‘I’m sorry,’ Pagan said to everyone, shaking his head. I could hear the misery in the aging hacker’s voice at letting us down. He looked awful.
‘Don’t worry about it, that was a miserable fucking tab,’ I heard a bone-tired me say to him.
Merle ran his hand through the stubble on his skull. He’d shaved it to get rid of the mess of hair he’d grown in captivity. He looked more like his sister than ever now.
‘We need food, rest and a brew-up.’ I’d said it to everyone but I wanted Merle’s opinion.
‘We need to be careful. We’re near one of the processors. They’re heavily guarded. A lot of the fighting went on around them during the war. They have remote and manned aerial patrols so we can’t stay here too long, and I don’t know what a brew-up is.’
‘A cup of tea. You’re American — you wouldn’t understand,’ a panting, sweat-soaked Mudge said.
‘What’s not to understand about a cup of tea?’ Merle asked.
‘For your lot, how to bloody make one,’ Mudge answered.
Everyone from Britain who’d ever had an American-made cup of tea was smiling. Even Pagan managed a weak grin. I think Merle had understood his job as straight man. That was promising.
It wasn’t a proper brew-up in a mess tin over a camp stove. I wasn’t sure I wanted to risk that in this atmosphere. It’d taste bloody awful. Instead we had cans of self-warming sweet tea — it wasn’t the same — and some energy bars.
Merle was rigging the climbing gear, though each of us would check it before we used it. I wasn’t sure where he was getting the energy. Particularly as up until less than two weeks ago he’d been living in a hole in the ground with a French name.
‘I love the atmosphere,’ Mudge said, hawking and spitting. ‘Nope, no better. I don’t even want a cigarette. This is a deeply depressing world.’
‘It’s what it does to my hair that bothers me the most,’ Cat surprised me by saying.
‘I could see how that would get to you,’ Mudge said.
Merle smiled as he drove another piton into a seam in the rock. The crack echoed out into the huge cavern. We paused and scanned the cavern for movement. We waited and waited. Nothing.
‘What, you think I was born bald?’ Cat said as if the conversation had never been interrupted.
Morag looked horrified. ‘It’s just grown back,’ she said, fingering her lank and sweaty hair.
‘It’s all right, honey. I shaved it because it kept on going frizzy; it didn’t fall out.’
Morag looked relieved. Pagan and Mudge were smiling and shaking their heads.
‘See, this was why I didn’t join the army,’ Merle said dryly.
‘Too worried about their hair?’ I asked.
Despite the banter we were constantly scanning our surroundings and taking it in turns to eat and drink; the rest of the time we had weapons in our hands. We needed the banter after that walk.
‘The air force have better stylists,’ Cat said.
I smiled at this. Now time to spoil everyone’s fun.
‘Okay, everyone pack up the E-suits and shove your camo on.’
By camo I meant reactive camouflage. They were like gillie suits made of a rugged liquid-crystal thinscreen that adapted to and blended with the surroundings. One of the benefits of a near-bottomless expense account. Well that and the amount that each of us had embezzled. We took it in turns to get out of the E-suits, breaking them down and packing them away. More weight to carry but we didn’t know when we’d need them again. Then we shrugged on the reactive camouflage over whatever armour we were wearing.
Each of us was carrying five hundred metres of photoreceptive smart rope. Merle was taking the end of each of the pieces of rope and chemically bonding them together. He was then checking them, then Cat was rechecking them and then I did the same.
‘Is this enough?’ I asked.
Merle shrugged in a not very comforting manner. He took the winch frame and mechanism from the drop container and started fitting it together. I headed around to the other side of the hole in the cavern floor to aid him. The rest were watching our backs. We wrapped the container in a reactive camouflage suit and swung it out over the hole. The engine whined quietly as the winch mechanism slowly started feeding in the rope we’d coiled on the floor. Merle guided it through to make sure it didn’t snarl up. Now Cat and myself were covering the hole in case anything happened. In theory it was moving so slowly that the camouflage sheet and the properties of the rope should render it almost invisible.
It took a long time. We’d fed over a thousand metres of rope through when we heard it. An engine. The so-familiar sound of a gunship had once been a comforting sound to me. Not now.
Merle slowed the winch, bringing it to as gentle a stop as he could manage. I could still see the rope swinging from the winch. Cat and I backed a little further away from the edge of the hole. Merle took something from his webbing and unfolded it. Super-spy had brought a hand-held periscope. He lay down on the rock floor and peered through it into the cavern.
Nobody said anything. The acoustics of the cavern were doing odd things. The engine noise seemed to get very loud and then recede. The echoing didn’t help. I was sweating again. Not so much from the exertion this time; I was suddenly overwhelmed with fear that the gunship would fly into the rope or the container. This was ridiculous. It was a huge cavern and a very thin rope. Eventually we heard the sound of the gunship’s engines definitely receding and Merle folded away his periscope.
‘Patrol,’ he said. ‘Would have been here longer if they were changing shift at the atmosphere processor.’ I nodded. He started the winch again. Some minutes later I saw the rope develop a bit of slack. ‘Well it’s long enough,’ Merle said.
We quickly disassembled the winch and packed it into Merle’s gear. He was first over. He just slithered over the edge head first. We watched the rope quiver as he slowly rappelled down it. After an age we saw it twitch. You had to be paying attention because the rope was now the same colour as the background rock.
Morag was next. That seemed to take longer. I had a brief thrill of terror as I watched her creep out over the precipice, but already the camouflage was obscuring her, turning her into fractal ghost movements in the violet light.
Then I went. The awful feeling of vertigo as I slipped over the edge head first, the sudden change in perspective, the shifting of the cavern floor and the sudden appearance of the cavern roof above me. I quickly suppressed the terror as I concentrated on rappelling down the rope slow enough for the reactive camouflage to work, using my legs to keep my inverted body straight. Down through the massive rigs that supported the UV strip lights. It was disconcerting because the rope seemed to disappear just below my grip and I was struggling to see my own hands. I had to rely on my sense of touch, dulled by gloves and inertial armour. The sound of my rasping breath was loud in my ears. Very quickly I was exhausted. I was so heavy and all the weight just wanted to pull me towards the distant ground.
All this rock. I wondered if Cat had gone to the Grand Canyon to remind herself of this place. Why would she want to be reminded? The mind does strange things to veterans. You don’t think you’ll miss these places but, like Mudge had pointed out, few experiences in your life ever live up to being that intense.
Looking back up I could see what looked like an enormous fan with an equally enormous filter beneath it. Around the edge of this giant piece of engineering I could see a system of catwalks with automated weapons at regular intervals. Fortified buildings hung from the cavern roof plus a landing pad that looked like it could take anything up to a transport shuttle. This was one of the atmosphere processors that helped make the air in the cavern system manageable. I didn’t want to call the air breathable. I continued pulling myself down. In terms of mega-scale engineering I guess the only things comparable were orbital stations and the Spokes. There were bigger ships, but we never saw the outside of them up close.