Progenitor - Michael Jan Friedman [65]
Paris looked at her. “But—”
“Your hands shake?” she said, refusing to let him finish, refusing to let him slide back into his morass of self-doubt. “Maybe mine are shaking right now. Maybe I’m wondering if there’s a better way to save those scientists—or a way that doesn’t involve putting my own people’s lives at risk.
“Maybe I’ll be wrong. Maybe I’ll disgrace myself and my family and have all those deaths on my head, and be haunted by my choice for the rest of my life. But that’s the chance I’ve got to take.”
Wu leaned forward in her chair. “I picked you for this job because I thought you were the best, Ensign. I still think it—and not because you’re a Paris. Frankly, that couldn’t matter less to me. The reason I think you’re the best is because you are—and I’d be a whopping great fool to send anyone else out on such an important mission.”
Paris didn’t seem inclined to protest what she was saying any longer. He just sat there, his mouth hanging open.
“Any questions?” the commander asked him.
The ensign didn’t say anything. He just shook his head from side to side.
“Then report to the shuttlebay.”
Paris nodded, looking as if he had just been slapped across the face. Then he got up and made his way out of the captain’s ready room. As the doors opened, he looked back at her for a moment.
“I’ll try not to let you down,” he said.
And with that, he went through the open doorway.
Wu slumped back in the captain’s chair. Apparently, her words had had the desired effect. Paris would do what she had asked of him.
She could only hope it would be enough.
It was late in the day when Simenon and his companions came to the obstacle he had been dreading the most—a convex wall of coarse, dark rock that rose eighty meters straight into the air and stretched to the horizon on either side.
“Well,” Ben Zoma told Simenon as he took the measure of the wall, “you weren’t kidding. That is a healthy climb.”
Picard glanced at the engineer. “Especially when the climber is hampered by injuries.”
Simenon imagined that his rivals were climbing the barrier now or had already gotten past it. However, he didn’t know for sure because he couldn’t see them. Their paths had diverged more and more as time went on, and the corrugated shape of the wall served to conceal the portions of it Kasaelek and Banyohla would be required to climb.
“Fortunately,” Picard added knowingly, “your forebears didn’t scale this wall. They found an alternative.”
Simenon nodded. “Yes.” But under the circumstances, he wasn’t sure that it was all that fortunate.
The Aklaash and the Fejjimaera were superior to the Mazzereht when it came to climbing, just as they were superior in so many other aspects of the ritual. However, Simenon’s subspecies could do one thing better than the other subspecies.
They could hold their breath.
And at some point in the history of the ritual, one of Simenon’s predecessors had discovered a series of caves that ran beneath the rock wall—a feature still almost completely flooded with water from an underground river.
The engineer had intended all along to swim that river and come up on the other side of the rock wall—a shortcut that had represented an advantage to his ancestors and seemed certain to give him an edge over Kasaelek and Banyohla.
But with his arm hanging limply and painfully at his side, he wouldn’t be able to swim the caves. He would instead have to depend on a plan Vigo had come up with a half hour earlier.
The Pandrilite had already found one of the extraordinarily long, flexible vines that grew in such profusion in these woods. Snapping the vine off at the root with his great strength, he tied one end around his waist and made a knot to hold it in place—leaving the last ten meters’ worth trailing on the ground.
Tugging on the knot, Vigo made sure it was secure. Then he snapped off another length of vine and added it to the first. And then a third, even longer than the first two.
Finally, the weapons officer turned to Simenon. “Do you think you can hang onto this?”
“I’ll