For all her vocal disgust at being restricted to "Kiddy Hill," Susan had to be as aware of her inexperience as anyone else could possibly be. She was also aware that there was a world of difference between any simulator, however realistic, and the reality of a fast downhill run on real skis. So however much she might resent the restrictions she faced, she knew it was still—
He could never remember, later, what interrupted his train of thought. Not the first thing, at any rate. There had to have been something, some tiny clue his conscious mind didn't grasp at the time and never managed to get its hands on later, but he had absolutely no idea what it had been. One moment his thoughts were sliding along in their normal channels, and the next they simply stopped. Just like that. As if someone had thrown a switch in his brain that jerked his eyes away from his sister and to the sheer wall of snow-ribbed black rock sliding past just beyond the lift car's windows.
It was rough, that wall, with icicle-anchoring cracks and crevices which had caught and held shallow dustings of snow. He'd been fascinated when he first saw the striations across the rock face, but he'd also become quickly accustomed to them. Yet there was something different about them now, and his brow furrowed as he tried to figure out what it was. Then he had it. Fine sprays of snow and ice crystals—almost like snow devils, but not quite—had begun to swirl above the pockets of snow.
But there's not any wind, he thought in puzzlement. Or not that much, at least. And what's that sound? It's almost like—
He looked up through the crystoplast roof of the car, and his heart seemed to stop.
Csilla Berczi's head jerked up as the first dull rumble vibrated through her ears and the soles of her feet. She didn't recognize the sound, but something about it rang warning signals in the primitive, cavewoman side of her brain. Her eyes snapped around the horizon, sweeping it for threats, and then she sucked in as if someone had just punched her in the stomach.
The entire mountainside above the Athinai Resort seemed to heave and shudder. It was a dropping motion, at first, a slow-motion movement at the very peak of Mount Pericles that seemed to have nothing at all to do with the buildings and people at the mountain's foot. But that changed with terrifying speed. The slow motion quickened, sliding faster and faster, and as it quickened, it spread. More and more of the mountain seemed to crumble, curling over like the top of some monstrous ocean wave while a spume of snow blew high above it. Boulders and rock outcrops and the dense dark green of evergreen trees vanished into the accelerating maw of the avalanche, and Csilla Berczi heard herself crying out in horrified denial as a lethal wall of rock and snow and splintered trees—and human beings—engulfed the lift towers and exploded across the resort.
Like all modern ski resorts, especially on Gryphon, the Athinai had the very latest in seismic monitoring equipment. Gryphon's weather was frequently violent and always difficult to predict very far in advance, and the mountainous planet was also the most tectonically active of the Star Kingdom's three inhabited worlds. That combination was enough to create avalanche hazards often, particularly in late winter or spring, when sharp temperature changes were common, and Athinai's management had no intention of allowing itself to be caught by surprise if it happened to them. Remote listening stations and temperature monitors reported back to the resort's central data processing station on a real-time basis. That data also went out to the Gryphon Mountain Data Interface, which had begun as a private venture over two T-centuries before, where it was joined by satellite imagery which allowed GMDI to track accumulations and search for even the tiniest signs of instability on a planet-wide basis. In the last fifty years, the planetary government had gotten involved—Gryphon's resort attractions accounted for almost twenty percent of its foreign exchange, and the local government reasoned that allowing paying guests to be squashed would do unfortunate things to the tourist trade—and GMDI routinely spotted avalanche conditions even as they formed.
Whenever that happened, steps were taken either to relieve the conditions or to evacuate all of the threatened resorts' guests until the danger had passed. Given the capabilities of modern counter-grav, tractors, and pressers, it was usually possible to deal with the threat before it materialized, and perhaps that was part of the reason for what happened. Perhaps the human beings behind those monitors and all the sophisticated technology for intervening and forbidding avalanches had become too confident, too certain of their own ability to control the raw fury of nature. Or perhaps it was even simpler than that, for the sensor density in the critical area was lower than it ought to have been. No one had known the minor fault line geologists would later name the Athinai Switch even existed, and the detection net's designers had skimped just a bit on what everyone "knew" was a stable area and chosen to devote more of their resources to known fault areas. What they had installed around Mount Pericles met the seismologists' specs—barely—but it was spread thin, and no one would ever know if the fault had given any previous signs of its existence that better instrumentation might have detected.
And what someone might or might not have known was utterly irrelevant anyway as the entire side of the Mount Pericles snowpack broke loose and went thundering downward like the icy white breath of Hell.
"Oh my God!"
Honor didn't recognize the voice on the net. She knew it wasn't one of her people—or she thought it wasn't, anyway, she corrected herself almost instantly, for she really wasn't sure. The shock and horror which suffused the words could have disguised anyone's voice.
She exchanged a sharp glance with Chief Zariello, and then automatically ran her eyes over the icons in her HUD, making certain all of her pinnaces were where they were supposed to be. But the check was pure reflex. Some part of her already knew whatever was happening had nothing to do with the drop exercise.
"Look!" someone else gasped. "Holy Mithra, look at the valley!"
Honor's head snapped up and around, and Chief Zariello automatically rolled the pinnace to give her a better look through the roof of the armorplast canopy. Her eyes swept out, looking for whatever had prompted that horrified exclamation. Then she saw it, and her face went blank with horror of her own as she watched the tidal wave of snow, stone, rock, and earth come smashing down the valley like the Apocalypse itself.
Athinai's sensors might not have seen it coming far enough ahead of time for an evacuation, but the resort's designers had allowed to the best of their ability for that possibility. Alarms began to wail throughout the compound, and massively reinforced panels of alloy snapped up to cover the huge expanses of crystoplast built into the viewing galleries and restaurants and shops. Lift towers locked down and threw up barrier panels of their own, and immensely powerful presser beams snarled to life. No one could have built an effective wall of pressers all around the resort, but the designers had stationed the generators at strategic points. They didn't try to build a wall; instead, they projected a series of angled pressers, like baffles or coffer dams that strove to divide the flowing megatons of snow and stone like the prows of ships and divert them from the resort's critical points. But the engineers who designed and built those generators had expected more time to bring them on-line. That was the reason all those monitoring systems existed: to give time for remedial measures, or for evacuation, or at the very least to spin the generators fully up before they had to take the load.