Trident's Forge (31 page)

B
enson and Mei
walked together most of the rest of the day, her spot on the dux'ah occupied as it was by their increasingly unpleasant captive. Not that Benson really blamed zer for being in a cross mood, even if ze had tried to kill him. The dux'ahs were entering musk and smelled, like, well, dux'ahs in musk. It was an odor of an intensity and unpleasantness outside Benson's experience, and he'd spent his teen years working in an aeroponics farm fed with waste water. He wouldn't want to be tied to one in the hot sun either.

In fairness, ze hadn't been the only person to try to kill him in the last twenty-four hours.

Someone
did
kill you, old man
, Benson thought.
And that kid pulled your feet out of the fire. Again. After you told her not to come.
He shivered at the thought, his chest and ribs still sore from the intense convulsions that had accompanied the defibrillator's attempts to restart his heart. He glanced over at Mei. It was past time to stop thinking of her as a kid. Maybe she'd never really been one to begin with. Maybe she'd never been given the chance.

“Thank you,” Benson said quietly, tapping his chest.

Mei didn't look over to answer. “Thank me by getting me back to Sakiko.”

“I'm trying. I'll just need to think of something.”

“We're doomed,” she said flatly.

“Well aren't you just a little fucking wellspring of encouragement.”

“I don't need to lie to you. You're a big boy. You can take it.”

Benson chuckled. “Your English is much improved.”

Mei shrugged. “I've been practicing.”

“Still, a smidgeon of faith would be nice. We've gotten out of worse.”

“Have we?” Mei asked.

“Well I doubt the Dwellers have a nuke.”

It was Mei's turn to giggle. “Thank Xis for small favors.”

“Xis? You're not going native on us, are you Mei?”

She shrugged. “They have a simple faith. You can learn it in a week, but it runs deep. They know how to take time for things.”

Benson pondered that. For eleven generations, mankind had just been sitting on its collective hands on board the Ark, waiting for their turn to come up. But since landing, there had barely been time to breathe. The city was ever growing, and that meant work. Endless work. Benson's entire job was to make sure everyone enjoyed their prescribed amount of recreational time, whether they liked it or not.

He had to admit, there was a certain attraction to a culture that hadn't yet developed a concept of time broken down into units any smaller than morning, evening, and night. It certainly streamlined schedule keeping.

“Will they make us leave, Benson?”

“Getting a little ahead of yourself, aren't you? I thought we were doomed.”

“I mean my people in the village. Will they be able to stay?”

Benson smiled at her. “You really like living with them, don't you?”

Mei nodded. “Yes. They have been kind and welcoming. Life is uncomplicated. They laugh easily, even if I don't get all the jokes yet.”

“The cat's already out of the bag. I can't speak for everyone, but I doubt anybody on our end will be in a hurry to round you up and deport you back to Shambhala. Besides, we're going to need a connection between our people and theirs. The Unbound may have finally found their proper place.”

“Our place?”

“Well, you've always existed in the inbetween spaces, yeah? Here's something you're built for.”

Mei swelled at the possibility. “Something worth dying for.”

“Indeed, but if it's all the same to you, I'm going to try very hard to keep us alive anyway.”

“I know you will.”

Benson noticed the resigned, accepting tone in Mei's voice, but didn't comment on it. The whole mission was insane to the point where he couldn't remember why he'd agreed to it in the first place. Maybe it had been anger at the people they'd lost. What they'd done to Atwood was barbaric. In the moment, he'd wanted to hurt whoever had killed her. But he wanted to believe he wasn't out here for revenge. Maybe it was the way an unsolved crime itched at his brain. Maybe it was pride and a selfish desire to relive the glory days. Maybe it was a little bit of all of them.

Now he walked through a hot grassland in a bloodstained shirt, reeking of sweat and caked in dust, unarmed, without his plant. He was marching into the heart of enemy territory with only a thin hope of staying alive against the same people who tried to massacre an entire village a few days earlier.

Tactically, it wasn't a great position to be in.

All he wanted to do was call his wife and let her know he was alive, for the moment at least. But if he did, they'd both be at risk. Whoever had tried to fry him would know he was still on the board, and she would know someone had tried to kill him. Benson knew his wife well enough to know that she would not react well to that. She would go straight after them like a missile, drawing a target on her own back in the process. He couldn't have that, so he had to keep her in the dark. The logic was airtight. That didn't make him any happier about it.

Theresa had tried to tell him. Tried to warn him off. Tried to get him to just step onto the shuttle for home and let someone else deal with it for once. With the benefit of hindsight, she'd probably been right.

She usually was. Damn her.

Benson tried to shake the thought, refocus on the facts of this case, come up with a plan to pull their butts from the fire. But he couldn't. He kept coming back to one idea. If he died out here, he would leave nothing behind. No family, no legacy. They'd probably pour some gaudy bronze statue of him as the man who saved the Ark and stick it in the museum where it would collect dust for centuries. But Theresa was still young and beautiful. She would mourn, but ultimately move on with her life and find a nice young man who wasn't shooting blanks. Not that he'd deny her that, but he still couldn't shake the thought of someone else giving her the family he couldn't.

There was only one chance of avoiding that future, and it was to survive the next few days.

“We're doomed,” Benson announced to the universe, trying to pull it into his little pity party.

“Shush.” Mei pointed to the head of the caravan. “We've stopped. Something's up.”

She was right. Kexx and Kuul had stopped at the head of the line while everyone else ground to a halt to avoid bumping into the person ahead of them. Benson pulled his head out of his own ass and pushed through the crowd toward Kexx.

“Hey, Kexx. Why've we–”

“Stopped” never made it out of Benson's mouth. Instead, his lungs filled with a sudden inrush of air as he realized the ground simply… ended. What he'd thought was the crest of a small hill was instead the very top of an immense canyon. The ground fell away at a ninety-degree angle. A thousand layers of multicolored limestone cut into top-heavy towers, needle-thin chimneys and sweeping arches filled the canyon floor in three, no, four distinct levels.

“Holy shit,” he said, taking a big step back from the edge. He'd known from the terrain maps loaded in his plant that there was an enormous canyon coming up, but without access to them, and with his mind otherwise occupied by a little thing like clinically dying, he'd forgotten. He'd even read how wide and deep it was in meters. But the abstract numbers paled in comparison to the dizzying reality spreading out before him. The canyon itself was so deep and so wide that Benson's brain simply refused to believe what his eyes were telling it, screwing up his depth perception and causing a sudden bout of vertigo.

His breath quickened, and he felt a chill despite the heat. “So, end of the road, huh?”

Kexx and Kuul glanced at him quizzically. Kexx translated Benson's words for Kuul, then turned to look at him. “What do you mean, Benson?”

“Well we've run out of ground, haven't we?” Benson glanced over the edge and immediately regretted it. It didn't make sense. He'd spent the first three plus decades of his life inside Avalon module, and it was “deeper” than this. Then again, there was no top of it to fall off. If you stepped off from the hub, the worst that would happen is you'd float off waving your arms ineffectually while people on the lifts pointed and laughed at you until someone threw you a tether.

The stakes here are a little higher
, Benson thought, then chuckled nervously to himself at the unintentional pun.

Kexx put a steadying hand on his shoulder, then pointed at more than a dozen black specks at the base of the far canyon wall. “The entrances to the Dwellers' caves are there. That's where our trail leads.”

“But,” Benson pointed down the rock face, “there's a bit of a drop off!”

Kexx gazed back at him, face blank as if ze didn't understand the objection. Then, Benson remembered the lava tube. The ease with which the Atlantians had stuck to the rock, almost like geckos. Kexx didn't understand, because the cliff was no obstacle to zer.

“You've got to be fucking kidding me.”

A
fter some frantic
explaining and ad-hoc translating, Benson and Mei managed to get across to their new friends just how ill equipped they were for making a thousand meter near-vertical free rock climb. They spent the waning hours of light scouting out a more manageable line of descent. About a kilometer and a half west, they found an outcropping that, while hardly inviting, was something less than straight down and offered several small plateaus along the way that would give them a chance to rest before the next leg.

Predictably, the old nightmares about freefalling through space woke Benson several times, and his thin bedroll didn't make falling back asleep any easier. He greeted the morning with an annoyed grunt.

“You awake?” Mei asked from the other side of their small tent. Benson grumbled his affirmation. “Good, just in time to fall to our deaths,” she said.

“It won't come to that,” Benson said. “It's just like when we climbed up the outside of Avalon module, remember?”

“We had a ladder,” Mei answered.

“True, but I was in a spacesuit held together with duct tape. How is this worse?”

Mei pointed downwards. “Ground's waiting for us at the bottom.”

“It'll be quicker than flying off into deep space and waiting for the oxygen to run out.” Benson paused and rubbed his neck. “That wasn't very reassuring, was it?”

“Not really, no.”

“Sorry. We'll be OK, Mei. Just take it slow and steady. You're light and have little hands, you'll be fine. Worry about me instead. I'm old and fat.” Mei cracked a smile at that, which was all Benson had hoped for. “C'mon, we should get moving.”

They tied the dux'ah off on long leashes to the sturdiest shrubs they could find, although Benson was sure they'd rip free with one good jerk. After some deliberation among the caravan, and no small amount of haggling on the part of Kexx, it was agreed that the three largest of the remaining warriors would alternate carrying Mei on their backs as they climbed down. Benson, too large by half to be carried, was tied off with ropes to two others who agreed to stay just above him as they made their way down the cliff.

Benson spent half an hour tying and adjusting a makeshift harness around his chest and running down to loops through his crotch and legs. He tried to imitate the safety harnesses he'd use once or twice back on the Ark, but the Atlantian ropes were stiff and unforgiving.

“The sun rises, my friend,” Kexx chided.

“Just a min… I mean, I'm almost done.” Benson fidgeted and fussed over the trim for another couple of minutes, but eventually even he had to admit he was just putting off the inevitable. He succumbed and handed one end of the rope to Kexx, who'd volunteered to be one of Benson's anchors. Then, much to his shock, Kuul stepped forward and held out a hand to take the other end. The warrior snatched it up while muttering a string of Atlantian that Benson couldn't hope to follow.

“What'd ze say?” he asked Kexx.

“Ze said if you slip because of your stupid shoes and kill us all, ze'll cut off your feet before you can hit the ground.”

“Fair enough.” Benson arranged himself at the edge of the cliff. He looked back at his twin anchors. “OK, once we're moving down the face of the cliff, don't let any slack build up. It'll be bad enough if I slip, but if there's any slack it'll snap tight and pluck you both off. Got that, Kexx?”

Kexx nodded and translated the instructions to Kuul, who acknowledged them with a flutter of zer skin patterns. Benson still couldn't read them for shit, but he did notice that their skin was unusually still, even pale. Despite their bravado, they were rattled. Scared, even, but Benson had his own anxiety to contend with. He looked back over his shoulder at the stunning view of the canyon. Layers of subtle purple, orange, and red weaved through the rock as though painted by a giant brush. It was beautiful. And terrifying. Benson swallowed hard and resolved not to look at anything but his foot and handholds until they reached the canyon floor.

The first step was the longest. Benson climbed meticulously down the outer face of the cliff, never moving more than one hand or one foot to the next hold at a time. The dew of the early morning hadn't yet burned off completely. Benson found himself frequently drying his fingers on his pants, but it wasn't long before sweat added itself to the dew, making for a slick mixture. Kexx and Kuul followed him from above, each careful to keep in line with his descent and the ropes taut, taking some of his weight off of his muscles.

A small yelp drew his attention. Above, Benson saw one of the largest Atlantians starting down the wall with Mei clinging to zer back like the strangest parent/child pairing in history.

“You OK up there, Mei?” he shouted.