Nasha drops to her knees, then sits, then flops onto her back and throws one arm across her eyes.
“Nasha?” Jamie says. “You okay?”
“Oh yeah,” she says without moving. “I’m great.”
Cat turns to look at me. “What now, Mickey? I mean, you’re still in charge of this fiasco, right?”
“I…” I begin. The truth, though, is that I don’t have any kind of reasonable answer.
“Don’t just ask what now,” Berto says after a long, painful silence. “He’s the decision maker here, not the oracle. Give the man some options.”
“Okay,” Cat says. “Option one: go in shooting.”
“Option two,” Nasha says. “Lie here until we die.”
“Option three,” Jamie says. “Walk back to the dome and forget any of this bullshit ever happened.”
“Okay,” Berto says. “Those are all stupid. Mickey?”
I look up. “You think you can get to the top of that?”
Berto follows my gaze. “What? The cliff?”
“Yeah. Can you make it to the top with your pack on your back?”
“Huh.” He takes a few steps back and scratches his chin. I can see his eyes moving across the face, already tracing out the first hint of a path. “Maybe? I’d want to do a walk-around, see if there’s another route that’s more climbable than what we’re looking at here—but even if there’s not, I guess it’s possible. Why? What are you thinking?”
“Same thing that I was thinking with the spiders. If we go down here, I need someone to get back to the dome and let them know what happened.”
“Okay,” Berto says. “So you want me to free-climb a five-hundred-meter granite face with a fifteen-kilo pack on my back, then just hang around up there waiting to see if you get eaten?”
“Yeah, pretty much. Unless you think you can run fast enough to get airborne from the ground?”
He actually has to think about that one.
“No,” he says finally. “I barely made it yesterday even with the speed boost from the rover and a jump-off point three meters off the ground. Pretty sure if I tried to get airborne from a flat start I’d just wind up busting up the glider and hurting myself.”
“Fair enough,” I say. “Anybody got any water at all left?”
Cat pulls a bottle from a side pocket on her pack. “Quarter-liter, maybe?”
“Give it to Berto.”
She looks like she wants to argue, but after a moment’s thought, she hands it over.
“Thanks,” I say. “Jamie?”
He shakes his head. Nasha wasn’t carrying anything, and I’ve been empty for hours now, so it looks like that’s it.
I turn back to Berto. “Okay. Get climbing, I guess. Good luck. I’ll keep you posted on what’s happening down here if I can.”
He hesitates, jaw working as if he has something to say. In the end, though, he just turns and walks away.
“HE’S GONNA DIE,” Cat says. “He’s gonna slip and fall, and then we’re gonna have to watch him splatter right in front of us like a rotten tomato. You know that, don’t you?”
We’re standing shoulder to shoulder at the base of the cliff, heads tilted back, watching Berto climb. Nasha’s still on her back, eyes covered, either sleeping or pretending to. Jamie’s sitting cross-legged on the ground with one of Nasha’s burners across his lap, staring at the mouth of the creepers’ labyrinth.
“Maybe,” I say. “I guess we all have to die eventually, right?”
“True,” she says. “Berto’s not going to die eventually, though. He’s going to die soon. Like, in the next ten minutes.”
I sigh. “The way things have been going, I wouldn’t be surprised if we are too, Cat. The thing is, though, Berto is actually the least likely of any of us to die today. If and when the creepers decide to come back for us, we’re finished. He’ll watch them take us apart, then take off in his homemade flitter and be back at the dome in a couple of hours. Just like always, everything works out for Berto.”
Cat shakes her head. “Not gonna happen. There’s no way in hell he makes it to the top.”
I turn to look at her. “Care to make a wager on that?”
She laughs. “Gamble over whether our friend lives or dies? Sure, why not? I guess that’s who we are by now. What are the stakes?”
I have to think about that for a minute.
“Dinner when we get back to the dome? Not potatoes and slurry, either. This meal has to include at least one rabbit haunch and two tomatoes. Loser pays.”
Cat squints up at me. “That’s a pretty low-risk bet, considering that the odds of us ever making it back to the dome are probably even lower than the odds of Berto making it to the top of the cliff.”
I shrug. “Take it or leave it.”
She turns her attention back to Berto as he wedges one boot into a vertical crack and stretches up for a handhold. “You seem suspiciously confident. Why?”
I smile, though she can’t see it behind my rebreather. “Did I ever tell you how I wound up on this mission?”
She tilts her head to one side. “I don’t think so. We talked about it, didn’t we? That night in the gym, right? You told me you weren’t a prisoner, and that you weren’t conscripted. I didn’t believe you.”
I laugh. “Well, it’s true. I was not a prisoner, and I was not conscripted. I actually volunteered for this gig. It wasn’t an entirely voluntary volunteering, though. I was in a shit-ton of trouble—and the reason I was in a shit-ton of trouble, aside from the general fact that I’m an idiot, was that I bet against Berto being able to do something that no human being should have been able to do, and then sat there and watched him do it. I promised myself then that I wouldn’t ever make that mistake again.”
We fall silent for a while then, and just watch. Berto is maybe a third of the way up the face at the moment. He moves like a spider, unhurried, hands moving from one hold to the next, toes finding near-invisible irregularities in the rock face.
“He looks like he knows what he’s doing, anyway,” Cat says. “Was he a pro climber or something back on Midgard?”
I shake my head. “Nope. Not so far as I know, anyway, and I’m pretty sure he would have let me know if there was yet another thing that he was great at.”
“Okay. Dedicated amateur, then?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Dilettante?”
“Not really.”
“So as far as you know, he’s got no serious climbing experience of any kind.”
I shrug. “Yeah, pretty much.”
“And yet you knew he’d be able to pull this off because…”
“Two reasons. First, Berto is a physical savant. You know he was the top-ranked pog-ball player on Midgard, right?”
“I did not. Is that a big deal? I was never much into sports.”
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s a big deal. He beat guys who had dedicated their lives to the sport, one after another, barely breaking a sweat, and he accomplished it basically as a goof. People were calling him the greatest natural talent the planet had ever seen, and then he walked away after three years because he was bored.”
“Okay,” she says. “And?”
I turn to look at her. “Huh?”
She rolls her eyes. “You said there were two reasons. That’s only one.”
I look up again. Berto is balanced on his toes on what looks like a two-centimeter ledge, one hand stretched above him and gripping a tiny nub, the other pressed flat against the rock beside him.
“Look at that,” I say. “You see where he is now?”
“Yeah,” she says. “About to fall.”
“Your heart’s racing just thinking about being up there right now, isn’t it?”
She shrugs. “Maybe.”
“Right. That’s the other reason. I guarantee you that his is thumping away at a steady sixty beats per minute right now. The thing about Berto is that the part of our brains that makes most of us panic when, just for example, we realize that we’re two hundred meters up a sheer rock face with nothing but two toes on a stray nub of rock between us and a quick and painful death—that part just isn’t there for Berto. You remember that stunt he pulled with the flitter a couple of years ago, right?”