Immortal Coil - Jeffrey Lang [2]
Fighting down panic, Soong gingerly felt to his side, searched for the edge of the precipice and found it. Maybe a meter wide where he was sitting, though it seemed to be wider to his left. It seemed stable, so Soong shifted his weight, then rolled off the handgrip that had been stabbing him in the side, and pulled himself up into a sitting position. His pants were shredded and there was a fair amount of blood smeared on the tatters, but he could move his legs so he knew they weren’t broken. He pulled out the med pack, peeled an anesthetic dermpatch off the roll and applied it to his thigh. Soong was rewarded with almost instantaneous relief, the pain dropping down to a dull throb. A quick pass with the medical tricorder confirmed what he suspected—scrapes and some serious contusions, but nothing life-threatening. He set to work patching up the worst of it. Blood loss in such a cold place was a bad thing.
Soong became aware of a distant buzzing sound, so he groped around until he found his earpiece. He tapped the comm link and said, “Graves? Ira? Please stop shouting. I fell, but I’m all right.” The buzz from the earpiece died away and was replaced by a dim murmur. Vaslovik was speaking.
“Noonien? You’re safe?”
“For now, Dr. Vaslovik. I’m on a ledge maybe forty meters down. I’m hurt, but not critically. If you can wait a moment, I’m going to try to bandage myself up.”
“All right, Noonien. Go ahead. If necessary, set up your pattern enhancer and we’ll beam you back to my ship.” Soong felt some of his anxiety drain away; he would get out of this place one way or another, assuming the enhancer survived the fall. Soong began to unsling his pack to see if it was undamaged, but stopped himself. He only had a little time before the cold totally sapped his strength. Better to concentrate on the task at hand.
Soong pulled the lamp closer and tried to set it down where he could use the light to inspect his legs, but the lantern wouldn’t stay in an upright position. The ledge was bumpy and irregular, but Soong’s attempts at finding a crack to wedge the lamp into were unsuccessful. Thinking he might chip out a small depression, Soong unslung his climbing hammer, took aim and swung. The hammer hit hard, but instead of the satisfying chink he had expected, all he got was a dull thud. He shone the light onto the ledge, then bent down to examine the spot where the hammer had struck. The surface of the rock was unscarred. He looked at his hammer and saw that the blade was dulled by the blow.
What the hell … ?
At first, he thought it was some kind of petrified plant root, but looking more closely he saw that it wasn’t a plant at all. Later—much later—he realized that it was the fingers that had confused him. They were extraordinarily long, almost like they had been melted or softened, then stretched like taffy. The arm and the upper body, too, seemed freakishly elongated, but it was impossible to say much else about it since the lower half of the body seemed to be dangling off the other side of the ledge.
Holding the lamp so he could keep an eye on the figure, Soong unslung his pack and began assembling the enhancer. As he worked, he tapped his comm link again and, as calmly as he could, said, “Dr. Vaslovik? Ira? On second thought, maybe you should come down here.”
PART ONE
Chapter One
” ‘IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT …’ “
Commander Bruce Maddox wasn’t sure he had heard correctly, so he hauled himself up out of the maintenance hatch and said, “Excuse me?” He had been looking for a loose connection or a mismatched isolinear chip, something to explain