Jack Dann - Dangerous Games

They were halfway up the sheer face, and the way Alena was climbing, they were going to die. Glenn watched her almost literally fly up the rock, making twenty-foot jumps from handhold to handhold, reaching out and grasping the smallest outcropping and crevice with fluid grace and deceptive ease.

Dangerous ease, he thought. Climbing in the low gravity seemed childishly simple compared to climbing on Earth. Which meant it was easy to take one too many chances.

Alena made one last lunge and scrabbled for grip in a tiny crevice. Her feet skidded and she slid down the face for one terrible instant before catching on another tiny outcropping. Tiny pebbles and sand bounced off Glenn’s visor.

“Slow down!” he said.

“We need to keep moving!”

“Alena…”

Labored breathing over the comm. “Listen to them!” Alena said. “Laci’s team is already rolling, and that psycho guy is, too!”

Glenn cursed. The voices from the Can, when they weren’t giving orders, provided a blow-by-blow of what the other teams were doing. To get you doing something stupid.

Glenn pulled himself up nearer to Alena. She resumed climbing, too.

“Let me get nearer,” he said. “So we can safety each other.”

“We have to keep going.”

“The others have more time to roll. We aren’t falling behind.”

Alena stopped for a moment. “I know, but…”

“It’s hard not to think it, yeah,” Glenn finished for her. He pulled himself even higher. She stayed in place for once.

“We’ll make the top before nightfall,” he said. “Then we shelter and wait it out. We’ve got a short roll and a reasonable flight. We still have the best chance of winning, Alena.”

Pant, pant. He was close enough to be her failsafe now.

Alena looked back, gave him a thin smile, and pulled herself up again. For a while it was all by the book, then Alena began stretching it a bit, leaping a bit too far, aiming at crevices just a bit too small. With the sun below the cliff, the shadows were deep, purple-black, and the cliff was losing definition in the dying day.

When they reached a deep crevice in the rock, Glenn thought things had begun to get better. But the rock was fragile and crumbly, and rust-red chunks came off easily in his hands. Glenn was about to tell Alena that they should get out of there when she reached up and grabbed an outcropping that broke off in her hand.

From ten feet above Glenn, she began to fall, agonizingly slow. Glenn felt his heart thundering in his chest, and had a momentary vision of the two of them tumbling out of the crevice to fall thousands of feet to the rocks below. He tested his handholds and footholds, and a small cry escaped his lips when he realized they probably wouldn’t survive the impact of Alena.

Glenn jumped downward, seeking better purchase. Slip and slide. Nothing more. Down once again. Nope.

Down again, and then Alena piled into him, an amazingly strong shock in the weak gravity. Mass still works, Glenn thought, wildly, a moment after he’d lost all contact with the cliff face.

Alena flailed, trying to catch the rock surface as it skidded by. Glenn knew that soon they would be moving too fast to stop, and reached frantically himself. He slowed their fall, but didn’t stop it.

Where was the edge of the crevice?

He looked below him. Right here. But there was one outcropping that looked reasonably solid. If he could catch it…

He hit hard with his feet and felt a shooting pain go up his right leg. His knees buckled and his feet slid to the side, away from the outcropping, towards destruction.

One last thing. He reached out and caught the outcropping, keeping one hand around Alena’s waist. For a moment he thought their momentum was still too great, but he was able to hold on. Alena skidded within feet of the opening.

Glenn didn’t dare move. He could hear the harsh rasp of Alena’s breathing. Meaning they were both alive. Alive!

Alena looked up at him with something in her eyes that might almost have been gratitude. He looked down at her and smiled. For a brief instant, she smiled back and his heart soared.

They backed out of the crevice and continued on up the cliff face. Glenn’s right leg roared with pain, and he knew Alena could see that he was slowing down. But she didn’t run away from him. She didn’t take chances. She didn’t say anything at all until they had reached the top, and the last dying rays of the sun painted them both blood-red.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly.

He was about to say something, but the Can blatted in his ear. “What an image! Pan slowly across the sunset.”

“Thanks,” he said, bitterly, as Alena turned away.

“What the hell does Timberland know about making space suits?” Evan said. He threw down the thick ream of printouts and rubbed his face, pulling it into a comic mask of fatigue and frustration.

“They’ll pay to do it,” Jere said.

“Another prime sponsor.” Sarcastically.

“What, like you’re suddenly worried about our contestants?”

Evan shrugged and stood up to pace. “RusSpace finally got back to me.”

“And?”

“And we’re fucked.”

For a moment, the word didn’t even register with Jere. Then he heard the phrase like a physical blow. “Fucked! What does fucked mean, like they won’t do it?”

“No, no.”

“They want more money.”

“It’s 2019 now, not 2018.”

No. They couldn’t move it out again. GM and Boeing pulled out when the schedule last slid. So now it was Kia and Cessna for the Wheels and the Kites. Good names, yeah, but not blue-chip. Maybe it would boost the ratings, that bit of risk, that added chance…

Evan nodded. “Yeah, it’s a crap cocktail, all right.”

“We can’t do this,” Jere said. His voice sounded hollow and faraway.

Evan shrugged. “We have to.”

“What’s the problem this time? They lied again? They fucked up? What?”

“No.” A sigh. “It’s the testing that’s killing us. Five drop modules, five backout pods, five Wheels, five Kites, the big package of Returns, a ship with a fucking centrifuge, for God’s sake, goddamn, it’s a lot of shit to do!”

“So what do we do?”

“We push. Or we scale it back.”

“What? Take it to three teams?”

“No. Scale back the build and the test. Leave out the backout pods, for example.”

“What happens if the team can’t make it to the Returns?”

A slow smile. “Tough snatch, said the biatch.”

“What?”

“Before your time.” Another shrug. This one slow, lazy, nonchalant. “If they can’t make it to the Returns, they probably can’t make it back.”

“Will this get us back on track?”

“We could do more.”

“What?”

“Skip final test of the Kites and the Wheels. All they are is a bunch of fabric and struts anyway.”

“And?”

“Leave the spinner down on the ground.”

“How are the contestants supposed to stay in shape?”

“We’ll put in a whole lot of Stairmasters. They can exercise. Gets us another sponsor, too.”

“And?”

“And that might get us back on track. Or so say our formerly communist friends.”

“Will they guarantee it?”

“They aren’t guaranteeing anything anymore. But I think it’s a lot more likely that we’ll make the deadlines if you drop some of the fluff.”

Fluff. Yeah, fluff. Just a bunch of safety gear. Nobody will notice.

“We’re taking a big chance.”

“What’s a bigger chance? Going to ’19 or making a few changes?”

A few changes. Nothing big. Nothing major. Nothing we won’t be crucified for if it comes out.