And the tension drained back out of me.
‘Charter boat, guys. They’re hauling a bottleback carcass.’
The boat laboured past and faded northward on a bored drone, listing awkwardly with the weight of its prize, not even that close to us in the end. Neurachem showed me the dead bottleback in silhouette against the blue-lit surface of the water, still trailing thin threads of blood into the water. The massive torpedo body rolled sluggishly against the bow wave, the flukes trailed like broken wings. Part of the dorsal flange had been ripped loose at some point and now it flogged back and forth in water, blurred at the edges with ragged lumps and tendrils of tissue. Loose cabling tangled alongside. Looked as if they’d harpooned it a few times – whoever had chartered the boat clearly wasn’t that great a fisherman.
When humans first arrived on Harlan’s World, the bottlebacks didn’t have any natural predators. They were the top of the food chain, magnificently adapted marine hunters and highly intelligent, social animals. Nothing the planet had evolved recently was up to killing them.
We soon changed that.
‘Hope that’s not an omen,’ murmured Sierra Tres unexpectedly.
Brasil made a noise in his throat. I vented the emergency chambers on the buoyancy jacket and snapped the grav system back on. The water seemed suddenly colder around me. Behind the automatic motions of course check and gear trim, I could feel a vague, undefined anger seeping in.
‘Let’s get this done, guys.’
But the mood was still with me twenty minutes later when we crept into the shallows at the base of Rila, pulsing at my temples and behind my eyes. And projected on the glass of my scuba mask, the pale red route-pointers from Natsume’s simulation software seemed to flare in time with the ratcheting of my own blood. The urge to do damage was a rising tide inside me, like wakefulness, like hilarity.
We found the channel Natsume had recommended, eased through with gloved hands braced against rock and coral outcrops to avoid snagging. Levered ourselves up out of the water onto a narrow ledge that the software had tinted and flagged with a slightly demonic smiling face. Entry level, Natsume had said, shedding his monkish demeanour for a fleeting moment. Knock, knock. I got myself braced and took stock. Faint silvery light from Daikoku touched the sea, but Hotei had still not risen and the spray from the maelstrom and nearby wavecrash fogged what light there was. The view was mostly gloom. Angelfire sent shadows scurrying past on the rocks as another firework package burst somewhere to the north. Thunder rippled across the sky. I scanned the cliff above for a moment, then the darkened sea we’d just climbed out of. No sign we’d been noticed. I detached the dive helmet’s frame from the mask and lifted it off. Shed my flippers and flexed the toes of the rubber boots underneath.
‘Everybody okay?’
Brasil grunted an affirmative. Tres nodded. I secured the helmet frame at my belt in the small of my back where it wouldn’t get in the way, stripped off my gloves and stowed them in a pouch. Settled the now lightweight mask a little more comfortably on my face, and checked that the datafeed was still securely jacked in. Tipping my head back, I saw Natsume’s route march off above us in clearly marked red hand- and footholds.
‘You all seeing this okay?’
‘Yeah.’ Brasil grinned. ‘Kind of spoils the fun, doesn’t it? Marking it out like that.’
‘You want to go first then?’
‘After you, Mister Eishundo.’
Without giving myself time to think about it, I reached up and grasped the first indicated hold, braced my feet and heaved myself onto the cliff. Swung up and found a grip with my other hand. The rock was wet with maelstrom mist, but the Eishundo grip held. I brought a leg across to fit against an angled ledge, swung again and grasped.
And left the ground behind.
Nothing to it.
The thought zipped through my mind after I’d gone about twenty metres, and left a slightly manic grin in its wake. Natsume had warned me that the early stages of the climb were deceptive. It’s apeman stuff, he said seriously. Lots of wide swings and grabs, big moves and your strength’s good at this stage. You’re going to feel good. Just remember it doesn’t last.
I pursed my lips, chimpanzee-like and hooted gently through them. Below me, the sea smashed and gnawed restlessly at rock. The sound and scent of it came bouncing up the cliff face and wrapped me in windings of chill and damp. I shrugged off a shudder.
Swing up. Grab.
Very slowly, it grew on me that the Envoy conditioning hadn’t yet come online against my vertigo. With the rock face less than half a metre in front of my face and the Eishundo muscle system thrumming on my bones, it was almost possible to forget that there was a drop below. The rock lost the coating of spray from the maelstrom as we climbed higher, the repeating roar of waves faded to distant white noise. The gekko grip on my hands made glassy, treacherous holds laughably comfortable. And more than all of these factors, or maybe the culminating Eishundo touch, what I’d told Natsume seemed to be true – the sleeve knew how to do this.
Then, as I reached a set of holds and ledges whose markers the mask display labelled with a restpoint symbol, I looked down to see how Brasil and Tres were doing, and ruined it all.
Sixty metres below – not even a third of the whole climb – the sea was a blackened fleece, touched with Daikoku silver where it rippled. The skirt of rocks at the base of Rila sat in the water like solid shadows. The two big ones that framed the channel where we’d come in now looked as if they’d fit into my hand. The back and forth sluice of water between them was hypnotic, pulling me downward. The view seemed to pivot dizzyingly.
The conditioning came on line, flattening the fear. Like airlock doors in my head. My gaze came up again to face the rock. Sierra Tres reached up and tapped my foot.
‘Okay?’
I realised I’d been frozen for the best part of a minute.
‘Just resting.’
The marked trail of holds leaned left, an upward diagonal around a broad buttress that Natsume had warned us was pretty much unclimbable. Instead he’d lain back and moved almost upside down under the chin of the buttress, feet jammed against minute folds and fissures in the stone, fingers pinching angles of rock that barely deserved the name hold, until he could finally get both hands on a series of sloped ledges at the far side and haul himself back into a nearly vertical position.
I gritted my teeth and started to do the same.
Halfway there, my foot slipped, swung my weight out and pulled my right hand off the rock. An involuntary grunt, and I was dangling left-handed, feet flailing for purchase far too low to find anything apart from empty air. I would have screamed but the barely recovering sinews in my left arm were doing it for me.
‘Fuck.’
Hang on tight.
The gekko grip held.
I curled upward from the waist, craning my neck to see the marked footholds in the glass of the mask. Short, panicky breaths. I got one foot lodged against a bubble of stone. Tiny increments of strain came off my left arm. Unable to see clearly with the mask, I reached up in the dark with my right hand and felt about on the rock for another hold.
Found it.
Moved my braced foot fractionally and jammed the other one in next to it.
Hung, panting.
No, don’t fucking stop!
It took all my willpower to move my right hand for the next hold. Two more moves, and it took the same sickening effort to look for the next. Three more moves, a fractionally improved angle, and I realised I was almost to the other side of the buttress. I reached up, found the first of the sloping ledges and dragged myself hyperventilating and cursing upright. A genuine, deeply grooved hold offered itself. I got my feet to the lowest ledge. Sagged with relief against the cool stone.