Clockwise to Titan by Elon Dann

Author:Elon Dann [Elon Dann]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hot Key Books
Published: 2013-01-14T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 9

The Giantess

On the third day, we rose at dawn, ate, and broke camp. I kept silent about the lights and the trembling ground of the night before. Even they were not my greatest immediate worry. That was a set of dainty shoe prints that ran in circles through the snow and mud around our bivouac. ‘Not mine,’ said Harete, and they were indeed too small to belong to any of us.

Odder yet, a chunk of Moth’s food had been taken from his food bag, where he had dropped it outside the tent. We found the lump of food on the other side of the tent to the bag, untouched. ‘Whoever it was, they’ve got standards,’ Harete sniffed.

We coaxed our bodies into a laboured trot. We did not see the marshals that morning, and I hoped they had been dispersed and delayed by the hedges and the corpse orchard, but by then experience had schooled me to price my hopes cheaply.

‘Pylon two-one-zero is our target,’ I told the others, ‘and Harete has to think of today’s story.’ The footprints bothered me, reminding me again of the botch-up we had made of our escape. Was the faceless Orion deliberately pulling his punches to extend our agony? The man was a sadist, if Tulips’ report was correct; it would be consistent with that. Were the prints made by a clumsy stagehand then, someone who’d strayed from behind the scenery and almost collided with the actors performing the farce?

I noticed that I was swaying slightly from side to side as I jogged along, more even than Harete with her wounded leg. Before we reached the first of the day’s pylons my kidneys ached, my tongue burned and my head rang bright with a pitiless pain. By pylon three, after we had lumbered over a hedge using our mattress-and-rope technique, I was as giddy as one of the diseased cows.

‘You need water,’ said The Moth when we next rested. He handed me his bottle, the only one with anything left in it. I batted it away. ‘Dehydration affects the brain,’ he pointed out, ‘affects decision making.’

‘Oh, shut up, you scraggy delinquent!’ I snapped.

‘It is not I who am a delinquent,’ he pointed out airily. ‘I am most definitely linquent; my linquency has never once been questioned.’

When I tried to rise, the pains in my kidneys started to roast me from the inside and I fell back. This time, I accepted The Moth’s water, and my eyes apologised for me.

Harete and The Moth laughed. ‘Come on, chovie-chops!’ Harete said, and to my shame I accepted her hand and we ambled along together, both limping. I felt much better for my drink, but we were now completely out of water and I knew we could not walk for much longer unless we found fresh supplies. Today there seemed to be no snow deep enough to collect and all the ditches were devoid of ice and water.

The helicopter from the night before was in flight again, criss-crossing the sky, visible as just a small, dark dot.

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