The faint afternoon shadows before him had scarcely shifted since he had last communicated with Kit. “Kit?”“There’s no hatch at Thirty Lower! Or anywhere else down to Ninety-two Lower, ‘cause that’s where I am now. And that’s as low as the Scorpion can go. There are structural transverse braces across the stack at Ninety-three Lower that the ship can’t fit between.”“How can all that be?”“Spying’s an inexact science. Teufelsberg Station hacks into these maps from a half million miles away.”“The plan has failed?”“The plan is every battle’s first casualty, Mort.”Despite her confident words, he felt her anxiety and fear swell, then heard through bone conduction in her skull the sound of her grinding her teeth across one another. The sound now seemed amplified in the Scorpion’s confined space. The sound was replaced in Kit’s ears by metal jingling against metal, and he saw in her hands bundles of multicolored vines around which dangled irregular wire bits.“What are those?”“Rappel ropes.
