campbell arrived and shone a light down there, he spotted him straight away. That lucky little...”
“Lys and Rachel made it out safe. That’s all that matters,” I remind him.
They both agree.
After scanning the message a couple more times, Lohengrin asks if we’re ready to try the code. He knows the answer to Thorpe-Campbell’s riddle, just like Sergei and I do. Just like Lys and Rachel do. It’s one of my worst-kept secrets, in fact. But it’s also something only my friends would know (they’re probably sick of hearing me quote it). And of course Thorpe-Campbell knows that. He’s been listening to me in the Hex since day one.
What would a skivvy say to J?
USE YOUR HEAD
Eleven digits right there, leaving no spaces. To strangers, it’s an unbreakable code because it’s so specific and so personal.
Lohengrin types it in, then hits ACTIVATE.
The teeniest bip—bip—bip emerges from inside the beacon, while a worm-like green pulse zips around the edges of the device. Sergei sits cross-legged on the bare rock between river and cliff, cradling our last hope. We’re well into our third day since the lifeboat landed. Maybe a couple of hours remain before the final extended deadline lapses and we never see Lys and Rachel again.
Star Binder Page 23
