CHAPTER TEN
"We APPEAR," STEN observed, "to be trapped."
Cind grunted at him, still recovering her breath.
"Was this on the aerial?"
"Negative. Or if it was, I didn't pick it up on the viewer."
"Doesn't matter, really. Other than we're going to have to do some serious backtracking."
He slid out of his heavy pack, nearly falling on the steep icy slope. Backtracking? He glanced behind him.
Way, way, way down below, he could see the double herringbone tracks of their skis, leading up the slopes toward this clotting excuse for a mountain they were stuck on. About two kilometers before, the gradient had become too steep, and they had strapped their skis to their packs and put on crampons. A klick after that, the two of them had roped up as the grade grew steeper still.
Two klicks... one kilometer... that was the distance in a direct, near-vertical line. In actual travel, they had been off their skis since just after dawn, and the day was getting late. And they had better reach a decision on what to do next quickly—Sten would rather not spend the night in a sleeping bag that he would have to anchor to keep from sliding off the mountain.
If for no other reason than that he had designs on Cind's virtue...
Sten had arrived at his planned base of operations—the Bhor home worlds in the Lupus Cluster—without encountering any Imperial warships. Next, he would prepare his specific campaign and go to war.
He still had to get approval for using their worlds from the Bhor Council. But at least he had been greeted with cheers, invitations to drunken feasts, and volunteers who wanted to join him killing someone, anyone.
However, it took time for the Bhor elders to assemble, and even longer for them to reach a decision, given the Bhor tendency to endlessly explore any aspect of anything—all spokesBhor welcome. Which was probably a legacy from the severe lack of entertainment in their primitive days during long arctic nights.
Rykor herself had wanted some time and privacy to consider what could be done, from her perspective, against the Empire.
Neither set of Sten's potential allies had materialized. Not that there was any guarantee they would—both the Rom and Wild's smugglers might have realized an alliance with Sten was more likely to produce death than freedom.
And Sten's troopies—from his embassy assistants to his Bhor and Gurkha heavies to the Imperial sailors—had suffered through a very long tour. Essentially no one had had any time off since they had arrived in the Altaics. Even the Gurkhas were tired and weary of blood.
Tired beings make mistakes, and Sten could afford none.
He spread his four ships out among the Wolf Worlds, hid them well on rural airports, and gave his troops some R&R. Sten worried his presence among the Bhor would be discovered by the inevitable Imperial agents, but Kilgour had told him not to fash. He already had a Plot, and would take care of that little matter before his own vacation. Which involved Otho, vast amounts of stregg, and whatever trouble he could get into.
Cind had the op order for Operation Vacation already drafted. A conventional lover might have looked for tropical oceans and romantic islands with ten-star resorts and twenty bow-n‘-scrapers for each guest But Cind was a descendant of the Jann, had grown up among the Bhor, and was a hard, experienced field soldier. To her, vacations meant the wilderness—and Sten's own ideas weren't that different.
The Bhor home planet was still glacial, even though the Bhor had reluctantly removed some of the glaciers as civilization and the birthrate increased. Scattered across the world were volcanic "islands"—oases in the midst of freeze. Most of them had been settled aeons ago by the Bhor, but there were still a few that were unpopulated.
Cind had planned on kidnapping Sten and taking him to one of those, and had been trying to figure out which of the possible areas could provide the best skiing and even some winter climbing. Sten had taught Cind rock scrambling, and she was determined to become at least his equal and, she hoped, his master.
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 undipped 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 zed 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 skrьiched 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.