Eric Flint - Rats, Bats and Vats

"Well, imprimis there is eating. Then, as the ancient Pistol indicated, secundum, there is sex, and tertius-I said there was more-there is strong drink. These are the philosophical contentions of rats."

Bronstein buried her face in her wings.

Reason's moon was bigger than Earth's. Even the crescent sliver was enough for Chip to see the still-working construction-Maggots. The tunnel-mound was getting wider and higher.

"I still think it's a crazy plan," he said, looking at the dark bulk of the mound. In daylight, with ropes and things it would be hard enough to climb. They wanted him to undertake a six hundred foot climb

… as soon as the moon was low enough to have this wall in darkness. And then, on the other side-six hundred feet down again. By that point the moon should be down.

"All right. Stay here forever then," hissed Eamon.

"Until you starve or get caught and eaten," Behan backed Eamon up.

"Until I lose my temper with you," said Bronstein, far more frighteningly. "Now climb!"

Chip climbed. So did the rats. It was easier for them as their paws were smaller, enabling them to use tiny pockmarks in the rock. Their strength to weight ratio was also much better than Chip's. The rats' problem was simply reach. A handhold Chip could grab, they had to do three extra moves to get to. Chip just had to face up to being too big and too wide and too heavy for the climb. He still had to do it though, feeling for handholds and footholds in the darkness. The rats could see better than he could in low light conditions, and of course the bats, to whom it mattered not at all, were at home in total darkness.

They'd chosen a zigzag Maggot construction ramp, which began perhaps thirty feet above ground level. Without that they really would have battled. The ramp was about eight inches wide and zigged and zagged its way at a forty-degree angle up nearly a third of the mound's height. For the rats it was a highway. An uphill highway so that they could complain, but a highway all the same. For Chip it was sweating terror and purgatory. He edged his way along, upwards, upwards, not daring to look down… again. He'd nearly plummeted off into the hungry darkness when he'd risked that first brief look. He'd gone all giddy and had to clutch frantically while Siobhan flapped around him like an annoying mosquito, telling him to "be climbing not shaking."

The rats, by now near the top of the ramp, were pretty full of their climbing ability. "Easy this. Methinks 'tis like a Sunday afternoon stroll, if it wasn't uphill," said Mel.

"The uphill will waste me away," grunted Fal. "I'm sweating my whoreson chops off."

"You've plenty to spare, before your waist's away," said Doll.

Then Eamon and O'Niel had fluttered up. "Over the side. And be quick about it! There is a builder-Maggot coming!"

"Uh. Over the side?"

"Now!" snapped the bat.

They had to cling there in the darkness, while just above them the Maggot click-sauntered past. By the time they got back onto the ledge, the rats were considerably chastened. There was nothing like hanging by your hands in the darkness over a huge drop to make you more appreciative of having something under your feet. At the top of the zigzag ramp, there was an entry into the Maggot-mound. They avoided this and had to traverse across a hundred yards or so to the next ramp.

From being near-vertical, where Chip had had to use tiny holds to hang on, the angle of the mound had eased off. He discovered that once he pushed away from clinging like a slime mold to the wall, he could actually stand on his feet on the tiny knobs. He was getting quite blase about it when a knob of Magh' adobe decided it wasn't designed for a hundred and sixty pounds of human. He managed to jerk back. Overcorrected. He scrabbled for a real handhold… started to slide.

Claws dug viciously into his back. Several sets. "Get a hold, Connolly," huffed some bat behind him, obviously through clenched teeth. Whether by bat-lift or luck, his slipping foot found purchase and his hand one of the occasional Magh' adobe struts. Chip clung there, panting. From far below came the sharp sound of the knob hitting the bottom, and bouncing away.

"I nearly gave myself a hernia," grumbled Eamon, settling on the wall. "What did you go and do a silly thing like that for, Siobhan Illich-Hill?"

"You and Longfang O'Niel were already clinging to him when I joined in."

"O'Niel, for what did you do crazy like that!?"

"Foin," said the normally taciturn O'Niel, "make it my fault then. When you know it was yourself who was first, Eamon."

"Whoever it was, I owe you," interrupted Chip.

"Well, if you owe me… then I have favor to ask," said Eamon.

"Ask away." Chip was feeling sick. Luckily, there was nothing much in his stomach to come up.

"Just don't tell everyone. The other Batties would expel me," muttered Eamon. He fluttered off into the darkness.

Chip stared after him. He'd known the bats were divided up into a jillion factions. They seemed to compensate for their infrequent mating by devoting their energies to political disputes. But he'd never once imagined that even the surly Eamon belonged to the extremist "Bat Bund."

"Ha," said Siobhan, landing on the strut. "He forgets I am not of the Bund. And I was here too-precisely because Bronstein didn't trust him alone with a human. And he was the first to try to hold you! All big talk, that Eamon. His mouth will get him into trouble his teeth can't get him out of, one day. Now, you must go on, Chip. Bronstein reckons that you and the rats must be off the mound by first light, and that is a bare four hours off."

Chip pressed on, somehow. As the angle eased, so did the climbing. He dislodged a few more fragments of Magh' adobe, but by now it was not enough to make him fall.

Eventually, Chip and the rats stood on the very top of the Maggot tunnel-mound. They had climbed the entire way in near total moonshadow. Now they could see a last moon-sliver poking its way into a shimmer of sea, perhaps thirty-five miles off. Thirty-five miles with many many stark folds of Maggot tunnel-mounds between them and it.

The bats hung in the air, twisting about them. "It's a long way to the sea, Bronstein," said one of the rats quietly. It was Fal. Obviously the distance, and perhaps the climbs that lay between them and it, had overawed the normally bumptious rat's nature.

"I' faith. A long and wearisome way." Doll looked at her paws, as if asking whether they were up to this.

"To be sure," agreed Bronstein. "It is a long way, for you earthbound creatures. And then we'll have to wait our chances for the force field to go down. Find driftwood. Make a raft. Do you rats have any other ideas? If not, you'd better get to climbing down."

Chip sighed, and began walking forward. "No other ideas, Michaela. We'd never get through the front lines. The sea is the only option. But it is a damned long shot."

"So is our surviving behind enemy lines. And what else can we do?"

"Nothing." Chip frowned. "But a length of rope and a grappling hook or even a few spikes would up my chances of making it."

"We'll look, then," stated Bronstein. "The forager-Maggots don't take metal away. Perhaps we can find something. But I think you are wishing for a great deal."

"Right now, all I'm wishing for is getting down from here fast, without getting down too fast," said Chip, looking nervously into the darkness ahead of him.

The climb down was the same again, but worse. It was also nearly the end of Melene. The rat-girl was the lightest and smallest of them, and had found the climb the easiest. Then, having paused to help Phylla, she missed her footing. Plunging headfirst past Fal she frantically tried to grab him. Fal's prehensile tail wrapped around her. The plump Fal stood as firm as a pylon as she found holds.