Tales from the Drift: Old Lessons, Hard Futures

Chapter 44 - The First Rule of Survival

He snapped his eyes and mouth shut, and pinched his nose closed as the plume shifted toward him with a great puffing burst. The noxious fumes penetrated his eyelids. Tears leaked down his cheeks, rapidly drying into baked-on streaks. His split lips burned, and his raw skin itched.

For a brief instant he considered how this half of the cabin-turned-escape-pod had split apart and wedged itself onto the rocky precipice. It was only for an instant though. The how of it all would have to wait. The need to be elsewhere took precedence.

As soon as the plume shifted away, he opened his eyes and released his nostrils. He scrunched up his nose, sniffed, and exhaled sharply to clear his nasal passages of gunky buildup. Hawking out the remaining phlegm, he went to work.

He undid the safety harness but did not use the quick-release tab. Instead, he worked apart the straps at his left hip and shoulder. Gripping the right-side straps, he swung himself out of the chair and found precarious purchase on the bit of rockface extending through what remained of the cabin's crumpled deck.

It wasn't going to hold for very long, so he didn't have much time to consider his next move. He mapped out the easiest and closest point of ascension and started climbing.

The rock's outer layer was soft and brittle, but its core was as hard as any alloy. He slipped several times as his fingers scraped through the sharp shale, or his booted toes snapped off a layer of slab.

Holding himself against the warm rockface, he counted down and tried to steady his breathing. Another gust of wind pushed the plume toward him. He gagged and hacked and sputtered.

Chest heaving, his foot slipped.

The sharp rock clattered below him and shattered into fragments. His fingers slipped as his bodyweight dragged him downward.

He managed to stop himself, his chest pressed against the rock. He'd slid all the way back to the same precipice from which he had started. Perhaps up was the wrong direction.

As the plume again shifted and dissipated, the hot wind taking it another direction, he looked down over the precipice's edge.

No. Up was the safer bet. The ground was a spider's web of cracks. Layers and bits of rock slab pressed into each other with such force that they snapped upward into a blade's edge. He huffed out a sigh. The bit of rock he could make out around the plume was similar, but with the added benefit of spiky outcroppings.

Brego cursed and resumed hugging the rockface. He counted. Steadied himself. Waited for the next gust to assault him with the plume and the gust after that to take it away. Then he started climbing again.

Luck favored him, and without slipping or snagging, and a minimal amount of scraping, he pulled himself up and onto what remained of the cabin's exterior hull.

The plume buffeted the underside and puffed out from the wreck's leading edge. The air above it was clearer and cooler, even if only by the margin of a small fraction.

He was in a valley, which might have been the mouth of a volcano. Facing toward the sun. Two suns? Three suns? He couldn't quite tell, the smog in the air was thick, the atmosphere a swirl of colorful clouds. Dense enough to obscure the light source, but not to completely diminish its light. He was on the leftmost side of the valley from the light source.

Strips and streams of liquid, he didn't dare hope for clean and drinkable water, appeared to crisscross the valley. Geysers erupted with great swells of smoke, just like the one below him.

In the great distance, thunder boomed in the rolling clouds. He hoped it didn't mean precipitation. Given all he had seen, the acridness in the air, the soreness in his lungs, any rainfall was likely to be acidic and pushing toward deadly.