Ilen lay about six metres down, caught on a couple of arm-thick projections that stuck curving out from the nearest intact bulkhead beneath like two slim tusks. She lay on her front, her head, one leg and one arm hanging over the drop. Glow patches on her sleeves provided pale, greeny-blue light. The fractured ends of the two tusk-shaped protrusions were only centimetres from the side of her body. Off to one side at eight- or nine-metre intervals, several more sets of the tusklike shapes clawed out from the bulkhead like bony fingers grasping at the gaping space. The drop below Ilen looked fifty or sixty metres deep, down to the bladelike edges of the fins beneath.
The human mindset had had to adapt to places like ’glantine where gravity was weaker and a fall that would break both your legs on Earth was something you could walk away from. But given enough vertical space to accelerate into, a human’s body would be just as injured or dead after a sixty-metre drop here as it would after a thirty-metre fall on Earth.
“Any rope?” Taince asked.
Sal shook his head. “Oh God, oh fuck. No. Well, yes, but we left it back there.” He nodded further into the ship. He seemed to shiver, hugging himself then putting up the collar of his jacket, as though cold. “C-couldn’t undo the knot again.”
“Shit! She’s moving,” Taince said, then stuck her head into the hole and shouted, “Ilen! Ilen, don’t move! Can you hear me? Don’t move! Just say if you can hear me!”
Ilen moved weakly, her head and the arm dangling over the drop shaking and shifting. She looked to be trying to roll over, but was edging still closer to the drop.
“Oh fuck, fuck, fuck,” Sal said, his voice high and quick and strained. “She was behind me. I thought she was all right. I didn’t see anything, must have stepped over it. A hatch or something or it was just balanced and she must have knocked it and she was shouting, sort of balanced over it, one hand, and screaming, and I couldn’t get back in time and she fell. We didn’t even find anything, didn’t do anything! Just junk! Oh fuck! She was fine! She was just behind me!”
“Be quiet,” Taince said. Sal sat back, rubbing his mouth, shaking. Taince put the gun back into her fatigues, slapped a glow patch onto her forehead, then, with her hands on two sides of the triangular hole, lowered her head into the gap again, further this time. She levered herself out for a second and looked back at Fassin. “Hold my feet.”
Fassin did as he was told. Taince got her shoulders through the hole, then they heard her say, “Ilen! You mustn’t move!” She hauled herself back out, leaving the glow patch where it was on her forehead like some strange, shining eye. “Nothing to hold on to underneath here,” she told them. “She’s moving around. Must have hit her head. She’s going to fall.” She looked at Sal. “Sal, how far away is that rope? By time.”
“Oh fuck! I don’t know! Ten, fifteen minutes?”
Taince glanced back into the hole. “Shit,” she said quietly. “Ilen’ she shouted. “You must not move!” She shook her head. “Shit, shouting at her’s just making her move,” she said, as though to herself. She took a deep breath, looked at Saluus and Fassin. “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do,” she said. “Daisy-chain rescue. Practised this, it’s doable.”
“Right,” Sal said, sitting forward, his face pale in the dim light. “What do we have to do?”
“One holds on at the top, somebody climbs down their body, holds on to their feet, last person climbs down both and picks up Ilen. I’ll do that bit.”
Sal’s eyes widened. “But the person at the top—”
“Will be you. You’re the strongest. Wouldn’t work on Earth; does here,” Taince told them. She slid over and grabbed Sal’s backpack. “Seen it done with four links. You two guys look in good enough shape. Fass, you’re in the middle. Plus person at the top gets tied on with these straps,” she said, glancing at Sal and then pulling a knife from her fatigues and slicing into one set of shoulder straps.
Sal knelt quaking at the side of the hole. “Fucking God, Taince,” he said, “we all want to rescue her, but this could get us all killed. Fuck, oh fuck. I don’t know. I don’t fucking believe this, I just fucking don’t. This isn’t happening, this is just not fucking happening!” He sat back again, visibly trembling. He looked at his shaking hands, turning them over and staring at them as though he didn’t recognise them. “I don’t know if I have any grip,” he said. “I really don’t.”
“You’ll be fine,” Taince told him, busy with the straps.
“Oh fuck, we’re all going to fucking die,” Sal said. “Fucking hell.” He shook his head hard. “No. Not. Not. No.”
“This will work,” Taince said, quickly tying the cut straps to those still joined to the pack.
I’m calm, thought Fassin. I’m probably in shock or something, but I feel calm. We might all be about to die, or it might be a close shave and a bonding thing we all remember for the rest of our long lives, but either way I feel calm. What will happen will happen and as long as we do our best and don’t let each other down, no matter what happens we’ll have been fine. He looked at his own hands. They were shaking, but not uncontrollably. He flexed them. He felt strong. He would do everything he could, and if that wasn’t enough, that wasn’t his fault.
Sal jumped up, wobbling dangerously close to the hole. “There’s more rope,” he said suddenly. His face was still grey-pale, but now almost expressionless. He moved past Taince.
Fassin looked at him, wondering what he was talking about.
“What?” Taince said, testing a square-section stalagmite extrusion on the floor then flipping the pack straps over it.
“Rope,” Sal said, pointing towards the outside and the flier. He took a backwards step in that direction. “There’s more. In the flier. I’ll go. I know where it is.” He backed off further.
“Sal!” Taince shouted at him. “There isn’t time!”
“No, there is, I’ll go,” Sal said, still backing off.
“Stay fucking here, Sal,” Taince said, dropping and deepening her voice. Sal seemed to hesitate but shook his head and turned and ran.
Taince leapt and made a grab for him but he’d moved too quickly. He vaulted a stalagmite and ran towards the gap Fassin and Taince had squeezed through earlier. Taince dropped to one knee and pulled the gun. “Stop, you fucking coward!”
There might, Fassin thought, have been half a second when Taince could have fired, but she dropped the gun and stashed it in her fatigues as Sal sprinted, ducking through the gap and away. Taince looked at Fassin. Now her face had gone blank, he thought. “Still a possibility,” she said, and quickly stepped out of her fatigues. She wore a one-piece underbody the same colour as her skin, so for just a moment she appeared to be naked. She reattached the top and trousers of the fatigues, snapping them tight to test that they held. “Right,” she said. “Now, this ties to your ankle.”
The straps on the backpack held, and Fassin did too, wrists tied to them but taking his own weight and Taince’s on his hands and fingers initially because he didn’t trust the straps, and the knot tying Taince’s trousers to his ankle held as well, and Taince was holding on fine as she shinned down over him and onto the fatigues and down with him twisting his neck and shoulders out and round so he could just about watch her progress and watch Ilen too, as though as long as he kept watching her she’d be all right, but then there was a ground-quake, shaking the ship, not badly, but enough to bring Fassin out in a cold sweat as he hung there, hands, palms, fingers slipping until it really was the straps and the straps alone holding him, and below him, below Taince, still just out of reach, Ilen moved one more time and fell over the edge and away into the darkness.
Taince made a lunge and Fassin felt the link between them jerk as she clutched vainly at the girl and made a noise like a gasp or a hiss. Ilen dropped away into the shadows, tumbling slowly, her hair and clothes fluttering like pale, cold flame.