He stuffed his feet back into his socks and boots, pausing a minute to let the warmth restore at least some measure of circulation to his feet. Then Jay retrieved his cloak and face mask and steeled himself to walk back outside. He really wanted to wait the rain out in the civilized atmosphere of the dome.
How far gone am I when a portable shelter is civilized? he wondered irritably.
He shoved the door aside. Without pausing, he ducked out into the canyon. The door slapped shut behind him.
The canyon’s darkness folded around him like another cloak. The rain had stopped, leaving nothing but puddles with crusts of ice forming rapidly. The sun was over the walls of the main canyon, Jay knew, but the night’s unforgiving cold and dark lingered for hours longer in this side crack. Still, Jay felt his breathing ease, not just from the change in the weather, but from getting away from Lu. It was always easier to think on his own.
It’s so close to finished, I’m getting nervous. And I should have had word by now. Uary’s had plenty of time to find out what that woman is.
Just check the transmitter and get back where you belong, Jahidh, he ordered himself.
All three of the team wore the neckline terminals commonly called “torques” that worked in conjunction with their translator disks to allow them to keep in touch with each other over limited distances. But offworld transmission required more power and a lot more circuitry. When Jay had suggested that the spare transmitter should be set up somewhere away from the shelter, Lu and Cor had both agreed. The reasoning he’d used on them was that if the weather, or a hostile native managed to destroy the shelter, there’d still be a way for the survivors to get word out. His real reasoning had been that the communications system needed a weak link he could exploit.
Jay switched the lantern on and strapped it to his arm. He pointed the beam up the rocky cliff, tracking the handholds Lu had so carefully gouged into the stone. He took a deep breath and flexed his hands before he hoisted himself up the rocky cliff. The rock hadn’t had the chance to absorb any heat from the new day. It was like climbing a ragged block of ice. Jay gritted his teeth and kept on climbing.
About ten meters above the canyon floor, the cliff broke away. Jay swung his leg over the lip and dropped down into a pocket-sized valley. Places like this were called “flood cups” by the inhabitants of the Realm because they could sometimes fill up with water and spill out into the canyon. This one, however, had several drainage holes drilled in it. Jay only had to splash through a few shallow puddles to reach the transmitter.
The unit was a stack of squat boxes. Everything they used on this planet had to be sheltered against the torrential rains and freezing cold that came with night.
Jay undid the straps holding the lantern to his sleeve and hooked it onto the side of the transmitter so he could see what he was doing. Then he lifted back the cover on the main unit. All the keys and displays glowed with a steady amber light and were completely blank.
Jay touched a series of commands he had memorized weeks before they landed here. No response came from the unit. No messages from the Unifiers, then. No change in status to report to their people down here stirring up trouble. Cor and Lu spent a lot of time cursing about the lack of attention their project was receiving from the bureaucracy back on May 16, even with the Vitae so interested in the Realm. Jay suspected both of them were on somebody’s mud list by now for failing to make scheduled reports.
Neither side knew how many messages were being “lost” during transmission.
Jay touched the keys again in a sequence that Lu and Cor had no idea was valid. The transmitter responded by scattering what could have been a random series of symbols from a dozen different alphabets across the screen. Jay took his translator disk out of his ear and slipped it into the download slot in the transmitter. The screen cleared instantly. Jay reclaimed the disk.
As soon as he had replaced the translator in his ear, Caril’s voice spoke to him. “We have released the artifact Stone in the Wall. She and Eric Born were allowed to escape confinement twenty hours prior to my sending this message…”
Jay sat in his tiny pool of light, feeling the cold seep into him as he listened to the details.
Blood, blood, blood! he cursed. Now we have to hunt down her family. He thought about Trail and her eyes, but couldn’t work the brief glimpse of a resemblance into a full-fledged hope. How could those idiots have done this! They know I’ve got nothing to work with down here! For a brief moment, he knew how Lu and Cor felt, bereft of resources and support.
He tried to tell himself it was only a setback, not a dead end. And it would have been very bad if the Assembly had found out how Stone in the Wall functioned before they did, but it was still bad enough. If the Imperialists didn’t have a thorough grasp of how the artifacts functioned by the time the Assembly parties came over the World’s Wall, the chance to win the Home Ground would be gone.
Of course, the two Unifiers thought that was the deadline for having the Realm’s power base reorganized under a monarch who wanted to join the Human Family.
None of which leaves any more time for sitting around here.
Jay climbed out of the flood cup and down to the canyon floor. The sky above him had turned smoky grey, but its light hadn’t yet traveled far enough over the Walls to show him his way, so he kept the lantern on and picked his path between the fallen rocks and frozen puddles as fast as he could.
After about three miles, the darkness ended and Jay stepped out of the canyon’s shadow into the filtered, hazy glow that passed for daylight in the Realm.
The Teachers said that Broken Canyon was where the Nameless Powers had argued about the word for “stone.” The entire breadth of it was a mass of jagged promontories, caves, cups, and gashes. The Walls didn’t even stand up straight. They sloped open like the canyon was yawning.
When the Nameless had finally come to an agreement, went the story, they made up for the botched job by painting the canyon in a spectacular fashion. The rain hadn’t made it out here, so the colors were still dry. Veins of silver and quartz shot through bands of crimson, rust, vermilion, violet, and sparkling sandstone. Here and there you could even catch a glimpse of a slick, greyish patch of exposed silicate.
Jay could remember the tremor of excitement in Lu’s voice when he’d discovered that the slick, grey “rock” was really a manufactured silicate lying under the dirt and gravel of the Realm. It meant that MG49 sub 1 was not just a failed colony, it was a fallen world, and who knew how much of their technology might have survived under the ground?
Broken Canyon measured three miles wide at its base, but he still felt hemmed in by the walls that were too huge to be taken in with a single glance. It got worse when he remembered that these were the smaller walls, and that the black, ragged stretch where the horizon should have been was a hundred times bigger.
Four years, as Jay and his two companions measured time, had passed and he had never gotten used to the sight. Jay looked at the ground and started down the slope through the screen of scraggly trees and underbrush. The spectacular colors of the walls almost compensated for the tan, grey, and olive green of the stunted trees and spiky reeds that poked out of the skimpy patches of soil. Moss and lichens gave the rocks coats of fuzz.
The sounds of life drifted up to him on the back of the omnipresent wind. Hooves and skids clattered against rock and sank into mud. Voices bounced off the boulders in an incoherent babble that seemed to come from all directions at once, all mixed up with the thousand little noises that came from constant motion. Jay shoved his way through a thicket of thorny trees and finally got a clear view of the muddy, pockmarked road.