Empire's End by Chris Bunch; Allan Cole Page B

was necessary to get there was to grab a pilot and a gravsled and they could be there in an hour.
    Cind sneered. That, too, was no vacation. Getting there was half the fun.
    And so, carrying packs heavy enough to give them the trail staggers, they had Kilgour drop them off where the dirt path ended, with a promise to return in five days to pick them up—or start the search parties in motion.
    Among the reasons their packs were so heavy was that neither Sten nor Cind fancied carrying dried rations—they could stay in the barracks and on duty and get ratpacks. They were willing to break their backs carrying some other, minor creature comforts.
    Their route on skis through the foothills to the base of the mountain. Where the mountain steepened, they would follow the course of a generally frozen river upward, through a gorge, to Cind’s secret spot. Since the maps of the wilderness were rotten, they would navigate from the aerial.
    And so it had been—until they reached this place not too far below the mountain’s summit, where the river went vertical, and became thirty meters of frozen-solid waterfall. They were trapped.
    This was a helluva fix she had gotten him into, he thought. And so observed.
    “Shut up,” Cind said helpfully. “I’m trying to figure out if we can slither back down this slope to that ravine we passed an hour or so ago. And maybe go up that to the summit. Then we could drop back down to where we want to go.”
    “That sounds like work.”
    “Stop whining.”
    “I am not whining. I am sniveling. How much rope do we have?”
    “Seventy-five meters.”
    “Dammit,” Sten swore. “See if I ever play climbing purist again. Right now a couple of cans of climbing thread, jumars, and a grapnel would be welcome. Or a stairway. But oooo-kay, we’ll do it the hard way.”
    He undipped from the rope, set his pack down where it hopefully wouldn’t start sliding all the way back down to the foothills, reroped his harness, took a deep breath, and started climbing.
    Up the ice of the waterfall.
    “I don’t like this,” he muttered. And he didn’t—the only reason Sten knew that ice cubes could be climbed was because he had seen it done once in a livie and also because he had once spent a weekend with one of his instructors in Mantis—and whatever happened to her, he wondered—who had been a nut on climbing waterfalls when the temp went below zed Centigrade.
    He had come off twice and had to be near-hoisted to the top, he remembered. No. His memory was wrong. None of the four of them had made it that long and bruised weekend.
    Follow Cind’s advice. Shut up.
    It wasn’t that bad, he thought No worse than, say, dangling by your hands and having to do a pull-up every two minutes.
    At least the ice is good and frozen. Don’t have to worry about any kind of a spring thaw.
    And you’ve got a good place to stand every now and then. As he was doing at the moment.
    “What’s that called?” Cind wondered from five meters below him.
    “Suicide,” Sten panted. “Front-pointing.”
    His good place to stand consisted of two front metal spikes of his crampons—alloy plates clamped to his boots that had vertical two-centimeter-sided spikes around their edges and horizontal ones sticking straight out from the toe.
    One foot suddenly skrüiched out of the ice, and Sten went back to dangling. He twisted back and forth for a while, getting the hang of things, did another pull-up, reached out for a handhold, found a handjam, kicked in his free boot. Half a meter farther up.
    Two wheezes, and try it again.
    And again. And again.
    Eventually, there was no ice above his hand to grab, and he flailed a little. Hand moved to one side. A rock projection. Rock? Such as no more waterfall?
    No more waterfall.
    Sten pulled himself to blessedly level ground, and rested. Then he tied off, and shouted down to Cind.
    First came the packs, tied to the rope and hand-over-handed up. More wheezing. Not only getting old, but old