hammock, the tough material of the groundsheet easily supported our weight, even with all the contortions I had to go through to get Anders into the sleeping bag. Once she was safely ensconced, I found that evening blue had arrived. Using a torch, I explored the crevasse, finding how it rose to the surface at either end. Then the danger from octupals, stirring in the sump at the crevasse bottom, forced me back to the tent. The following night was not good. A veritable swarm of octupals swamping the tent had me worrying that their extra weight would bring it down. It was also very very dark, down there under the mist. Morning took forever to arrive, but when it eventually did, Anders regained consciousness.
“They tried to kill us,” she said, after lubricating her mouth with purified water.
“They certainly did.”
“Where are we now?”
“In a hole.” She stared at me and I went on to explain the situation.
“So how do we get out of this?” she eventually asked.
“We’ve both lost our claw frames, but at least we’ve retained our oxygen bottles and catalyzers. I wish I’d told Tholan to screw his untraceable com bullshit.” I thought for a moment.
“What about your palm com? Could we use it to signal?”
“It’s his, just like the claw frame I was using. He’ll have shut it down by now. Should we be able to get to it.” She looked up. Her backpack was up there on the slab, up there with the gabbleduck.
“Ah.”
She peered at me. “You’re saying you really have no way of communicating with the citadel?”
“Not even on my blimp. You saw my contract with Tholan. I didn’t risk carrying anything, as he seems the type to refuse payment for any infringements.”
“So what now?” she asked.
“That rather depends on Tholan and Tameera… and on you.”
“Me?”
“I’m supposing that, as a valued employee, you too have one of these implants?”
Abruptly she got a sick expression. I went on, “My guess is that those two shits have gone for my blimp to bring it back here. If we stay in one place, they’ll zero in on your implant. If we move they’ll still be able to track us. We’ll have to stay down low under the mist and hope they don’t get any lucky shots in. The trouble is that to our friend down here we would be little more than an entree.”
“You could leave me — make your own way back. Once out of this area they’d have trouble finding you.”
“It had to be said,” I agreed. “Now let’s get back to how we’re going to get out of here.”
After we had repacked the blister tent and sleeping bag, we moved to the end of the crevasse, which, though narrow, gave easier access to the surface. Slanting down one way, to the graveled banks of the river, was another slab, bare and slippery. Above us was the edge of the slab we had rolled from, and, behind that, disappearing into mist, rose the wall of stone I had earlier descended. Seeing this brought home to me just how deep was the shit trap we occupied.
The citadel was just over two hundred kilometers away. I estimated our travel rate at being not much more than a few kilometers a day. The journey was survivable. The almanac loadings I’d had told me what we could eat, and there would never be any shortage of water. Just so long as our catalyzers held out and neither of us fell…
“We’ll run that line of yours between us, about four meters to give us room to maneuver.
I’ll take point.”
“You think it’s safe to come out?” Anders asked.
“Not really, but it’s not safe to stay here, either.”
Anders ran the line out from her winder and locked it, and I attached its end ring to a loop on the back of my belt before working my way up to the edge of the slab. Once I hauled myself up, I was glad to see her pack still where I had abandoned it. I was also glad that Anders did not require my help to climb up — if I had to help her all the way, the prospective journey time would double. Anders shrugged on her pack, cinched the stomach strap. We then made our way to where vegetation grew like a vertical forest up the face of the cliff. Before we attempted to enter this, I took out my palm com and worked out the best route — one taking us back toward the citadel, yet keeping us under the mist, but for the occasional ridge. Then, climbing through the tangled vegetation, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something was watching us, something huge and dangerous, and that now it was following us.
The first day was bad. It wasn’t just the sheer physical exertion, it was the constant dim light underneath the mist sapping will and blackening mood. I knew Tameera and Tholan would not reach us that day, but I also knew that they could be back overhead in the blimp by the following morning blue if they traveled all night. But they would stop to rest. Certainly they knew they had all the time they wanted to take to find and kill us.
As the sun went down, Anders erected one blister tent on a forty-degree slab — there was no room for the other tent. I set about gathering some of the many rock conches surrounding us. We still had rations, but I thought we should use such abundance, as the opportunity might not present itself later on. I also collected female spider vine flowers, and the sticky buds in the crotch branches of walker trees. I half expected Anders to object when I began broiling the molluscs, but she did not. The conches were like chewy fish, the flowers were limp and slightly sweet lettuce, the buds have no comparison in Earthly food because none is so awful.
Apparently, it was a balanced diet. I packed away the stove and followed Anders into the blister tent just as it seemed the branches surrounding us were beginning to move. Numerous large warty octupals were dragging themselves through the foliage. They were a kind unknown to me, therefore a kind not commonly encountered, else I would have received something on them in the almanac’s general load.
In the morning, I was chafed from the straps in our conjoined sleeping bags (they stopped us ending up in the bottom of the bag on that slope) and irritable. Anders was not exactly a bright light either. Maybe certain sugars were lacking in the food we had eaten, because, after munching down ration bars while we packed away our equipment, we quickly started to feel a lot better. Or maybe it was some mist-born equivalent of SAD.
An hour after we set out, travel became a lot easier and a lot more dangerous. Before, the masses of vegetation on the steep slopes, though greatly slowing our progress, offered a safety net if either of us fell. Now we were quickly negotiating slopes not much steeper than the slab on which Anders had moored the tent the previous night, and sparse of vegetation. If we fell here, we would just accelerate down to a steeper slope or sheer drop,
