REVOLT ON WAR WORLD (c-3) by Jerry Pournelle

Author:Jerry Pournelle [Pournelle, Jerry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sf_space

The sun moved as slowly in the sky as you might expect on a world with forty hours between sunup and sundown. Tom's scouts had found two possible ways to leave the mesa. He selected one, then got the rations, blankets, shelter pieces, and pieces of tent rope distributed among the people. They made packs out of them. Then he formed them up in their units and we started down the trail, with scouts leading the way. The sun seemed almost as high as when the shuttles had left, a little more than three hours earlier by my watch. There were eight rations for each person-that was all we had-and no one was to eat until Tom ordered a meal break.

It didn't pay to think too much about things; you could go into despair. We had to make a decision and do it, and handle the complications as they came up. Or lie down and die. The Dinneh weren't known for lying down and dying.

We didn't have nice backpacks from Wilderness Suppliers. We rolled up our rations inside our two blankets each, wrapped them in a piece of tent cloth, tied it all together with a piece of tent rope, and slung it over a shoulder. Also there were a lot of people-almost all the women-who'd been interned wearing street shoes. Their feet were soon in trouble. Those who wore riding boots or engineer's boots were just as bad off. A few tried to go barefoot, but they put their shoes back on pretty quickly. Marilyn was wearing stout, low-cut walking shoes, but gravel and sand got in them. We took turns carrying Marcel. I offered to carry her pack for her, but she wouldn't let me. She said it would make her look bad to the Navajo women.

The canyon we worked our way down into was about seven hundred meters deep there, according to our map, and the way was steep, treacherous in places. It wasn't like hiking the Bright Angel or Kaibab Trails down into the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Those were surveyed, improved, and maintained-almost manicured; I suppose they still are. This was rough, untracked and uncertain. Much of it required scrambling instead of hiking. And we had people, especially women, who'd never hiked in their lives. Some weighed more than a hundred kilos, even after thirteen months on the Makarov. For them, the trail was hell; for some it was impossible. Twice we got cliffed out and had to wait while the scouts hunted for a way to continue. Then we all had to backtrack a ways before we could go on again. Once a scout fell to his death. We also lost eight people who fell when rock slid away beneath their feet and they couldn't stop sliding before they went over an edge.

All the scouts saw goatlike animals. One scout came face to face with something that looked much like a large mountain lion, with thick fur and a ruff-our first cliff lion. It

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.