Short Fiction Complete by Dean McLaughlin

Author:Dean McLaughlin [McLaughlin, Dean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-06-25T00:00:00+00:00

Six days passed before they returned to the ruin that had been the freehold. Two of those days were spent on a high ledge, huddled in what shelter they could build of frost-shattered stone and the wreckage of the platform. The peak’s crest stood only a few meters over them. The star’s blaze was pitiless. The air, though breathable, was thin and icy. Fitful winds clawed them. After dark, the cold closed around them like a frozen hand.

For two days they endured. On the third, the storm began to die. Centered now over high ground, it could no longer draw on the source of its power: the superheated air of the lowlands. Slowly, the clouds that crowded below their refuge, reaching plume and tendrils upward through the clefts and rockfall scars, began to withdraw. After half a day more, the clouds had fallen back far enough for them to follow.

The descent was hard. The sledge had been wrecked when it came to ground; wind-driven, once it had drifted out of the storm’s center, unable to control its altitude more closely than half a kilometer, there had been little choice but to accept the risks of bringing it down at the first—perhaps only—chance where they could hope to have breathable air. In addition to smashing the sledge itself, there were two broken legs, a pelvis, several arms, and uncounted cracked ribs. No one was without at least one bruise or sprain.

But the negagrav units still worked. Without them the descent would not have been possible. Without them, they could not have made their way down the cliffs that dropped from parapet to parapet, decameter after decameter, down into the clouds. With the negagravs, and with litters and slings improvised from the wreckage, they could let themselves down from one stage to the next, a few at a time. As the cloud deck fell back from the mountain wall, they followed. There were more sprained limbs, scraped skin, and rope burns.

Climbing down took four days. As they came to lower elevations, the scars of the storm were everywhere. Great chutes cut by rockslides gashed the slopes. Vast masses of shattered stone choked the narrow gorges, sprawled across the esplanades. Water gushed from clefts in the rock, cascaded in sheets down sheer stone walls. The nights were cold. By day the star warmed them, dazzled them, burned them, but when a promontory cast its shadow on them, the air turned instantly chill. The farther they descended, the more complete was the storm’s devastation, until at last they came to the place where the freehold had been. Only ruin waited for them there.

Of the fields, nothing was left but gullied wasteland. The rockslide mass had engulfed the longhouse so completely that the place where it had stood could only be guessed at. Within the heaved and tumbled desert of crumbled stone they found a few stones that showed signs of having been worked by tools, but that was all.

By then it was late afternoon.

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