Ringclimber

Chapter 20 - The Edge

"Hey, what's that?" Kyle asks. They are together, resting, below a fairly transparent section of the ring. High to the outside, a new, brilliant star grows. In moments, it is brighter than the sun. It slowly elongates, stretching retrograde.

"It's not an ice carrier signature," Pat mutters.

"Come on, none of you guys remember?" Sharon is surprised. "It's January 17th. The Hale probe is heading out today. Damn, I should have been ready." She synchs her recorder. "A starship," she whispers.

The light casts a second shadow from each of them. It slowly crawls across the sky with their orbit away from it. They move on. The next dark side, they rise to the surface of the rings, and watch the blaze of the probe flicker against their visors. It is a light like a campfire that they can use to warm themselves with before sleep. Two darks later, it is only a star. A dark later still, it is invisible, and Sharon sits outside the tent, reading its relayed telemetry.

At six months they reach one of the wildest, hardest parts of the rings. The outer edge of the C. A shear between masses of stone, streams of rust, and fragments of coalesced ice. The grinding is hideous and silent, but they leap, knowing it for the final challenge. Sometimes it is a murderous game, and they crawl though isolated and darkened caves of slowly crumbling soil. They drift through vaults of void, watching the teeth of the rocks ahead. They are unable to stop, because there is nowhere that it is safe to stand.

There is a moment when she bursts through snow to a darkness shot with colorless blazing light. She shouts with ecstasy.

"What'd they think?" she yells. "Stop? No, let's go. Right down there to that damn storm." She smiles at her whimsy, amused at her fantasy... she rights herself, but the burn is incomplete as the systems fail, and she is tumbling.

They come out of the blizzard in time to see her out of control, her course intersecting a rotating boulder - ten tons of glinting dusty ice.

Erin and Pat stare for a moment, until suddenly Pat feels herself wrenched around by Anne grappling one of the spare air tubes from her pack. And then Kyle suddenly jets past in pursuit of Sharon.

Anne is cursing. "Goddamn it, why did you have to leave it hooked... Couldn't you just --" she tears at the plug joint and it releases, scattering her backward head over heels, hastily righted like a marionette by the stabilization burn. She fires thrusters, following Kyle and Erin so swiftly that she wonders if she will be able to stop.

But they are too late. A shriek and a grunt as Sharon's body strikes the moonlet; a sound of crumpling that Anne is terrified will actually be the suit frame, but her remote consoles show that the frame is OK, though the life support telltales have all gone red. Sharon's suit rebounds and spirals lazily out through the boulders. The whistling of air out a broken joint steals their hearing.

They can hear Anne reading off her corrections to herself as she passes them at full speed. "Three point four," she gasps. "OK, now point twelve down." Her voice is rigid, as if it would break used for anything but numbers. "OK, up there, uh... one twenty... twenty four, twenty six. Come on! Straighten up!" The rocks are dancing around her, but the movement is hers.

"C'mon," Pat cries, tracking Anne. It is some of the hardest flying she has ever seen, and as the material gets denser, Sharon is rebounding and slowing, but Anne is using gymnastic techniques to keep her own energy up and gain distance.

Pat burns hard, and Kyle gasps in terror as she veers from the path of a glittering boulder, then is almost invisible in its shadow. For a moment, he is frightened that he will be lost, not thinking of Sharon, not thinking of anything except the idea of being lost. He burns, and he is frowning, lips parted, a rictus of disgust and shame.

Anne sweeps past Sharon's tumbling suit, and behind. She clings to the pack, and Sharon, awakening dimly, fires a sporadic sharp burn that only shifts the axis of the tumbling. They smash through a curtain into thick dust. Anne smacks her on the shoulder. "Cut it out," she yells. "You're making it worse." Sharon passes out again screaming from the lack of air and the cold.

Anne wraps her legs around Sharon's waist and merges with Sharon's stabilization computer. She lets it work while she wrenches at the valve, seeing quickly that, as she expected, most of Sharon's primary air has been drained by the leak. As the stablization burns jolt them, she switches to the secondary, and replaces the primary bottle from the spare she had brought. A six hour bottle, she thinks, ought to be good for ten minutes at this rate of leakage.

They flash the emergency bubble up around Sharon. Erin flies back to the depot for additional air. There are tears runneling the sweat on her cheeks as she takes a light step into the sky, dwindling and vanishing through the dust. Inside the bubble, Anne crouches beside Sharon and grips her rigid prosthetic hand. And Sharon, though her eyes are bewildered and faint, smiles the little smile back. Then they start to save her life.

It is a shock to awaken, and the weightlessness hits her in the pit of her stomach. She wants to be sick, but twenty years of habits and control save her from that. From the ceiling, Anne glances past her softbook, and seeing Sharon's eyes glint with motion, she abandons the book and pushes down toward her patient.

"How are you?" she whispers, hanging close.

"Been worked by an avalanche, eh?" Sharon's voice is hoarse with the aftereffects of pressure loss.

Anne smiles, but there is a restraint of sadness and vigil in her voice. "You were."

"No shit..." but her voice is lost with her consciousness, trailing away weakly. She is asleep again, and Anne reaches up for her book.

"I think we should pull out," Anne replies. "Look, it's not even safe here, we're too close to the surface. What else can we do?"

"Let Sharon decide," Erin insists.

Anne glares back. "She's in no shape to decide."

"She will be. Let's wait." Erin sees the resistance on the other's faces. "It's her right. She started this. She came to save you, Kyle. She took you, Anne, to the summit of Arsia when you were willing to go. She let me decide to go down from Arsia. She has a right to make up her own mind, to have us leave her alone until she does, and to accept what she wants. So leave her alone, all right?"

When Sharon is finally mobile, Erin says nothing. She makes no comment when Sharon starts to work on her battered suit. It is as if her support had been a last surge of energy, now spent. She produces tools and probes when Sharon asks for them. Once in a while, Sharon examines her, but says nothing.

As they approach the inner edge of the C Ring, Erin overhears Pat and Anne discussing projects postponed, soon to be restarted, as if they are prisoners of conscience about to be released. "You have no idea," Erin interrupts. "It's going to be a long time before you get to do this stuff. People will be following you around for a long time, every damn thing you do."

It is true, but they had never really considered it. A new apprehension enters their thoughts. That of succeeding at something no one had ever done.

Still, the public is far from their thoughts as they gather with their flock of cameras, transmitters, and recorders by the spindly lances of beacons on the boulder that arbitrarily delimits the inner edge of the C Ring. The scattered infall of the D Ring diffuses toward the atmosphere below. If they fell fourteen thousand kilometers, they would strike the wrinkled clouds. The clouds glow and wipe the visors with the reflection of their bands. Each of the team smiles, unseen, almost crying at the sight of the infalling material. They had all imagined what the end would be like, but this was far crueler. They hug each other, gently, and formally. They inspect the suits of each of the others, every ding, every chip, every scrape, fixing it in their minds where it will hang forever, not to be forgotten.

Content, Layout, and Images Copyright © 1999 by Mark Cashman except where indicated (NASA photos)