David Weber - Worlds of Honor

" 'S okay," he said finally, when the laughter had released him. " 'M just tired, you know? Sleepy. G'on talkin' to me. It'll keep me awake."

"Are you sure?" The voice of the girl he couldn't remember ever having seen came back to him from the dimness, and he nodded.

"Positive," he said. The word came out sounding like a drunk he'd once heard, with a sort of exaggerated, woozy precision. He wanted to giggle some more at the thought, but he managed not to.

"All right," Andrea said. "You know, this was the first time I ever came to the Atticas for the skiing. We always went to the Black Mountains before. I don't know why. Just closer, I guess. Anyway—"

She went on talking, hearing the thin veneer of calm holding her own words together like glue against the terror quivering deep inside her. She'd never said anything so inane and pointless in her life, she thought. Yet somehow, however disjointed and pointless it might have been, it was also the most important thing she'd ever told anyone.

Because it proved she was still alive, she thought, just as the weakening grip on her ankle told her at least one other person still lived beyond the barrier which pinned her, and just as Ranjit's occasional responses to her questions proved he was still alive.

For now.

Susan's hands were more than simply abraded now. She'd been forced to work her blind, agonizing way through and around a tangle of broken limbs the avalanche had carried down from above with it, and she'd injured her right hand badly when she caught it in the angle of two of the branches. She couldn't tell how badly it was bleeding, and she was terrified of meeting another, worse tangle—one she couldn't find a way past.

She was weeping now. She couldn't stop. Every muscle and sinew ached and throbbed and burned, and she wanted so badly to make it stop. Just to make it end. But she couldn't. Ranjit depended on her, and so she drove her exhausted body upward.

How far down am I? she wondered in the small corner of her mind which had any energy to spare from the brutal task of pushing herself on. Surely I should be seeing some sign of daylight coming down from above by now, shouldn't I? Am I even still going up? Or did I get turned around somehow by those limbs? Have I started digging downward again?

She didn't know. She only knew she couldn't stop.

"What is it, Stinker?" Honor asked. She knelt beside Nimitz in the gathering twilight, and the 'cat sat up on his rearmost limbs, reaching up to pat her chest urgently. His eyes bored into hers like augers, and she knew he was trying to tell her something, but she couldn't quite bring herself to believe the most logical explanation. Treecats had been used over the years in search and rescue efforts on Sphinx, but not as often as one might have expected, for the range at which they could sense human beings they'd never met before appeared to be limited. There had been instances of 'cats who were able to home in on total strangers at distances of up to a hundred or even two hundred meters, even under the most adverse conditions, but such cases were extremely rare—more the stuff of rumors and legends than recorded fact. More to the point, perhaps, Honor couldn't recall ever having seen any indication from Nimitz that he might be capable of such a feat. Besides, they were over three hundred meters beyond the line the alpine SAR teams had calculated as the furthest any of the lift cars might have been carried from the lift tower. The shouts and machinery sounds of the rescue effort were small and lost here, little stronger than the whine and moan of the gathering wind, and she looked around, trying to see anything that might have brought him here.

The 'cat made a sound, half-pleading and half-commanding, that dragged her attention back to him. He captured her eyes once more, and then he took his right true-hand from her chest and made an unmistakable gesture with it. A gesture that pointed straight down into the snow.

" Here? " As well as she knew him, Honor couldn't quite keep the doubt out of her voice. "You think there's someone down there?"

Nimitz bleeked loudly, then chittered at her and nodded hard. She looked around once more, back to where the stump of the lift—the better part of two kilometers from where she knelt—poked up out of the snow, tiny with distance. There was no way a lift car could have been carried this far, she told herself. Was there? Yet Nimitz seemed so positive. . . .

"All right, Stinker," she sighed. "What do we have to lose?"

The 'cat bleeked again, even louder, as she keyed her com once more. And then, as she started to speak into it, he turned and began to burrow into the snow himself. Snow tunnels were a game he and Honor had played often during her childhood on Sphinx, and it was remarkable how rapidly a six-limbed creature with centimeter-long claws could tear through snow. By the time Honor was done speaking on the com, he was two meters down and going strong.

Susan froze. For a moment, her mind was too foggy and confused to tell her why it had stopped her, and then she realized she'd heard something. It seemed impossible, after so long sealed up alone with the sound of her own breath roaring in her ears, yet she was certain she truly had heard something. She strained her ears, and then her heart gave a tremendous lurch. She had heard it! A scraping, scratching sound, like something moving through snow—something moving towards her!

She screamed, lunging suddenly in her dark little world, thrusting towards the sound, fighting her way up out of the endless blackness. She punched and kicked and ripped at the snow, and then, suddenly, her right fist broke through some final barrier into open air and she froze once more, unable to move, paralyzed with a strange terror which dared not believe she might actually have clawed her way back into the upper world at last. She wanted to shout, to move, to cry out for help, to do something . . . and she couldn't. She couldn't move at all, and so she simply lay there.

But then something touched her hand. Strong, wiry fingers closed on her wrist, holding it, and something soft and silken pressed against her torn and bleeding palm. A half-heard, half-felt croon of comfort burned into her, and Susan Hibson went limp, sobbing in a sudden torrent of relief like agony as the reassurance of that touch filled her.

"Where do you want us, Ma'am?" Sergeant Wells panted as she and her squad slithered to a halt beside Honor. The sergeant carried a powerful hand lamp against the gathering darkness, and her people carried hand tractors and pressers and shovels. Honor ran her eyes over them once, then nodded for them to follow her.

"Over this way," she said, leading the way back towards Nimitz.

"We're a long way beyond the search line, Ma'am," Wells pointed out diffidently, and Honor nodded.

"I know. Call it a hunch."

"A hunch, Ma'am?"

"That's right, but it's not really mine. It's—"

She stopped dead, so abruptly Wells almost ran into her, but neither of them really thought about that. They were staring down into the hole burrowed into the churned white surface, to where a small, dark-skinned hand, torn and bloodied, thrust out of a wall of snow and a cream-and-gray treecat cradled it against his chest while his eyes blazed like green fire in the glow of the sergeant's lamp.

Ranjit Hibson's eyelids fluttered open.

For a long moment he simply lay there, drowsy and content and warm. For some reason it seemed wrong for him to feel that way, but he couldn't quite remem—