Kraken Orbital (14 page)

‘Not far now!’ Kolt shouts back and seems to
pull himself through a sort of doorway in the cave and is able to
fully stretch out. He reaches back for me, I take his arm and with
one last gasp, force myself, driven by his power, out of the tiny
hole.

I quickly scramble to my feet, neglecting to
look around the new area, and swing back around to peer down the
tight crawl space we just forced our way through. Kolt is holding
up the improvised torch as close as he can to the entrance to the
tunnel.

It,
irritatingly, only lights up the immediate area in a hazy spherical
glare of flickering and inconstant light. The scr
eam has died down a little but it’s still there. I’m glad
the noise is growing more and more feint. I don’t even care if it’s
someone in trouble and they are getting dragged away by a rouge
dinosaur. I just want the noise to go away. A selfish thought I
admit but I just don’t care.

‘What the Hell is that?’ I join Kolt by the
entrance to the crawlspace and peer into the relentless darkness,
as if somehow expecting my vision to suddenly and somehow adapt out
of nothing and be able to see more. It doesn’t work. I can’t see
anything. The scream grows more and more distant with each passing
minute. My heart calms at the same rate.

‘
I remember
the caves now.’ Kolt turns immediately back to me and stands up
from his crouched position. He raises the torch high but it’s
starting to die. As the adrenaline ebbs out of me I begin to feel
very cold, colder than I have in a while, and
I start to realize just how far we have come through this
system of caves.

It must be
first light by now. We must have spent the whole night traipsing
through the darkness of the forest first and then the cave system
second. Kolt aggressively tosses the torch back down the
crawlspace. The wood splinters against the jagged rock and the
light goes out, as the wood breaks apart, too fast for us to see
anything that m
ight be following us. I’m
angry with him but only for a moment or two.

I start to
adjust to the new light very quickly and
realize that the cave system has opened up higher in the
mountain. Now to address his cryptic comment about remembering the
caves…

‘Why do you remember them?’ It’s a good
enough start to an awkward conversation.

‘I remember the fearfulness of the place. I
remember shapes dancing in the dark and monsters lurking beneath
the rock.’ I wish he hadn’t said that. I had convinced myself that
I was just imagining things but clearly not. There was something
odd about the cave network. I just didn’t want to face the truth. I
have to come clean with him.

‘I thought I’d been imagining things.’ I say,
trying hard not to let even the slightest amount of fear show, and
turn my head from side to side to try and detect where the new
light is coming from. I can just about feel a bracing breeze blow
in from unknown entrance, or exit depending upon perspective, of
the cave system.

‘So did I.’ Kolt said nothing more. What
could he say? He has no answers, no more than I do, so it will be
very wrong of me if I expect anything other from him.

‘What did you think the screaming was?’ I ask
him using the past tense since the noise has now completely faded
into nothing but an eerie memory.

‘
Perhaps a
lost woman.’ He guesses. There is nobody here but us. ‘Though I
know the tone of her vocal chords from somewhere deep in my mind.’
He
recognized the sound of the scream!
That admission made my blood run cold. I know Kolt is beyond help
with some things, including his patchwork memory, but this last
comment reminds me of some other horror inducing things he has said
in the past few days.

I wonder how
he feels? If he
recognizes a ghostly howl
to belong to woman he knew once upon a time then he must be
crawling up the walls with worry about it. I can’t even bring
myself to reply. I don’t want to pry further into his damaged
psyche because I’m honestly afraid of what I might find.

‘Is your ship much further?’ I ask instead. I
can’t deal with his last comment so I’m deliberately choosing not
to. The cold is getting worse now. Since the chilling sound of a
distant scream has now died away, I can hear the wind howling and
billowing around a cramped entranceway, the sharp rocks causing
turbulence and gusts.

‘
We have
climbed much through the night.’ His voice suddenly changes. He
sounded reflective, and I’m not sure it is the right word to use,
but I think it’s afraid, when he admitted to
recognizing the scream. Now he is himself again. Confident,
strong and assertive.

‘So?’ I fill in the gap between his
observation and his explanation.

‘We will exit the cave high in the mountain
and have to climb a difficult face of rock until we reach a ridge,
upon which my poor ship is lain to rest.’ He points with a finger,
that I can thankfully now see given the new source of light, to the
right and steps forward.

The cave has lost it’s intense atmosphere
now. The cold has taken that away and filled it instead with a thin
spray of stray snow flakes.

Chapter 10

Mountaineering

Kolt leads
the way through a few winding rock crevasses. The light grows
stronger with each ninety degree turn and before I even have time
to think about the dangers ahead, we are upon them. The cave opens
up onto the sheer face that we have to climb.

There is no
gentle progression, giving us any time to psych ourselves up for
the mission, we are just thrown out into it and will have to make
do. I have no idea how to climb. Climbing a tenuous vine nearly
killed me. Climbing down a rocky chimney plunged me into a deep
river that nearly drowned us both.
How the Hell am I going to beat this?

While gripping the side wall of the last
section of the cave as hard as I can, I lower my head out of the
opening to see just how far we have climbed. The wind has picked up
a lot in the early morning sun and I can’t see anything through the
snow flurry it has whipped up.

The wind drags snow away from the mountain
side and thrashes it around like a plaything. It takes my breath
away as soon as my face leaves the relative comfort of the damp and
dark cave system.

‘Kolt?’ I ask him, a pathetic tone hung about
my voice, almost like a desperate plea.

‘We have no choice.’ He preempts my words and
pushes past me to climb out into the battering wind.

He disappears
to the left.
My heart starts to beat like
crazy again. I am faced with no option. I have no choice but to
follow Kolt and he knows that. He knows if he walks or climbs away
from me I’ll follow like a beaten child. I hate that. He has me
figured for the scared little mess I am, no fooling him with the
pointless display of fake bravado.

A
though
t passes my mind, the same one that
has slapped me across the face a few times since crashing, I really
am the beta male in this relationship.

Kolt has
almost disappeared into the blanket of snow. It takes me that long
to work up the courage to follow him. I really don’t want to. I
feel the power shy away from my fingers and muscles
as the adrenaline pumping through my veins
causes me to slump away from the challenge.

My instant reaction, out of a choice of to
either fight or take flight, is to run. But I can’t. I remember
reading something about an ancient conflict from back on Earth. It
was from a time known as the Second World War, a long past memory
that has ebbed all but completely from the collective vicarious
memory of the world. All men feel fear. Fear is normal. Anyone who
claims to have none is either psychotic or lying. True courage is
not the absence of fear. But the ability to overcome it.

I paraphrase it in my head as I search for
the motivation to do this. As I search for a reason to persuade my
inner coward to let go and climb out onto the rocky face with Kolt.
That will have to do.

I reach
around a jagged and freezing rocky slab with my gloved hand,
looking for traction and finding only little of it, and use it to
pull my body out of the relative warmth and comfort of the cave.
The wind hits me right away and I feel nothing but its harsh
pounding weight exert its force on my back and push me head first
into the snowy rock surface. I panic at first but
m
y focus seems to come back as soon as I
take the initial plunge into the unknown.

Just like it
did as we hurtled over that waterfall so many miles below. The wind
will give me traction against the rock face and help me to hold on
so long as it doesn’t change direction. I press my already cold
body hard against the sharp edges of the frozen snowflakes and
carry on.
If I swing out the wind could
get underneath me and pull me clean off the wall. The angle is
already against me. I can just about see Kolt’s dark figure, washed
with a blanket of snow, patiently and dutifully waiting for me in
the not too far distance ahead. He is shouting to me, I can hear
that, but I can make out none of the words.

‘What?’ I scream at the top of my lungs, but
for my effort I just get a blast of icy snow particles shoot down
my throat. I am virtually drowned by the force of the wind and
decide to ignore him and just try to get closer on my own
initiative.

I slide my cold hands further along the
precarious layer of frozen water, trust all of my weight to a small
and rapidly disappearing rocky ledge, and balance with every bit of
strength and focus I can manage. I shift my weight and use what
crevices in the ice wall I can find to help me traverse across the
snow covered face of the mountain.

I can feel my toes bend backwards as I fight
to keep my clumsy boots on that tiny rock ledge.

‘
Kick your toes into the snow
!’ I
can just about make out his words through the howling and ever
present wind. I peer to him through the volumetric snow. But my
balance is so precarious that I dare not move even an inch to try
and catch another syllable. I can see his black silhouette
though.

He is kicking at the wall with his pointed
toes to create temporary foot holds in the ice sheet. I click on
immediately after his demonstration. I realize that I’m trying to
face the direction in which I am travelling and I should really
just be looking right at the wall. Kicking my boots into the ice
will create good footholds and I just have to transfer my weight
from one foot to the other and so on.

I can keep my balance better with my hips
thrust parallel to the wall rather than stepping over myself like I
am now. My heart rests and my breathing relaxes, along with my
tired arms and legs, as I take on his advice. I slam my right foot
hard into the ice and watch as chunks of white snow fly away from
the wall to create a good stepping place.

Kolt must be
happy that I’ve figured out his technique because he is back on
course again with
out as much as a glance
back. My legs are trembling with the effort after no time at all
but I need to stay focused. Maybe Kolt was right. Maybe I still did
desire rescue. I could really do with it now to be honest. I dare
to look down and immediately wish that I hadn’t.

The ground is far from view, the snow drifts
still batter the mountain side, and I can see nothing past the
swirling mass of white flakes. I feel like falling. My legs are
screaming at me to let go, screaming so hard that part of me wants
to let them, and all that stops me is the feeling of falling into
the abyss below. I start to scream as loud and as throaty as I can
to muster my energy and power.

There is something primal about doing that.
Something in it that focuses the mind and releases pent up, ancient
and long forgotten parts of our ape minds, and allows us to reset
ourselves to absolute zero. It works and my legs are good for
another few steps.

The pace is
relentless and I try to hone in on my tactic of screaming and
attacking the mountain side with each heavy swing of my leg. Kolt
must think I’m possessed. Let him. He is
beyond crazy anyway. I am so consumed with my battle
against the mountain that I don’t even notice him stop. I scare
myself so hard when I run into him that I almost lose my grip and
fall.

My scream
stops immediately and I am sure my
embarrassment shows. If all of my blood had not been taken
up in the battle to re-oxygenate my poor tired muscles, I know I
would blush. He looks at me with dissatisfied and intense eyes.
Like a father might look at his son when he did something immature.
Something he thought he would be past.

‘There is a sheltered outcropping below us.’
Even through the howling animal like wind I can detect the
uncertainty in his voice. Even past his horrifying eyes I can see
his faded memory battling its way to the surface and failing to
quite reach it.

‘Is that the way you came?’ I scream through
another mouthful of cold snow. It makes me splutter and shake my
head. This must be the first time that I have ever envied Kolt for
the garish gas mask he has been cursed to wear.

‘Yes.’ He replies after a pause that doesn’t
exactly allay my fears.

‘Are you sure?’ I chose my words very
carefully right there. I have no wish to offend him or send him
spinning even further down the rabbit hole of his lost mind. I just
want to know how certain he is of it.

I can see
what he
’s planning. By the way he keeps
glancing from side to side and back again. The way he keeps
checking his hand holds. Ones he has punched into the wall of snow
himself.