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Flakes of rock rained down around him, and he realized the last protection he had set was fifty feet below—he needed to get to that ramp above,
fast.

The cliff-gliders grew bolder. They lightly grazed his shoulders, back, and heels as he climbed, flittering around him in greater numbers like flying crabs swarming over the cliff face. “Hang on, bro,” he said to himself nervously.

The humming stopped.

Andy sighed. “Now I know what an earthquake feels like.”

“OK, it’s over,” Nell said, hopefully.

Briggs came through the hatch from Section Three. There was a serious look on the chief NASA technician’s face.

Cliff-gliders
Megatriops hemapteryx
(after
Joel,
Revision of the Notostraca of the World)

“Hey, Briggs. Is there any way I can run down to Section One and get my Mets cap? I think I left it down there.” She smirked at him.

“That’s very funny, Nell. That would be a ‘no.’ So, now we have
earthquakes?”

“Not too bad, so far.”

“Yeah, sure.” Briggs glared at her. “Bring on the mudslides and hurricanes!”

Dante began to suffer from forearm pump as the fingerwork bulged his arms and weakened his grip. He tried shifting more of the weight to his feet, and finally, painfully, he reached the crack and wedged himself in. He shook out his arms in the womb of rock and then set some protection, overcamming it into a hole above him, and hooking it in with a locking ‘biner.

He was not confident about bivouacking on the rock face— sleeping here did not seem like such a great idea, after all. Crawling deeper into the crack, he discovered a vertical crevice that shafted into the roof like a ladder, straight to the overhang at the top. He felt a surge of hope. If this was as clean as it looked, he could reach the top in fifteen minutes.

He decided it was time to transmit, using the camera’s night vision mode. He turned on the
SeaLife
walkie-talkie and called in.

Every three and a half minutes Peach nibbled a peanut M&M as he played the twenty-sixth level of Halo 5—when suddenly he caught a signal icon blinking in a corner of his monitor.

He clicked the icon as though he were blasting another alien, and the raw feed of Dante’s camera suddenly filled the screen, muddy and crackling:
“I’m here on Henders Island, about a hundred
meters from the top of the cliff. Do you guys hear me? I hope your walkie-talkies are on, man…”

Peach looked around for his walkie-talkie but couldn’t find it.

Cynthea was sleeping in her cabin when the beeper of her walkie-talkie went off on her night table. She sprang up as she heard Dante’s voice.

She dashed in her navy blue pajamas toward the Control Room with the walkie-talkie to her ear. “Dante! You shouldn’t be doing this!” she scolded as she ran.

“Hey, it’s done, Cynthea. I told you I could climb this thing. Here I am!”

“Oh my God!” she groaned.

As soon as she reached the Control Room and saw the live feed, frustratingly dark and erratic as it was, she grabbed the shipboard satphone and speed-dialed.

“This is Cynthea Leeds, may I speak to Barry? Just wake him up, honey. Trust me, OK? DO IT!” She looked at Peach, frowning, and put her hand over the receiver: “Can you bring down the contrast and brighten the image or something, Peach? We gotta get more than that.” She took her hand off the receiver. “Barry, I’ve got a rock climber with a camera thirty feet from the top of Henders Island, ready to go live. Wake up, Barry. Wake up! We’ve got to go LIVE now! This is the broadcast of the century! We can get it through the news blackout from Henders Island! Damn it, that’s our hook! Barry?”

Peach could hear Barry breathing through the phone’s ear speaker.

“Do you know what time it is on the East Coast right now, Cynthea? It’s one-thirty in the morning!”

“That’s what makes it legendary television, Barry!” Cynthea shook her head, glancing at Peach. “Do it! You’ll have the exclusive rights to a MILLION RERUNS! This is like the first MOON
LANDING, BARRY!” She put a hand over the receiver. “Tell Dante to hold off from getting to the top—Barry’s getting his fat ass out of bed and is going down to the office, but Dante has to stay put for ten minutes.” She put the satphone to her ear. “OK, Barry, sweetie. Thank you, my darling!”

“OK, I hope this night vision is coming through—I have the camera strapped to my chest now and you’re looking at the cliff above me,” Dante said. “I’m climbing a seam. You may be able to see some gliders just outside the crack. I’m protected from them in here, but they’ve been getting a little close for comfort— one of them seems to have taken a nip out of my elbow. But mostly they seem to eat these big fireflies that were coming after me…”

Dante climbed fifty feet before setting some pro. He estimated that he was now a hundred feet from the top.

Peach’s voice suddenly crackled through the walkie-talkie.
“Can you stop about thirty feet from the top and wait for a green light, Dante?”

“No problem. Don’t make me wait too long, though, the last bit’s an overhang, dude.”

“OK, cool. Keep videoing, we’re getting all this. You shouldn’t have done it, you know,”
Cynthea scolded.
“But you’re going to be a superstar, baby!”

“Woo-hoo!” Dante grinned as he steadily climbed up the crack, ducking occasionally to avoid a swooping glider.

“Are you getting this, Barry?”

“We’re getting it, we’re getting it. It’s exciting stuff.”

“Are we live?” There was a pause and Cynthea glared at the phone. “Barry?”

“It’s great stuff, Cynthea, but I don’t know… I’m having dinner
with Congressman Murray tomorrow night from the FCC Oversight Committee to hash out the merger details—”

“Why, you cocksucking motherfucking backstabbing son of a bitch,” Cynthea snarled.

“Now, Cynthea, we can maybe get better airtime and a real special out of it later without getting in trouble with the FCC or violating the goddamned Patriot Act or God knows what else the lawyer is nodding his head at me about right now, all right?”

“Don’t let me down, Barry!” Cynthea threatened.

Dante dangled from a pair of cams that he had chocked into the roof of the overhang, thirty feet below the cliff’s summit. As he looked across the chasm, the opposite cliff face seemed to draw nearer, then recede. “It’s kind of gnarly up here, man. We’re having another earthquake, I think. I hope you’re getting this, man!”

“Try to hold it steady.”
Peach’s voice came over the walkie-talkie taped to Dante’s upper arm.

“You try!” Dante snarled.

Dante set two nuts in small cracks above his head and equalized the tension on the tie-ins. Cliff-gliders leaped past him, devouring the flying, glowing bugs attracted to his dangling body.

He swung forward and caught the edge of the overhang, locking off with one arm and reaching up with the other to place a final cam.

He was ten yards of rock away from the top. “Tell me when, guys. And make it
fast
, OK?”

“Come on, Barry! You’ve got a live feed from Henders Island all ready to go, damn it!”

Peach heard Barry reply through her phone’s receiver: “I don’t want another slaughter on TV!”

In the background they could hear Dante’s narration as he
pointed the camera across the crevasse.
“A few feet to go here on the crux—What the hell?”

The other wall was only about twenty feet away. The dark trilobite-like creatures seemed to be congregating into a mass directly across from Dante.

“That doesn’t look good,” Peach told Cynthea.

“I don’t like the look of these things, man,”
came Dante’s voice.
“Ow! They’re comin’ at me from all directions now—I can’t hang around here longer, man. I’m going for it.”

“OK, we’re cutting in live in five seconds,” Barry said. “So get ready, Cynthea, damn you, you fucking bitch!”

“I could
marry
you, Barry!”

“OK,”
Dante grunted.
“I am almost to the top of Henders Island…”

“We’ve got a live shot coming from Henders Island as one of the crew
of SeaLife
, without our permission or authorization, is about to reach the top of the island’s cliff, and broadcast the first images of the island’s interior,” Cynthea narrated. “What do you see, Dante?”

“Damn it—those things have teeth, I think. Uh, fuck, I’m just getting up the last bit here, hang on.”
The camera swept across pale rock illuminated by night vision as they heard his grunts and hard breathing.

“Keep talking, sweetie, keep talking!” Cynthea coaxed. “Don’t swear, though, honey!”

Dante reached a grasping hand up over the lip and hauled himself to the top of the cliff. His muscles trembled with exhaustion, and he lay still on his back for a moment, breathing and giving thanks. He had made it.

He raised himself to his feet.

“Oh shit!”

One of the giant tigers flashing orange-and-pink stripes sat in front of him. The thing was the size of a tractor.

As Dante spun and dove back into the crevasse, he saw a luminous
figure, on the opposite side of the crevasse, jump in the air and spread out four arms in an X.

“Oh
shiiiiit
!
”
Dante heard it screech, in a warbled imitation of his own voice.

“We’re cutting this off, Cynthea!” yelled Barry. “Are you
crazy?”
she screamed.

The rope yanked on his harness as it belayed inside the gri-gri and tightened the cam driven into the ledge.

He dangled and spun, head downward, on the rope. A cloud of bugs circled him, chased by leaping gliders.

He righted himself and climbed the rope, drawing his body up under the ledge.

Above him, the tiger-spider suddenly loomed over the edge, blocking the moonlight. He saw it reach two long black spikes down into the crack and hook his rope. It pulled Dante up like a fish caught on a dropline.

As its jaws peeled open, revealing dark appendages, he smelled the sour stench of its breath and felt a splatter of stinging drool on his face. The rope lunged upward as the beast yanked it with two arms, and its head stretched down over the rocky edge on an elastic neck. He felt its hot breath and his heart pounded as the creature screamed a sound he never imagined could come from a living thing.

Dante heard the taunting voice of the other animal, from somewhere above on the cliff: “Oh
shiiiiiit
!
”
it echoed.

He knew that with one more pull of the rope he would be inside the monster’s mouth. Dante chose to die another way.

“Bye, guys,” he said, and he unclipped.

The creature screamed like a hoarse siren, its voice receding away from him as he fell.

The last thing they saw on-screen was the camera eye tumbling through the chasm as the scream of the beast faded—the transmission fizzled on impact with the ground.

“Cynthea, Christ! What are you doing to me?” Barry yelled.

“Oh God,” Cynthea screeched. “When did you cut it?”

“Not soon e-fucking-nough!”

Captain Sol used surgeon’s forceps to place a small brass cannon on the gun deck of the
Golden Hind.

“Good.” Zero nodded.

“Does it look straight?”

“Yeah,” Zero said.

“Good.” Samir nodded.

Captain Sol lifted his thimble-sized shot glass. “Here’s to it, eh?” He toasted Zero with a sip of añejo tequila.

Zero toasted him back.

Watching Captain Sol build his model was just about the only entertainment available on the
Trident
lately.

The ship-to-ship phone bleated suddenly and Samir rose from his chair and picked it up. He listened for about ten seconds. “Uh, wow, I think you need to speak to the captain,” he said, handing the phone to Captain Sol. Zero looked on curiously.

The captain smirked, putting the phone to his ear as Samir shrugged.

“Captain Sol, this is Lieutenant Scott of the U.S.S.
Enterprise
informing you that a communication signal has been detected coming from the vicinity of your vessel. In fact, we believe it came from your vessel. Broadcasting is unauthorized and contrary to the orders you have been given from the U.S. Navy. We must demand you prepare for immediate boarding.”

“Cynthea!” Captain Sol growled.

“Please copy that again?”
said the voice on the radio.

“Thanks,
Enterprise
, I agree, whatever you are detecting is unauthorized. Let me check my ship now to find out what’s going on, over.”

“Uh, we will help you
, Trident.
Is that understood?”