Catching the Cable

My brain didn't deliberate. My body moved before I could formulate a single word.

I dropped my socket wrench, grabbed the heavy braided towline looped to Buggy Three's recovery bumper, and threw myself forward.

I didn't try to pull him away. If I dragged him back, the swinging mass would crush his legs against the tailgate.

Instead, I kicked a steel wheel chock under the buggy's rear tire to lock our chassis, threw the towline's heavy steel hook through the snatch block mounted to the hangar's reinforced corner stanchion, and caught the swinging hoist cable with the free loop.

"Duck!" I roared.

I wrapped the braided line twice around Buggy Three's mechanical power-takeoff drum and slammed the manual engagement lever down with both hands.

The steel cable caught the swinging stabilizer mid-arc.

The kinetic shock tore through the towline with the force of an exploding shell. The steel rope sang, shedding flecks of galvanized zinc as it went rigid as a steel rod.

The immense tension jerked me forward. My boots skidded on the greasy floor. My right shoulder flared with blinding, white-hot fire as the old scar tissue stretched under the load.

I clamped my jaw shut, planted my heels against the rear tire, and threw my entire body weight backward over the brake lever.

Hold, you bastard. Hold.

The stabilizer halted with a deafening metallic clang. It hung suspended four inches above Lórágy's head, trembling violently in the tensioned web of steel.

Silence slammed down over Hangar Nine.

The only sounds were the hum of the swinging overhead lights, the drip of hydraulic fluid from the winch housing, and the ragged sound of my own breathing.

Lórágy stood entirely still beneath the suspended cylinder. His spectacles hung crooked on the bridge of his nose. His hair was plastered to his forehead with cold sweat. His hands were still clutching a single glass flask against his ribs.

He looked up at the steel tube hovering inches above his brow, then slowly turned his head to look at me.

I was still pinned against the brake drum, muscles shaking, hands white-knuckled on the release lever.

"Are you... intact?" he whispered.

His voice was barely audible. It shook with pure, unvarnished shock.

"Get out of the bed," I ground out between clenched teeth. "Right now. Before my shoulder gives out and this thing turns you into strawberry jam."

He didn't argue. He slid sideways out of the truck bed, ducking under the taut cable with awkward haste, and landed on the concrete beside me.

The moment his feet cleared the frame, I tripped the snatch block release.

The stabilizer dropped the remaining four inches into the center cradle of Buggy Three's cargo bed with a heavy thud. It settled perfectly between the reinforced middle crossmembers, right over the trunnion axle I had just torqued down.

The suspension groaned, compressed two inches, and held.

The center of gravity was dead center. The axle was safe.

I let go of the lever and leaned against the rear quarter panel, my right arm hanging limp at my side. My collarbone felt like someone had driven a red-hot nail under the bone.

Margit rushed over, her face gray as wet slate. "Is the casing cracked? Did the acoustic seals rupture?"

"The casing is fine," I snapped, glaring at her with enough venom to melt lead. "Your winch brake is shot. If your crew uses that hoist again, I will cut the cable myself."

Margit opened her mouth to defend her workers, looked at the crushed steel rigging on the floor, and shut it. She turned on her heel and began screaming at the crane operator.

I stood there, trying to discreetly roll my right shoulder to work the cramp out of the muscle.

A shadow fell over me.

Lórágy had stepped up to my side. He wasn't looking at his crates anymore. He was looking at my shoulder.

"You tore something," he said softly.

"I pulled a muscle. It's fine."

"You have a scar across your clavicle. Third-degree ballistic trauma, improperly debrided." He spoke with clinical precision, but his eyes were wide and dark behind his lenses. "You took the entire kinetic vector of that three-hundred-kilo load on a compromised joint."

"I took the load on the snatch block, Doctor. I'm not an idiot."

"You held the manual lever," he insisted, taking a half-step closer. His fingers twitched, as if he wanted to reach out and touch the collar of my jacket, but he stopped himself an inch away. "You could have jumped clear. You would have saved yourself and let the cargo crush the bed."

"And let you get splattered across the floor?" I scoffed, forcing a tight, sarcastic grin despite the throbbing ache in my collarbone. "Then who would explain sporulation cycles to me in words with six syllables?"

He didn't laugh.

He just stared at me. The rigid, condescending mask he had worn since Hangar Nine had cracked wide open, leaving behind something raw and unsettled.

He reached down, picked up a thirty-kilogram heavy-duty lithium power cell from the floor, and hoisted it into the rear rack with a grunt. He didn't ask for help. He stacked it directly over the middle axle, wedging it tight with timber chocks exactly the way I had demonstrated earlier.

He wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of his forearm and turned back to the remaining gear.

"The secondary microscope stays in the hangar," he said, not looking at me.

I blinked. "What?"

"We only have allowance for one optical unit under your weight limits," he said, his voice quiet, disciplined, and entirely devoid of argument. "The secondary unit stays in storage. Along with the spare incubator."

He looked at me over the rim of his glasses.

"Your math was correct," he added. "We cannot afford the weight."

I stood there for two seconds, listening to the clatter of tools across the bay.

Coming from Lórágy Folyosy, that was the equivalent of a formal surrender signed in blood.

"Good," I said, clearing my throat. "Then load the survival rations and get in the cab."

By 13:50, Buggy Three was packed.

Eight hundred kilograms of luxury gear sat abandoned on the hangar floor, including Margit's spare drill heads and Lórágy's polished herbarium chest. What remained was strapped down with high-tensile steel webbing, locked to the chassis, and balanced so cleanly that the six tires carried equal weight to within five percent.

At 13:55, the staging horn sounded across the valley.

WHUMM. WHUMM. WHUMM.

Three long blasts echoed through the concrete caverns, shaking the dust from the steel rafters.

The massive iron blast doors at the rear of Hangar Nine began to grind upward on heavy chains, revealing the staging platform of the Hasadék Cableway.

Beyond the doors lay nothing but darkness.

The Breach opened up like the throat of a leviathan, a vertical chasm four miles wide and two miles deep, plunging into the black belly of the mountain range. A howling updraft of cold, damp air surged into the heated hangar, carrying the smell of ancient wet shale, sulfur, and deep-earth moss.

Gyula, the grizzled cableway master, stood on the control gantry in a grease-stained leather apron. He swung a red signal lantern in wide, impatient circles.

"Rig Three!" Gyula bellowed over the roar of the ventilation turbines. "Take the cradle! Five minutes to drop window!"

"Move it," I told the team.

Margit and her chief technician climbed into the rear bench of Buggy Three's crew cab.

I took the driver's seat on the left, sliding my boots onto the heavy ribbed pedals. The diesel-electric engine purred to life with a deep, guttural rumble that vibrated through the steel floorboards and settled directly into my spine.

The passenger door opened. Lórágy climbed in beside me.

The consortium's budget cuts were never more obvious than inside that cab. It was designed for narrow military scouts, not a four-person scientific expedition.

When Lórágy pulled the heavy steel door shut, his left shoulder pressed flush against my right.

There was no gap. Every breath he took, every shift of his weight as he adjusted his harness, pressed the warm, solid line of his arm directly against mine. He was tall, his long legs cramped against the dashboard, his knee brushing my gearshift lever every time I touched the clutch.

"Comfortable?" I asked dryly, shifting into low gear.

"Exceedingly," he replied, staring straight ahead through the reinforced windshield. His voice was stiff, but his arm didn't pull away. In fact, he braced his foot against the firewall to give me more clearance for the steering wheel.

A small courtesy. He didn't mention it. Neither did I.

I eased the throttle forward.

Buggy Three rolled out of Hangar Nine, tires rumbling over the steel transition plates, and crawled onto the suspended descent cradle.

The cradle was an open platform of steel grating suspended over the abyss by four massive braided steel cables, each as thick as a man's torso. Below the metal mesh floor, two thousand feet of absolute blackness fell away into the void.

Gyula walked around the buggy, slamming four heavy locking dog-clamps over our wheel rims with a five-pound sledgehammer.

CLANG. CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.

The impacts echoed down the shaft, swallowed by the infinite hollow of the mountain.

Gyula stepped up to my window, spit a stream of tobacco juice onto the grating, and tapped the glass with his wrench.

"You're locked in, Kenderesy," he shouted over the wind. "Once the winch trips, there's no reverse cable until Station Three. You drop or you drop. You got four days of battery on the transponder."

"Understood," I said.

"Good luck down there," Gyula muttered, his weathered face grim under his greasy cap. "They say the spores are blooming early at the lower shelves."

He stepped back to the control console, reached up, and threw the master hydraulic lever.

The heavy steel descent cage slammed down over our roof with a shuddering crash, locking the cradle from above.

A loud mechanical clunk resonated through the frame.

The floor beneath Buggy Three dropped two inches as the cableway took the full thirty-ton load.

For one breathless second, we were completely weightless.

Then the cable squealed in its giant sheaves, the electric motors groaned, and Buggy Three plunged over the edge into the dark.