Кристофер Банч - Empire's End

She had found something better on a recent aerial photo-mosaic. Not on any map. Completely unknown. All that was necessary to get there was to grab a pilot and a gravsled and they could be there in an hour.

Cind sneered. That, too, was no vacation. Getting there was half the fun.

And so, carrying packs heavy enough to give them the trail staggers, they had Kilgour drop them off where the dirt path ended, with a promise to return in five days to pick them up—or start the search parties in motion.

Among the reasons their packs were so heavy was that neither Sten nor Cind fancied carrying dried rations—they could stay in the barracks and on duty and get ratpacks. They were willing to break their backs carrying some other, minor creature comforts.

Their route on skis through the foothills to the base of the mountain. Where the mountain steepened, they would follow the course of a generally frozen river upward, through a gorge, to Cind's secret spot. Since the maps of the wilderness were rotten, they would navigate from the aerial.

And so it had been—until they reached this place not too far below the mountain's summit, where the river went vertical, and became thirty meters of frozen-solid waterfall. They were trapped.

This was a helluva fix she had gotten him into, he thought. And so observed.

"Shut up," Cind said helpfully. "I'm trying to figure out if we can slither back down this slope to that ravine we passed an hour or so ago. And maybe go up that to the summit. Then we could drop back down to where we want to go."

"That sounds like work."

"Stop whining."

"I am not whining. I am sniveling. How much rope do we have?"

"Seventy-five meters."

"Dammit," Sten swore. "See if I ever play climbing purist again. Right now a couple of cans of climbing thread, jumars, and a grapnel would be welcome. Or a stairway. But oooo-kay, we'll do it the hard way."

He unclipped from the rope, set his pack down where it hopefully wouldn't start sliding all the way back down to the foothills, reroped his harness, took a deep breath, and started climbing.

Up the ice of the waterfall.

"I don't like this," he muttered. And he didn't—the only reason Sten knew that ice cubes could be climbed was because he had seen it done once in a livie and also because he had once spent a weekend with one of his instructors in Mantis—and whatever happened to her, he wondered—who had been a nut on climbing waterfalls when the temp went below zero Centigrade.

He had come off twice and had to be near-hoisted to the top, he remembered. No. His memory was wrong. None of the four of them had made it that long and bruised weekend.

Follow Cind's advice. Shut up.

It wasn't that bad, he thought. No worse than, say, dangling by your hands and having to do a pull-up every two minutes.

At least the ice is good and frozen. Don't have to worry about any kind of a spring thaw.

And you've got a good place to stand every now and then. As he was doing at the moment.

"What's that called?" Cind wondered from five meters below him.

"Suicide," Sten panted. "Front-pointing."

His good place to stand consisted of two front metal spikes of his crampons—alloy plates clamped to his boots that had vertical two-centimeter-sided spikes around their edges and horizontal ones sticking straight out from the toe.

One foot suddenly skruiched out of the ice, and Sten went back to dangling. He twisted back and forth for a while, getting the hang of things, did another pull-up, reached out for a handhold, found a handjam, kicked in his free boot. Half a meter farther up.

Two wheezes, and try it again.

And again. And again.

Eventually, there was no ice above his hand to grab, and he flailed a little. Hand moved to one side. A rock projection. Rock? Such as no more waterfall?

No more waterfall.

Sten pulled himself to blessedly level ground, and rested. Then he tied off, and shouted down to Cind.

First came the packs, tied to the rope and hand-over-handed up. More wheezing. Not only getting old, but old and weak, Sten thought.

Now for Cind. He waited—in spite of an impatient shout—until he'd gotten all his wind back. He wouldn't mind losing a pack, but…

Cind tied on.

"I've never done this before," she shouted.

"All the girls say that."

Cind started climbing. Naturally, Sten thought in some disgust, she's a natural. She swarmed up the waterfall as if it were liquid and she an Earth salmon in spawning season. Nor was she breathing very hard at the top.

"I didn't know you could even do that."

"All the girls say that, too."

Sten shouldered his pack. Helped Cind on with hers. They were next to a frozen pool, rocks sticking through the ice. Sten noticed the ice looked hazy the further back it got.

Just ahead of them—not more than fifty vertical feet—a cloud drifted toward them of a draw. Wonderful. Now they'd be climbing in a fog.

Sten was wrong: the rest of the climb—a gentle walk on level ground—took only four minutes.

They moved through the draw, into a winter paradise. The draw opened into a tiny valley. Shrubs. Grass. Wildflowers.

"Well, I'll be go to hell," Sten marveled. To one side of the valley a hot spring bubbled, its water flowing across the minimeadow and joining the larger river, still hot enough to melt the ice. Pools dotted the course of the spring's flow, and they were anywhere from boiling to frigid, the farther away they were from the spring.

Sten thought it was almost worth the climb.

The steaming springs drew them—but both of them knew the unchangeable ritual: first shelter, then fire, then food, then fun. Shelter was easy—snap three sets of shock-corded wands together, slide them through slots, and their tiny dome tent was up. They staked it down for security. Fire was also not a problem—their stove was a Mantis-issue item no larger than Sten's palm. But it was AM 2-fueled and could run at full blast for at least a year without a recharge. Sten took it from his pack and set it near the tent, between a circle of small rocks that his small fold-up grill would sit on. Food? They skated on that one for the moment—their muscles were sorer than their bellies empty.

Or at least that was the pretext.

"Damn, but these rocks are cold."

"Of course they're cold. Get in here where it's warm."

Sten, naked, slid into the pool near Cind.

"What," she asked, "is in that bottle?"

"You will observe what appears to be a standard alloy campflask, which disgusting people who espouse clean living and good thoughts probably fill with some sort of healthy soyagunk. But some subversive clot happened to dump the organic glop, and fill it up with stregg."

Sten uncapped it, whoooed , put the cap back on, and tossed the flask to Cind.

"There are three more like it in my pack."

"Oh, boy. I brought two myself," Cind said. "So much for the clean life." She drank.

Sten eyed her lasciviously.

"They float!"

"Brilliant observation. You're only just noticing, and we've been together how long? Is that why they made you an admiral?"

"Yup."

"What a guy to go Empire-toppling with," Cind said. She rolled over and kicked against the rocky wall of the pool, sealing out into its center.

"Hey, you can almost swim out here in the middle."

"Uh-huh."

Sten had no interest in swimming. He lay on his back in shallow water, parbroilingly close to where a stream of water bubbled into the pool. Years of trouble and blood seemed to wash out of his body and mind.

"I think," he managed, "every muscle in my body just turned to rubber."

"Oh dear."

"Not quite. Come here, wiseass."

"Observant, romantic, and complimentary to boot. Well, here I am. Now what?"