grinned viciously. 'We spit at them! And someday we'll pay them back! But meantime I love you people, and what we've built here! So it's time to take a night off and… party!' The crowd whooped.
A makeshift band of drummers and wooden flutists started a pounding, hooting beat, and some of the assembly began to awkwardly dance in the sand. Fermented plant juice was passed out, forgivably awful because it was so fiery. A bonfire roared in the night. Daniel studied the cliff face above Rugard's cabin. It was dark, a slab against the stars.
The Warden worked the crowd and then came up to Raven. 'Why isn't it working yet?' he growled quietly.
'I'm almost there.'
He grasped her hand that held a cup and tipped it forcefully toward the sand. His grip was like a vise. 'I don't want you drinking tonight. I want you up at the cabin later, with me, getting that transmitter to work. The compound will be hungover and half-conscious tomorrow. We can't take all of them, so it would be a good time to slip away without saying goodbye. Understand?'
'You're willing to leave these people you love?'
'I'm willing to leave my own mother to get out of this dung hole.'
'I'll come to you later.'
'You'd better. I'm watching you, bitch. Don't think about leaving without me.'
'Relax, Warden.' She smiled tightly, her wrist twisted. 'We're working together, remember?'
He looked at her intently, his gray eyes like hollows. 'Don't fuck with me.' Then he dropped her arm and moved away.
Her group danced, to be seen. Except for Raven, they pretended to drink, to be seen. And then Daniel, Tucker, and Ethan slipped quietly away into the dark, one by one, even as the noise of the celebration grew. Sparks wafted up to dance amid the stars. Raven and Amaya drifted through the crowd, laughingly fending off advances and keeping an eye on the hill to Rugard's cabin.
Sometime after midnight the women met in the shadows, wary and tense. 'I can't find Ico,' Raven reported. 'I haven't seen him for an hour.'
'I don't think he's one for parties,' Amaya said. 'He told me he was getting more supplies before going to watch Rugard's door. You should have seen his pack when we started. He brought everything.'
'I haven't seen the Warden, either.'
'He's hanging on a new concubine. Drina looked furious.'
Raven looked out into the dark, feeling her sore wrist. 'Ico wants to get back very badly, doesn't he?'
'I think he's angry. He wants revenge.'
'I hope he's not so angry he does something foolish. Did you move the supplies away from the boulder cluster, like I told you?'
'Yes, but I don't understand why.'
'And try making what I suggested?'
'Yes. I don't know if it will work.'
'Good. Hopefully none of it is necessary. I'm going to get the activator. We'll meet the men with the transmitter and slip away.'
'Then why the precautions?'
'Because it may be more difficult to get out of Erehwon than I would like.'
The monolith that formed the sheer cliff at the rear of Rugard's cabin was more a steep slope on its opposite side, its rock the texture of sandpaper. A watercourse that funneled periodic thundershowers down the face of the rock had made enough of a crease in the formation to give Daniel, Ethan, and Tucker a desperate chance of scaling it. They shouldered the ropes that Raven had liberated from a compound warehouse and then started their climb at a dead run, sprinting up the rock's lowest slope with a momentum that took them to a pool in a fold of rock thirty feet above the surrounding sand. They clung to its rim.
'You okay?' Daniel asked the others.
Tucker looked around at the bare stone. 'No snakes so far.'
'I don't think a flea could cling to this dildo,' Ethan said, looking upward at the pale formation rising like a horn. 'How the hell are we going to get up this, Daniel?'
'Friction.'
The watercourse gave them just enough of a dent to brace themselves as they wedged upward, and the rough texture provided a tenuous grip. None dared look down. Daniel's sweat left a trail of dark droplets and Ethan breathed in short gasps, his muscles trembling from the tension. Tucker grunted with the effort to keep his bulk from sliding back downhill. There was enough slope to give them purchase, but it was like climbing a funnel, gravity trying to pull them toward a dark drain. The night was cool, the stars cold, and yet Daniel was hot from the exertion.
At least the view was extraordinary, he noticed when he glanced up. Other monoliths in the cluster of rocks gleamed gray in the dark like the domes of a religious sanctuary, their canyons and valleys lakes of shadow. The sky vaulted down and the desert horizon climbed up to tie into one vast sphere of ghostly luminescence, the rock he clung to at the center of this spectral universe. It was as if he was climbing the crest of a floating asteroid, he thought. His goal, the summit ahead, seemed to lead to space itself. The effect was dizzying.
His floating reverie was interrupted by a scrape and a muffled curse. Tucker was sliding backward down the chute. 'Damn!'
Daniel tensed, praying. After several yards the big man managed to brake himself, abrading his arms and legs to keep his precarious contact with the rock. He skidded to a halt.
'You okay?' Daniel inquired quietly.
There was a long silence. 'I'm okay. I can tell by the pain.'
They started up again. It helped to keep eyes to the stone. There was one short stretch where the pitch was nearly vertical and they climbed by pushing against almost imperceptible undulations in the surface, straining from the exertion. Then the slope began to ease and finally to flatten. Daniel crawled shakily onto the roof of the monolith, his muscles rubbery. The surface of its crest was rough but basically level, eroded into shallow depressions that held pools of water separated by ridges of tougher rock. In the compound below figures still staggered drunkenly in the dying firelight. He felt horribly exposed, yet it was unlikely anyone could see him in the darkness. Dropping to his knees, he made his way to the far edge. Here the rock tower dropped straight down to Rugard's cabin, completely black in the night. There was no light from the house, and none from the brush nearby.
It was like dropping into the dragon's den.
'Gawd,' Tucker said as he came up next to Daniel. 'If my ass had puckered any more on that climb I would've collapsed on myself like a black hole. This is the craziest damn thing I've ever done, you know that?'
'A computer would never do it,' Daniel agreed. 'But it's not as crazy as me going down there.' He peered into the darkness. 'I can't see a thing, but I have to hope the transmitter is really down there and everyone is gone, drunk, or passed out. Rugard hasn't shared our secret, I'll bet, so nobody should be particularly alert. You're going to have to lower me as I rappel, and Ethan will help feed the line. Then you can both hoist me up. Can you do that?'
Tucker considered. 'I can brace my legs against these little ledges up here. I won't be able to see anything though, so I'll just lower until Ethan says you're down. Ico's keeping an eye on the front door?'
'That's the plan.'
Tucker began flaking the ropes loose in businesslike fashion while Ethan used knots to join them. Daniel tied an end around his waist and crotch vaguely similar to his memory of the rappeling harness he'd used on vacation. Backing down a sheer cliff was not as difficult as it looked, he reminded himself, so long as you were sure the partner feeding the end from around his waist was absolutely dependable. He hoped Tucker's snake venom had thoroughly worn off.
Daniel stood, saluted his companion, and walked backward as Tucker fed out the rope. He paused on the edge, double-checking his knots. Not exactly just another day at Microcore. Then he leaned back into space. His legs were braced against the cliff, his body straight, and the taut rope cutting into his waist was all that suspended him from eternity. The helplessness of it- the requirement for implicit trust in another human being- was
