Текст книги "The Star to Every Wandering "
Автор книги: David George
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FOREWORD
Every Wandering Thought
So finally, after penning the outlines for the McCoy and Spock novels of the Crucible trilogy, I arrive at the Kirk tale. And this one event, this crucible, that I had envisioned impacting all three of the main Star Trek characters, had affected the good captain in a very clear and obvious way. I readily see the story that surely must flow from the events in one of Trek’s most popular episodes, and I know just how it will tie in with the overall themes of the other two books.
I know at once that I can’t write such a novel.
Here’s the thing. For good or ill, I like to defy reader expectations. I strive in my writing not only to deliver a satisfying story, but also to surprise. When it works, that can be a very good thing. But there’s a risk involved there too, in that a reader who has strong expectations going into a novel might be disinclined to enjoy it if those expectations aren’t met. I know this, of course, and yet I nevertheless like the challenge of attempting to deliver something new and unanticipated to readers that they will still end up appreciating.
In this case, after writing the McCoy and Spock novels of the Crucible trilogy-Provenance of Shadows and The Fire and the Rose, respectively-I realized that I had myself established reader expectations for the third volume. I couldn’t have that. If I take readers from Point A and then to Point B, you can rest assured that I’m going to do my best to avoid following that up with a tale that brings them to Point C. Too obvious. Way too obvious.
So I began again. I examined Jim Kirk’s life, knowing which of his characteristics and experiences I wanted to illuminate, and I searched for a different lens through which to do it. I found it in a place I hadn’t expected, and I ended up putting together a tight little tale that actually surprised even me-partly for its relative brevity (I tend to write long, as many of you might have noticed), partly for its linear nature (well, mostly linear), and partly because of its content. I hope that means that I’ll end up surprising readers too. I guess you’ll find out.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O, no, it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring barque,
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.
– William Shakespeare,
Sonnet CXVI
Kirk: Spock…I believe…I’m in love with Edith Keeler.
Spock: Jim, Edith Keeler must die.
– “The City on the Edge of Forever”
OVERTURE
Chasms
He had all the time in the world. All the time in the universe, really.
The twisting, writhing ribbon of energy that had torn apart two Whorfin-class transports and taken three hundred sixty-eight lives, that had trapped the new Excelsior-class Enterprise and then sent a jagged tendril blasting through the starship’s hull as it escaped, had deposited Captain James T. Kirk in a place where time-where reality itself-held no meaning. He could go anywhere, do anything. He could relive his past, revise it, even envision a future for himself that had never been….
Edith, he thought, as he so often did, but this time, he watched as she gazed skyward, at the constellation of Orion to which he had just pointed. After a few seconds, she turned to him. Standing together on a sidewalk in New York City, in the year 1930, they moved closer to each other. Their lips met for the first time, the touch of her flesh warm and soft and loving.
Kirk stopped, slamming his eyes shut, knowing that he could not do this. Although the memories had always stayed with him-had always haunted him-he had never allowed himself to remember for very long. Even more than a quarter of a century later-or more than three hundred years later, depending on the method of reckoning-the loss remained too great for him to bear.
And so he started again, sending himself back to the moment of his entry into this impossible, timeless place. He could go anywhere, do anything. He could relive his past, even revise it….
Gary, he thought as he peered at his old friend standing in the makeshift brig at the lithium cracking station on Delta Vega. Kirk would make certain to get the ship and crew away quickly, stranding the mutated helmsman here with enough provisions to survive until Starfleet and the Federation Council could determine how best to deal with him. Kirk didn’t want to do it, but he had no choice given the circumstances, and at least Gary would live.
And he started again….
Sam, he thought as he looked from the sedated form of Aurelan and across the room to the motionless body lying on the floor of the office. Kirk recognized his brother, even dressed in the orange lab coveralls and with his face turned away. Surely the Enterprise had arrived at Deneva in time, though, and Bones would be able to treat Sam, to restore him to full health.
And started again…
David, he thought as he walked toward Carol and away from the towheaded young man. In the tunnels deep beneath the surface of the Regula planetoid, Kirk realized that he had all these years later come face-to-face with his grown son. Now, at last, he could have a relationship with David, and the disconnection of the years past would give way to a long future of kinship.
And again…
Spock, he thought as he watched his closest friend slide down the transparent bulkhead, his body decimated by the radiation within the containment chamber. Kirk followed him down on the other side of the partition separating them. Spock had saved the Enterprise and its crew of trainees from being destroyed by the Genesis Wave, and now the medical staff would find a way to save Spock.
And again, and again, and again…
…until he stood out in the crisp daylight air of the Canadian Rockies, amid the majestic snow-covered mountains, in front of his isolated and rustic vacation home. With a swing of the axe in his hands, he chopped wood for the fireplace, alive in the simplicity of the effort, in the physicality of the exertion. The day ahead, which had once been filled with ugly complications, would now be filled with joys only-he would see to that. But all of that would come later. For now, he let it all go and reveled in the fresh air and the silence surrounding him.
And then, unexpectedly, a man stood there staring at him. He wore a uniform Kirk didn’t recognize, although the skewed chevron of the Starfleet emblem stood out clearly on the left side of his chest. It didn’t matter. Kirk wouldn’t let it matter.
“Beautiful day,” he told the stranger, then swung the axe once more, splitting another piece of wood.
“Yes, it certainly is,” the man said, walking slowly over. He cut a striking figure, with his bald pate and ramrod-straight posture. Kirk did not ignore the man, but he did continue chopping wood, even getting the stranger to set a log section in place for him. “Captain,” the man said, suggesting that he might know Kirk’s identity, although it might simply have been a function of recognizing Kirk’s own uniform, though he’d removed his crimson jacket. “I’m wondering, do you realize– “
“Hold on a minute,” Kirk said, not wanting to have a conversation that caused him to realize anything. “Do you smell something burning?” He really did detect the hint of smoke coming from the house, but he utilized it as an effective distraction. Leaving the axe buried in the stump on which he’d been hewing wood, he descended the curved stone staircase to the open front door, then hurried through the living room to the kitchen at the back of the house. There, in the middle of the long island, he saw smoke rising from a frying pan sitting atop the heating surface. “Looks like somebody was trying to cook some eggs,” he called back to the stranger, not wanting to be rude. As he rounded the island and carried the pan across to the sink, he said, “Come on in.” He turned on the faucet and washed the burning eggs down the drain, adding, “It’s all right. It’s my house.”
But it’s not, Kirk told himself, discerning something not quite right about the situation. “At least it used to be,” he said, remembering as he brought the cleaned pan back to the cooking surface. “I sold it years ago.”
The uniformed man had entered the house and now stood just a couple of meters in front of Kirk, on the other side of the island. “I’m Captain Jean-Luc Picard of the starship…” He hesitated, and Kirk knew the name that he would say next. “…Enterprise.”
From out past the captain, Kirk heard the gentle tolling of chimes. “The clock,” he said, moving from the kitchen and into the living room, recollecting more. He reached the wooden shelf that extended from the fireplace mantel, atop which sat an elegant, handcrafted timepiece he remembered well. “I gave this clock to Bones.”
“I’m from what you would consider the future,” Picard said. “The twenty-fourth century.”
A dog barked, a deep, throaty exclamation. Kirk turned to the still-open front door, to where a Great Dane now sat, peering inside. “Butler!” Kirk said, thrilled to see his old companion. He walked toward the dog, who got up and came into the house. Kirk dropped to his knees as he reached the canine, but while that action felt right, the sense of there being something wrong increased. “Butler,” he said. “How can you be here?” He looked to Picard in the hope that the captain might be able to provide some answers. Of Butler, Kirk said, “He’s been dead seven years.”
And then, from above, came a woman’s voice, instantly recognizable. “Come on, Jim, I’m starving,” she said. “How long are you going to be rattling around in that kitchen?”
Kirk turned away from the dog, who then ambled off. “Antonia,” Kirk said, understanding that this had all happened before. “What are you talking about?” he asked Picard. “The future? This is the past.” He rose back to his feet. “This is nine years ago.” He remembered it so well.
Just in front of him in the living room, on a small table, sat a wooden box, the antique piece decorated and held together with ornate metal fleurs-de-lis. Kirk stepped forward and opened it, knowing what he would find within. He pulled out a small, black velvet bag and extracted from it a golden horseshoe, a miniature red rose attached to the arch. My going-away present to Antonia, Kirk thought, recalling once more the events to come, recalling this very time. “The day I told her I was going back to Starfleet,” he said, and he felt now what he had felt then: relief, shame, sadness. He had hurt Antonia, he knew, and maybe he had hurt himself too.
Slowly, he padded past Picard, around the island, and back into the kitchen. From atop the rear counter he picked up a pair of objects, speckled orange. “These are Ktarian eggs, her favorite,” he said, holding them up for Picard to see. “I was preparing them to soften the blow.”
“I know how real this must seem to you,” Picard said. “But it’s not.”
Kirk didn’t care. He didn’t want to care. He set the horseshoe and one of the eggs down, then turned up the heat on the cooking surface.
“We are both of us caught up in some kind of temporal nexus,” Picard continued.
Kirk tried hard to ignore the words and whatever they implied. After cracking the egg into the frying pan, he asked Picard to retrieve an herb for him from a kitchen cabinet. As the twenty-fourth-century captain did so, Kirk scrambled the egg with a whisk, holding the pan over the heating surface.
“How long have you been here?” Picard asked.
“I don’t know,” Kirk answered honestly, taking the herb and adding a dash to the pan. He remembered starting to chop the wood, but before that…he didn’t know. Evanescent images flitted through his mind, elusive as a long-ago dream. “I was aboard the Enterprise-B in the deflector control room and– ” He suddenly thought about seeing Antonia again, and he recalled the tray he had prepared…this morning, whenever that had actually been. He asked Picard to continue whisking the eggs, and then, as he went to retrieve the tray from the far counter, he resumed his story. “The bulkhead in front of me disappeared and then I found myself out there just now chopping wood, right before you walked up.” Not entirely true, but close enough. Whatever had come between the Enterprise-B and now had emerged from within his mind and then faded away.
He thanked Picard and took the pan from him, dishing the egg out onto the plate on the tray. “Look,” Picard said with some hesitation, “history records that you died saving the Enterprise-B from an energy ribbon eighty years ago.”
“You say this is the twenty-fourth century?” Kirk asked.
“Uh huh.”
“And I’m dead?” Kirk said.
“Not exactly,” Picard told him. “As I said, this is some kind of– “
“Temporal nexus,” Kirk said along with Picard. “Yes, I heard you.” He’d heard, but he’d disregarded the information. He wanted to focus on this re-created day, on this last time-and maybe not the last time-with Antonia. He mentioned completing the preparation of her meal just before a toaster finished heating three pieces of bread. Kirk squeezed past Picard to get them, then set the toast on the plate.
“Captain, look, I need your help,” Picard said, his voice suddenly forceful. “I want you to leave the nexus with me.” Kirk tried to ignore him, picking up the tray and heading out of the kitchen and toward the stairs that led up to the second floor. Picard followed. “We have to go to a planet, Veridian Three,” he insisted. “We have to stop a man called Soran from destroying a star. Millions of lives are at stake.”
Millions of lives, Kirk thought as he mounted the first steps, and then he pressed himself to let it go. Still, he stopped partway up the stairs. “You say history considers me dead,” he said. “Who am I to argue with history?”
“You’re a Starfleet officer,” Picard said sternly. “You have a duty.”
“I don’t need to be lectured by you,” he snapped back, Picard’s words uncomfortably close to the ones Kirk had repeated to himself all the long years of his life. “I was out saving the galaxy when your grandfather was in diapers.” He paused for an instant, deciding to change the tenor of his response. “Besides which,” he said lightly, “I think the galaxy owes me one.”
Picard regarded him for a moment, then turned away. Before he did, though, Kirk took note of the expression on his face, one he had seen many times before-most often in a mirror. “Oh, yeah,” he said beneath his breath. He walked back down the steps and over to stand beside Picard. “I was like you once,” he said. “So worried about duty and obligation I couldn’t see past my own uniform.” Once, he had saved three and a third centuries of human history, possibly Earth itself, maybe even the Federation, and all it had cost him had been the love of his life. “And what did it get me?” he said. “An empty house.” He had lived too long with the pain.
Picard looked at him, and Kirk could see that the future captain of the Enterprise actually understood. “Not this time,” Kirk told him, and he started back over to the steps and then to ascend them. “This time, I’m going to walk up these stairs and march into that bedroom and tell Antonia I want to marry her.” When he reached the second floor, he balanced the tray against the jamb, took hold of the knob, and threw the bedroom door open wide. “This time,” he said, determined, “it’s going to be different.”
Inside, Antonia looked up at him from where she still lay in bed, her long hair spread out on the pillow behind her head, the dark strands contrasting the white fabric. She gave him a wide smile, and he returned it. He glanced back at the door for a moment as he pushed it closed with his foot, then turned back to see-Not the master bedroom of his vacation home, but a barn. For a moment, he felt disoriented. Horses whickered and the dry, earthy scent of hay filled the air. The tray now gone from his hands, Kirk peered behind him, but the doorway through which he’d just come-through which he thought he’d just come-had gone too. He didn’t know what had happened, but as he looked around, he recognized his location. Not only that, he also thought he knew when he was. This time it’s going to be different, he’d said, and maybe now, he could ensure that from the beginning. With his own thoughts and hopes, he realized, he had chosen to come to this place, to this time.
Kirk moved to his left, deeper into the barn. By turns disconcerted and thrilled at this new setting, he gazed all around. As he did, he saw that Picard had again come after him.
“This is not your bedroom,” the captain said.
“No, it’s not,” Kirk said. “It’s better.”
“Better?”
“This is my uncle’s barn in Idaho,” Kirk said. He had always thought of the place in that way, even long after his father’s brother had died and passed the property on to him. “I took this horse out for a ride eleven years ago,” he said, walking over to the already saddled beast he had called Tom Telegraph. “On a spring day,” he said. He moved to the nearest door, lifted its wooden latch, pushed it open, and gazed out into the sunshine. “Like this one,” he said. “If I’m right, this is the day I met Antonia.” He looked back over at Picard. “This nexus of yours, very clever. I can start all over again and do things right from day one.” This time, he thought, he would not be left with an empty house. Without another word, he crossed back to Tom Telegraph, mounted his saddle, and rode him outside.
He recalled where he’d met Antonia, up on the crest of a hill out past the ravine he’d so often jumped. Breaking the horse into a gallop, he headed across the open countryside in that direction. The rays of the midmorning sun warmed Kirk’s face, the steady beat of Tom Telegraph’s hooves accompanied by the whisper of the switchgrass through which they moved. It had been a long time-too long-since Kirk had ridden, and it felt good to be doing it again.
I know how real this must seem to you, Picard had said, but it’s not. And Kirk knew the truth of that. He hadn’t gone back to the day he’d met Antonia, only to some remarkable simulacrum of it. But with a great sense of liberation, he also thought that might be enough for him. He remembered Christopher Pike, the man he’d succeeded to command of the Enterprise. A strong, vital man, Fleet Captain Pike had been horribly mutilated when during an inspection tour of an old cadet vessel, a baffle plate had ruptured. Pike had saved numerous lives, hauling one young officer after another from the delta rays inundating the affected area, but in the process had condemned himself to life in an automated wheelchair, unable to do anything but move slowly about and signal “yes” and “no” in response to questions. But then Spock had taken his old captain back to the forbidden world of Talos IV, where the powerful mental abilities of the small population there had then allowed Pike to live an illusory life of the mind, apparently happily. Why couldn’t Kirk do the same here in the nexus? Why shouldn’t he?
Kirk directed Tom Telegraph into a moderately wooded area. Amid trees and bushes, he pushed the horse toward the hill, and before it, to the ravine. They picked up speed as they approached the meters-wide chasm. Kirk loosened the reins, leaned forward out of the saddle, and grabbed hold of Tom Telegraph’s mane.
At the ravine, the horse leaped up and forward. He crossed the gap in the earth and landed in stride. Up ahead the hill rose to its crown—
Something’s wrong, Kirk thought. He swung the horse around and to a halt, peering back at the ravine. Tom Telegraph had cleared the dangerous natural obstacle with no trouble, with apparent ease, even. Kirk hadn’t been concerned for a second.
But I should’ve been, he thought.
Kirk spurred the horse on again, back toward the ravine. Again he prepared for the jump, and again Tom Telegraph soared into the air and across the open space. They landed, and once more Kirk stopped the horse and faced back in the direction of the chasm.
Behind him, he heard the approach of hoofbeats. He waited as Picard rode up, coming to a halt a few meters to his left. Kirk looked over at him, then pointed toward the ravine. “I must’ve jumped that fifty times,” he said. “Scared the hell out of me each time.” And then he revealed the uncomfortable truth: “Except this time. Because it isn’t real.”
Kirk fell silent, the superficiality of this faux existence weighing heavily on him. In the distance, a horse whinnied, and he looked up to the hilltop for which he’d been headed. “Antonia,” Picard said.
Antonia, Kirk thought as he saw her sitting tall astride her own horse. Romeo, Kirk recalled the beast’s name, and then: Not Romeo. And not Antonia. “She isn’t real either, is she?” he said. “Nothing here is. Nothing here matters.”
Kirk walked Tom Telegraph toward Picard and his horse and started to circle around them. “You know, maybe this isn’t about an empty house,” he said, even as he knew that it was. But he couldn’t do anything about that, could he? He had cleared out his house by choice, for the good of the many. He could not undo that. On the other hand, he could help Picard attempt to save millions of lives. “Maybe it’s about that empty chair on the bridge of the Enterprise. Ever since I left Starfleet, I haven’t made a difference.” Kirk finished going around Picard, coming to a stop a couple of meters to his side.
He thought for a moment. He had left Starfleet for several reasons, but largely because of that empty house. If he couldn’t fill it, if he couldn’t change his life in the way that he wanted to change it-and his time away from the space service suggested that he couldn’t-then didn’t he have a responsibility, to himself as much as to others, to return to the duty and obligation of which he and Picard had spoken?
Slowly, he stepped Tom Telegraph to the side, until he stood next to Picard’s horse. “Captain of the Enterprise?” Kirk asked.
“That’s right,” Picard said.
“Close to retirement?”
“I’m not planning on it,” Picard said.
“Let me tell you something: don’t,” Kirk said, recollecting his own mistakes and seeing in Picard a kindred spirit. “Don’t let them promote you. Don’t let them transfer you. Don’t let them do anything that takes you off the bridge of that ship, because while you’re there, you can make a difference.”
“Come back with me,” Picard said. “Help me stop Soran. Make a difference again.”
Kirk had already decided that he would. He could not stay here in this place, in this time, or in any place or any time that the nexus offered. He had already stayed far too long. No matter how many events he relived here, no matter how many mistakes he rectified, none of it would truly matter to his life.
He took Tom Telegraph in front of Picard’s horse so that Kirk could face the captain directly. “Who am I to argue with the captain of the Enterprise,” he said with a grin. “What’s the name of that planet, Veridian Three?”
“Yes.”
“I take it the odds are against us and the situation is grim,” Kirk said, warming to the idea of taking on this challenge.
“You could say that,” Picard agreed.
How many times had Kirk rushed into a burning building? As many times as he had made it safely back out, save once: he had gone down to the primary deflector control center aboard the Excelsior-class Enterprise, had apparently succeeded in saving the ship, but he hadn’t returned. Now, finally, he would-and he would storm right back into another burning building. “You know, if Spock were here, he’d say that I was an irrational, illogical human being for taking on a mission like that,” he said. “Sounds like fun.”
Picard smiled, then turned his horse and started back the way he’d come. Kirk peered up at the top of the hill one last time, at the imitation of Antonia, and he knew that he’d made the right choice. He went after Picard, having no idea how the captain intended to get them to Veridian Three.
As they trotted forward, though, Kirk saw a brilliant white light suddenly blossom, as though emerging from the fabric of existence around them. The gauzy blue of the sky, the green of the trees, the flaxen hue of the switchgrass, all bled and faded. The field of white grew to envelop Picard and his horse, then engulfed Kirk and Tom Telegraph as well. For a subjectively immeasurable span of time, he could see nothing, could hear nothing, could sense nothing. Even the feel of his own body vanished, as though he existed only as thought. He wanted to run but had no legs, wanted to scream but had no voice-And then with dizzying swiftness, the force of gravity held Kirk. Light shades of brown formed before his eyes, and a hot, dry wind brushed the flesh of his face. He smelled the dust of the arid region, tasted the grit of the air. The rapid change of place unsettled him.
He took a moment to steady himself, no longer on horseback now but on foot, and then suddenly an explosion boomed not far behind him. He turned from the sandstone wall he had been facing to see a cloud of dust rising before a stone ridge twenty-five meters away. Debris showered down upon the rocky topography like rain. Kirk thought he saw motion at the base of the cloud, a quick flash of red and black, but it seemed to disappear behind an outcropping.
He stepped forward, thinking he knew the source of the movement, but then through the daylight shrieked two bright green pulses, the discharge of an energy weapon. Kirk threw himself backward as the shots pounded into the same stone ridge where the previous explosion had taken place. A huge force field blinked orange above the area as another cloud of dust went up and a huge slab of rock tumbled side-over-side to the ground.
As more rubble peppered the area, Kirk waited. The source of the blasts remained hidden from view around the rocky mountain by which he stood. Seconds passed, and then a minute. He surveyed the ragged terrain, strewn with rocks and boulders, cut with fissures and grooves. When he saw and heard nothing, he prepared to move, to try to find Picard or this Soran of whom the captain had spoken. But then a hand appeared on the edge of a crevice that ran across the landscape in front of Kirk. He stepped up to it and peered down to see Picard climbing upward. They made eye contact, and Kirk lowered himself to his knees and helped the captain up.
“I take it that was Soran firing at you,” Kirk said.
“It was,” Picard confirmed. “He’s got that handheld weapon, but he’s alone here. If we go at him from two sides, one of us should be able to stop him.” As Picard gazed in the direction from which the energy fire had come, he explained that Soran had briefly experienced the nexus himself eighty years ago, aboard one of the very transports that the skeleton crew of the Excelsior-class Enterprise had endeavored to save. Prior to that, Soran had lost his entire family in an unprovoked attack by a brutal alien species, and apparently the nexus had allowed him to overcome the pain of that terrible loss, at least while he’d been within it. Having been swallowed up himself by the timeless other-space and subjected to its effects, Kirk found that eminently understandable.
According to Picard, after Soran had been beamed from the transport, and consequently from the nexus, he had then spent the ensuing decades searching for a safe means of reentering it. The energy ribbon, which made a circuit through the galaxy every thirty-nine years, functioned as a doorway into the nexus. Soran had developed a scheme to reroute the path of the ribbon so that it would intersect the surface of a world-this world, Veridian Three. In order to accomplish that, he had deployed a trilithium weapon of his own design to collapse a star, Amargosa, thereby affecting the gravity in this sector. Now, he intended to do the same thing to this system’s star. After Soran had then made it back into the nexus, the shock wave resulting from the destruction of Veridian would tear apart each of its six planets, including the fourth, home to a preindustrial society numbering two hundred thirty million.
“Soran has covered these crags with a complex of platforms, bridges, and ladders,” Picard said. “It appears that he’ll launch his trilithium missile, then make his way to the highest platform to wait for the ribbon to sweep him up into the nexus.”
“How much time have we got?” Kirk asked.
“Minutes only,” Picard said.
“Then let’s go.”
Kirk threw his closed fist through the scaffolding, catching Soran on the side of his face. The white-haired man fell backward and off the top of the rocks, fifty meters or more above the ground. Kirk heard him grunt once, but Soran did not scream.
As quickly as he could, Kirk extricated himself from the web of metal bars that held up the platform at the apex of the rock formation. As he did, he saw Picard clambering back up from where he’d tumbled during their hand-to-hand struggle with Soran. “I thought you were going for the launcher,” Kirk said to him. In fact, by returning when he had, Picard had prevented Kirk’s death at the emitter end of Soran’s handheld energy weapon.
“I changed my mind,” Picard said. “Captain’s prerogative.” Together, they started back down from the summit, heading for the trilithium missile that sat poised to take flight. As they reached that level and approached the launcher, though, Kirk heard a low whooshing sound from ahead, and he looked over to see the bronze missile fade into nothingness, obviously cloaking. More important, the launcher and its control panel also vanished.
Suddenly, Kirk heard another noise, above and to his left. He peered over and saw Soran falling down the side of the cliff face at the end of a rope, which he’d evidently grabbed hold of when he’d fallen. Now, he slid down fifteen meters, then jerked to a stop. A small object flew from his hands, clattered along the rocks, and landed atop one of the metal bridges constructed here.
