Immortal Coil - Jeffrey Lang [0]
SOMEDAY, THOUGHT NOONIEN SOONG, when I have a choice in the matter, I’m going to live where it’s always hot. Not warm. Not temperate. Hot.
Checking to see that his lifeline was secure, Soong set his legs against the face of the cliff, raised his hands to his mouth, and, after lifting his breathing mask, puffed onto them in three quick, sharp breaths. The battery packs for the warming coils in his gloves were dying. When Ira Graves first mentioned this little expedition, he’d told Soong to pack gear for climbing in cold environments. But Soong had interpreted that to mean the sort of conditions you might find in the North American Rockies or, at worst, the lower reaches of the Alps. Nobody had said anything about this —sub-zero temperatures, practically no atmosphere and freakish rock formations. Soong had completed some difficult climbs in his not-quite two decades, but even with the antigravs, the conditions he was currently facing were a little more complex than anything he’d faced before.
Soong decided to blame everything on Graves. It was convenient. Just because Graves was arrogantly brilliant (or brilliantly arrogant—Soong wasn’t sure which) didn’t mean he was always perfectly in control of everything. Academia, Soong had concluded, was a pond where the little fish—students like himself—were gobbled up by the bigger fish—grad assistants like Graves—who were, in turn, gobbled up by even bigger fish like Dr. Emil Vaslovik, probably the biggest fish he was ever likely to meet.
He would have liked to flatter himself by thinking that it was his exemplary work in the artificial intelligence workshops that had brought him to Vaslovik’s attention, but Soong understood enough about how the system worked to admit that his mountaineering skills probably had more to do with it. Maybe Vaslovik had heard about the time Soong had climbed the campus clock tower. Going to have to work on curbing those impulses, Noonien … Whatever the case, when Graves had contacted him and told him—not invited, but told him—”You’re going on a little trip next week,” Soong knew he wasn’t really in a position to refuse. So, there he was: halfway down a ninety-meter cliff while the two other men who had brought him here sat on a ledge twenty meters above him. There has got to be a better way to get ahead in life, he decided.
His scan had revealed that there was another ledge approximately twelve meters below him, but the lantern dangling from his belt wasn’t powerful enough to cut the gloom. He was just going to have to trust his abilities and take it slow, the way his father had taught him. Soong activated the comm link inside his breathing mask with the tip of his tongue and said, “I’m going to continue my descent now. Does the tricorder show anything unusual below me?”
Too loudly, Graves said, “No. Nothing. The cliff face is stable. You should be okay.”
Soong tapped the comm link again and said, “Not so loud, Ira. You’re going to shake me off the cliff.”
Vaslovik switched on his comm and asked in his grave, yet oddly soothing manner, “Are you all right down there, Noonien?”
Soong grinned. It was only the fourth time Vaslovik had asked him that in the past twenty minutes. Somehow, he hadn’t expected the quadrant’s greatest expert on machine intelligence to be quite so … grandfatherly. But what did I expect? Someone who spoke in syntactically perfect sentences and glided like a mech on ball bearings? He decided grandfatherly was good, grandfatherly was, in fact, just fine. It helped to make up for Graves who, by contrast, was condescending and just generally insufferable.
Soong shook himself. That’s a good way to get into trouble, Noonien. His father would have cuffed him on the ear. Think about what you’re doing, about where you’re placing your foot next. The cold was getting to him. He could feel himself drifting.
Soong inspected his safety line, then checked the telltales on the antigravs. The right battery pack showed bright green, but the left one was blinking yellow. He did a quick test, pushing off the cliff face, and