IGMS Issue 18 (5 page)

"You're a walking mess," he said with weary affection. Her dark-brown hair was scorched short on the right side, just as her right cheek and ear were singed, and all of her right arm had a first degree burn inside her coverall sleeve. He didn't want to think about what was under the bandages on both her hands, but for now the kit's painkiller was keeping the nerves properly numb. That was good. "Thanks for saving my dumbass life. Twice, even."

Connie gave him a wary sideways glance. Most of her right eyebrow was gone too. "Trick compliment?"

"No trick. That was smart, cranking up the McNaughton so the wyverns would hatch out faster. I wouldn't have thought of that one." He rubbed his right shoulder, which was out-and-out killing him, now that it had regained his attention.

"I had to do
something
when the San Ysidro showed up. It was the only thing that occurred to me."

"You could have peeled out of there, like I told you to."

She shook her head. "I'm not actually so good about following orders. I was going to tell you that tomorrow."

He thought for a silent while. Then he said, "Consider the message conveyed."

A minute later he pushed the door open and stepped out. "Come on. The Heap's not going anywhere, and we've got a job to finish."

"What, we're going back?" She stiffened in the seat, leaning away from his extended hand.

"Not a chance. I think you must have creamed Junior pretty good, or else we'd have had company by now. But it's anybody's guess whether those other idiots came back or not." He made a brusque
hurry up
gesture, and turned away once he saw she was finally starting to move. "So no, we're not going back. What we're going to do is hike down to 299. Somewhere around the turnoff we're going to find Trager or one of his guys. They were expecting us hours ago, they'll be looking. After we tell them what went down we can get you to Mountain Community Medical."

"You too," Connie said.

"Yeah, me too."

He stood where the San Ysidro had finally ceased thrashing, and looked down at the bloody, riddled corpse. Somehow it looked even bigger, splayed out dead in the darkness. Connie stopped a few feet behind him.

"Hey, trainee. How long before the baby wyverns wake up and start eating their way back out?"

"I have no idea," she said, looking a little worried.

"Good to learn there's
something
about D's you don't know." Despite the pounding snarl in his shoulder, he realized he felt happier than he had in months. Maybe years. "The answer, for your information, is twelve to fifteen hours. Plenty of time for somebody else to come here and handle this mess, and good luck to them."

He started off the way they'd first come, hunching forward slightly as he walked to keep his torso from swinging too much. Connie caught up with him, matching his pace. The stars were out, and it wasn't hard to find their way.

Neither of them said anything for more than twenty minutes. Then Connie spoke up. "They had a
San Ysidro black
. Can you
believe
it?"

"There's a lot of people who'll be asking that one," Gruber nodded. "From the Feds on down. Get ready to star in one hell of an investigation."

Connie stopped walking. "Oh my god" she whispered. "Oh no. What are my parents going to say? I can't tell them about this! I mean --"

"Nice try," Gruber grinned at her. "Parents or no, hands or no, you're still writing up the report. If you can't type, you can dictate."

She tried to kick him in the shin, but he managed to get out of range. The first time, anyway.

I learned about the canyon from Shelley, an ex I hadn't seen or thought about for fifteen years.

I almost deleted the message unread when I saw who it was from. But Shelley being Shelley, she'd known just what to say to get my attention.

"I've found something," she began, "which might interest you."

She sent the message from the surface of Miranda, one of Uranus' inner moons, where she was trailing a team of miners on a geological survey. Deep inside Miranda's Chevron Valley, they'd stumbled upon the rim of a previously uncharted canyon. It was narrow, crescent-shaped, mostly obscured by shadow, missed by both the Voyager and Bard probes. The miners scanned a few rock samples at the lip, found nothing which interested them, and moved on.

But Shelley had lingered. She'd dropped in a stream of radar balls, constructing a crude map of the canyon's interior. When she saw the results, she didn't share them with the miners. She sent the map directly to me.

It was the deepest canyon in the solar system. Twenty-three kilometers, straight down, from surface to floor. Three times deeper than the Hebes Chasma on Mars, twice as deep as the Herschel crater on Mimas, deeper even than the ice rifts of Tethys. A dark void in the ground, like an open mouth, plunging to depths never encountered by man.

The moment I received Shelley's message, I began making plans. I would be the first to reach the canyon's floor.

"Ready whenever you are, boss," said Wil. He and Katherine stood ten meters back from the canyon's rim, decked out in the latest UltraThins, kicking at the dusty ground impatiently.

It was morning, if there is such a thing in the outer solar system. Uranus hung low in the sky behind me, casting a green glow over the jagged peaks of Chevron Valley. To my right sat our lander, its feet braced against the icy ground, the climbing rope extruding from its belly, drawn taut over the white-gray surface rock. And directly in front of me, the canyon beckoned -- a thin black ribbon, snaking across Miranda's ragged landscape.

I was ready, too. I'd tossed the rope's weighted free end over the rim fifteen minutes ago, double-checking the connections as they slid by; it should now be settled at the bottom. But Wil's announcement wasn't meant for me, it was meant for the fourth member of our party.

Shelley.

As a
quid pro quo
for telling me -- and only me -- about the canyon, I'd agreed to bring her on the climb and let her collect rock samples for her lab. As I'd feared, she was already slowing us down.

Shelley's pressure suit was one of the old, clunky beasts I'd given her on Mars fifteen years ago. She'd loaded it up with a belt full of terrestrial geology tools -- chisels, sonic scanners, and portable mass specs -- and now she strapped two enormous sample bins to her air tanks, tripling her width.

"I wouldn't carry all that mass," I said mildly.

"The gravity here is less than one percent
g
," she retorted. "I weigh one pound. I think I can handle it."

True, but if she filled those bins with rocks, her lateral momentum would be unwieldy. I shrugged. I had my diamond knife. If she slowed us down, I'd just cut the sample bins free.

I switched to the group frequency. "Shelley's radar map shows nine ledges on the north wall. We'll rappel down the rope, single file, ledge to ledge. Stay above me, and don't let your speed exceed three meters per second. Clear?"

Katherine smiled politely and nodded. Wil smirked and saluted. Shelley finished adjusting her gear and balanced on her knees, watching me.

I clipped the rope to a pair of carabiners on my hip, then shuffled my feet backwards to the precipice. Holding the rope loosely in both hands, I raised my chin, surveying the surface one last time.

It is this moment that I cherish the most. Not the climb itself, or even the moment of triumph, but this moment, the moment just before. The canyon was still a mystery -- unexplored, unseen, unknown. When I do reach a destination, even when I'm the first, I'm always a little saddened. There would be one less new thing to see.

"Remember," I said, "stay behind me on the rope. I touch the bottom first."

I turned away from the others, looked down into the black abyss, and stepped over the rim.

For the first several hundred meters, the rising sun illuminated the canyon's wall. From above, it appeared to be a sheer cliff, but inside, it blossomed into three dimensions. Bulges, ledges, sharp angles impossible in higher
g
. Mottled mixtures of white and gray, ice and rock, just like the surface.

Ten minutes in, the light faded to reflections, then disappeared. The canyon was now pitch black. I turned up my headlamp and lightly squeezed the rope, slowing my descent to a steady two meters per second.

Wil and Katherine were descending smoothly, thirty meters up rope. Skillfully, I had to admit.

They were a husband and wife team, "Firsters," like me, but for all the wrong reasons. They'd been the first to summit Olympus Mons on foot, the first to surf a comet's tail, the first to ride a geyser on Enceladus. Stunts, not exploration. For Wil and Katherine, it wasn't about seeing new things, it was about being seen.

They were the last people I wanted to climb with, but I couldn't afford a trip to Uranus alone. So we made a deal. I let them in on the expedition, and they agreed to let me explore the canyon floor first, alone. I had little doubt they would try to break that agreement.

It wasn't Wil and Katherine who worried me now, though, it was Shelley. She lagged hundreds of meters up rope, her headlamp swinging wildly each time she adjusted speed. Every few hundred meters, she'd pause to inspect the wall and take mass spec data. Every kilometer, she'd stop her descent entirely to chisel a rock sample.

I reached the top ledge on schedule, followed by Wil and Katherine. I stayed on the line, blocking their path, until they'd unclipped from the rope. They moved to the far side of the ledge where they sat, feet suspended over the edge, talking on their private frequency.

Finally, fifteen minutes later, Shelley arrived. She unclipped, walked directly to the canyon wall, knelt down, and began chipping away at a rock.

I walked up behind her and activated a private channel.

"You can hammer during breaks," I said, "but don't stop your descent. We're already twenty minutes behind schedule."

Shelley stopped chiseling. Her shoulders rose and fell with a heavy sigh. "Lance, do you even know why I'm here? Why I'm risking my life in some uncharted canyon, with you of all people? Have you even thought about that?"