Nexus by Robert Boyczuk (best large ebook reader txt) 📕

Now on her back, Liis stared into the sky. A heavy, suffocating snow settled on her. She blinked, once, twice, as large flakes adhered to her visor. “Sleep,” she whispered as if she were giving her suit an order, and her eyes slid shut obediently.

“We’ll never get through the pass.” The voice vibrated through Liis’ helmet. It was their sixth (or seventh?) rest stop on the third (or was it fourth?) day. The voice, she had at first assumed, was her own, for she’d already caught herself talking aloud several times. But when it came back, more insistent, she realised someone else spoke to her. “Can’t he see the winds don’t ever let up?”

Penirdth, she thought. His shadowed helmet blotted out her view.

“It’s madness.”

He had undone his harness and moved to where she rested now, her back against the toboggan, and touched his helmet to hers while she’d shut her eyes. His distant voice seemed to work its way into her consciousness, to shake off the stupor into which she had fallen. She felt as if she were rising through the depths of a pool into the daylight.

“Liis? Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” She blinked, stared at the dark band that was Penirdth’s visor. “Fine.”

“You can already feel the wind picking up here. It’s been blowing steadily at our backs for the last fourteen hours. And we’re still twenty klicks away from the pass. What will it be like when we’re there, at the mouth of the funnel?”

“I…I don’t know.” Thought was difficult. Her mind still felt out of sync with reality, as if there was a second lag time between perception and understanding. She turned her head, breaking contact with Penirdth. To the south, the pass was now visible; the snow had finally stopped a few hours earlier after falling for nearly ten hours. But the pass was still choked with agitated snow-bearing clouds. Setting her visor’s magnification on maximum, she stared at the mighty billows that rose and fell like titanic waves. She touched her helmet to Penirdth’s again. “What other choice do we have?”

“We’ll be torn to pieces if we try this.”

Liis shrugged inside her suit. “We’ll die anyway,” she said dully.

Penirdth pulled away abruptly. He moved back several paces and plopped himself down on a knee-high block of ice. He curled his hands into fists and pressed them between his thighs. He’s scared, Liis thought with surprise. It was the first time she’d seen him display anything other than his characteristic equanimity. Oddly, she felt like laughing. Instead, she struggled to her feet, unclipped her harness and walked over to him. Settling down next to him, she tugged on his right arm gently. Reluctantly he released it to her. She placed it in her lap and, uncurling his fingers, pressed his gauntlet beneath hers.

Liis had been watching the pass. When the gap wasn’t obscured by heavy clouds and blankets of snow, a mist seemed to rise off the flat between the peaks. Not mist, she realised. But wind, blowing loose snow from the icefield, eroding the surface of the glacier and creating a perpetual blizzard in the pass even when the sky overhead was clear.

And, as Penirdth had predicted, the wind hadn’t let up. Here, seven kilometers away, an insistent breeze pressed at their backs, pushing them steadily towards the col; snow swirled around their ankles and made small dunes about their bodies whenever they paused for a rest.

Liis looked back to where he trudged behind her. During the last three rest stops he’d kept his distance. God only knows what’s going through his mind, she thought. Of all of them, he had seemed to adjust best to the situation. But his fear betrayed that he hadn’t really adjusted at all. Liis tried to remember what she’d been thinking when she’d first had to face the reality of her scant remaining time; but back then, her thoughts had been only of Josua. Dying hadn’t seemed so frightening. In fact, hadn’t she welcomed the idea? The sense of relief it promised?

A surprisingly strong gust of wind buffeted her; stumbling forward, she lost her balance. She swung out her good arm to break her fall. But when her palm struck the ground, it skidded away from her. Everything seemed to happen slowly: the ground rising towards her while slow-motion flakes of snow swirled around her. Her broken arm, she knew in that distended moment, would take the brunt of the impact. She steeled herself. But the instant of contact, suns exploded in her head, darkness blooming behind, rushing forward like a tidal wave.

She howled in agony.

Liis lay on the ground, breathing heavily. Sweat peppered her brow. Dark clouds streamed overhead. I’m on my back, she thought. Someone must have turned me over.

A figure crouched next to her, hand extended. Penirdth, she thought. Her wounded arm pulsed sharply, making her shudder. Fighting back nausea, she reached out and clasped his hand. A moment later, she was on her feet, the world spinning bright around her, her ears ringing and heart pounding….

In the distance, the column moved forward. No one had bothered stopping. At the front of the line, Hebuiza’s ovoid helmet bobbed, urging them on into the gathering storm.

Liis sucked in a deep breath, released Penirdth’s hand reluctantly. Her whole body convulsed; she felt nauseous. In a moment, the tremor passed. Gritting her teeth, she tugged her sled into motion, dragging it towards the swirling maelestrom ahead.

The gusts increased in both intensity and frequency as they drew closer to the pass. Blasts of wind, like the one that had surprised Liis, were now commonplace. But she was ready for them. She had retrieved a ski pole from her sled. Whenever she felt an abrupt rise in the intensity of the wind (or, as on several occasions, thought she felt a rise), she paused, set her feet apart and planted the pole in front of her like the third leg of a tripod. Though it caused her to lag further behind the rest of the party, it seemed to work, for she hadn’t fallen again. But she knew this, too, would soon be useless against gusts that beat at her back like angry fists.

As they marched, the sky closed in on them; a sparse snowfall had turned into a steady stream of white flakes that tore past them furiously. The angry red ball of the sun was directly overhead, but under the storm clouds, it’s crimson light was muted, barely perceptible in the gloom. Liis could no longer see the others, save for Mira who was ahead of her in the column. The pass had long since vanished, obscured by the roiling clouds. Despite the steady snowfall, the terrain became easier to negotiate. Fewer and fewer fissures slowed their progress. The ground itself was lined with an endless series of tiny, scalloped ridges, reminding Liis of those carved in sand by a retreating tide. But these were hard, frozen in place, and her boots rocked as she walked over them. She lowered her head and fixed her eyes on the tip of Mira’s slender tail-flicking over the ridges only a step ahead of her like a fishing lure-and following it without thought.

When Liis could barely make out Mira’s small shape struggling twenty meters ahead of her, the rest of the group came unexpectedly into sight. They were gathered in a tight circle, all leaning back against the wind. Their toboggans had been arranged in a low wind-break. Liis dragged her sled into place, staggering as the wind shoved her forward. She jammed her pole into the ground to steady herself. A helmet bobbed forward, touched hers.

“Wait here for a few hours. Yes. To see if the weather lets up.” It was Yilda, his thin voice sounding even more attenuated through the material of the two helmets. He pointed ahead, though at what Liis couldn’t see. “This is the start of the descent. Two kilometers and we’ll be past the narrowest part of the pass and onto a much steeper downslope. Three and half kilometers more and we’re on the plain.”

Nothing to it, Liis thought wryly. “How are we supposed to get down there?” she asked, her voice rough from disuse. It had been at least two days since she had last spoken. “And what about these toboggans?” Pushed by gusts of wind, hers had already been intermittently running up against her heels for the last half a kilometer.

“Not-” A blast of wind surged between them, separating them and cutting off Yilda’s voice; their helmets clacked back together. “- sled.”

“What?”

“Your sled, eh? Ride your sled. In two hundred and fifty meters the run should be, ah, steep enough.”

A five kilometer toboggan ride through this mess? It was insane.

“Survey shots, yes, show the ground should be smooth,” Yilda continued. “Like here. Control the descent by attaching crampons to our boots and dragging our feet. The problem is to stay in the centre of the glacier. Yes. The surface is slightly convex. The sleds will want to veer off to the sides. Towards exposed rocks or crevasses. With this wind, impossible to get back on course if you slip too far over to either side.”

“And how are we supposed to stay in the centre?”

“Suit compasses. Yes.”

Shit, Liis thought. It was beyond insane. The compasses could provide only the crudest means of steering over the hump of the glacier. It would be like trying to navigate a ocean-going vessel through a narrow straight only by eyeballing stars. A fraction of a degree would translate into kilometers of error. And staying directly in the centre was no guarantee of making it safely to the bottom. It could just as easily lead them to an unsuspected fissure. She was struck by an image of the six of them lying atop their sleds and shooting, one after the other, into a yawning crevasse they had no chance of seeing until it was too late….

As if in answer to this thought, Yilda said, “Fan out, hey? To approach our runs from slightly different angles. Just in case.”

Just in case some of us end up riding air, Liis thought. Yilda was remaining true to form: rather than gambling all of their lives on one course, he would cover his bets, balancing a few likely deaths against the chance most would survive.

“Listening?”

“Yeah.”

“Tell Penirdth,” Yilda said. “Behind you.” Turning, Yilda walked away, digging his heels in with each step, leaning backwards at an unnatural angle, supported by the press of the incessant wind.

Liis lay on her toboggan, the crampons on her boots dug securely into the surface of the glacier to hold her back. Her tail had been coiled and secured to her pack. Though the slope wasn’t severe, the wind buffeted her insistently, trying to nose her forward. Beneath her, the oval-shaped sled rocked forward slightly with each gust. The sled had holes bored along its edges and straps had been looped through these to serve as handholds. With her right hand, Liis clutched the one nearest the front. Her other arm lay beside her, cradled in a carefully padded hollow where, she hoped, the jarring motion of the sled wouldn’t grind the newly set bones together. Earlier, she had managed-after a painful and frustrating struggle-to slip her broken limb from its sling and back into the sleeve of the suit, allowing herself a fresh analgesic patch to endure the task. Yet despite the medication, the pain had been intense, and now her arm ached miserably.

At Yilda’s