Echoes of Earth by Sean Williams, Shane Dix Page A

itself.” Alander reluctantly allowed an image: of the bug rocking and swaying up the roots, the tips of its many legs sticking to the resinlike material with the ease of magnets to iron. They weren’t using pincers, grippers, or even suction pads. How it stayed on he couldn’t tell.
    It all became much worse when the bug acquired the tower proper. At an angle of ninety degrees to the ground, he sank deeper into the seat as the bug put on a sudden burst of acceleration. He didn’t want to look at the image to see how fast the climber was going or how high he was getting, so he switched off the conSense feed. It was bad enough that he could imagine it. He felt like Jack ascending the mighty beanstalk, oblivious to what perils awaited him at the top.
    Avoiding the image wasn’t as simple as just turning off conSense, however. Twenty-five seconds into their journey, the carapace of the bug suddenly turned transparent. Not perfectly see-through—he could see mysterious rods and planes shifting between the walls of his chamber and the outer skin—but clear enough to take in the view.
    He twisted around to look behind him. The sun was up enough to illuminate the world falling rapidly below; the base was just visible through the dust and receding quickly. He swallowed and let the seat take him again. The top was lost in the sky. The wall of clouds seemed to be rushing at him, and he was already dreading passing through them. He didn’t want to see the stars; he didn’t want to be that high.
    “Your skin is registering roughly Earth-normal atmospheric pressure,” said Sivio. “Do you want to test it?”
    “If you remove your mask,” added Samson, “you’ll be able to breathe easier.”
    He hadn’t realized he was breathing heavily. Lifting the mask a centimeter, he hesitantly tasted the air, then waited for analysis.
    “It’s good, Peter; better than you’re used to, in fact.”
    He tugged the mask off completely and sucked in a chestful of clean-smelling, oxygenated air, the most satisfying breath he had taken for weeks. The ability of his artificial body to breathe Adrasteian air came from within, involving complex chemical processes in its lungs, but it was perfectly capable of breathing Earth-normal air. Indeed, he felt that it might work slightly better, as a flood of well-being swept through his body.
    More calmly, he surveyed the view below. The surface of Adrasteia spread out below him like a desiccated pancake, buckled and split in thousands of places, uniformly brown, uninteresting from any height. It vanished as the bug reached the warmer cloud layer and climbed rapidly into mist. Its carapace crawled with droplets of water startled out of the air by the appearance of something solid.
    They ascended in silence for a good five minutes before the cloud layer began to thin.
    “Watch out for your eyes,” said Samson, gripping his hand.
    He took her advice in time as they burst out of the clouds and into the upper atmosphere. The sun, hanging over the bowed horizon to his left, burned brightly into the bug’s interior, blinding him for a second even through his upraised hand. His eyes soon adjusted to the onslaught, however, allowing him to see normally. As a result, when he looked up, the stars weren’t visible; all he could see was the sunward edge of the tower stretching higher and higher above him. Somewhere up there, an orange point shone; this, he assumed, was the terminus of their journey: Spindle Five.
    Below, the tower descended in a perfectly straight line into the clouds. Alander couldn’t guess how far they had come or how fast they were traveling.
    “How long until we get there?” He wasn’t that concerned; he just wanted the sounds of the others to distract him from his growing fears.
    “If you continue at this rate,” said Hatzis, “one hour.”
    “What do I do until then?”
    “That’s up to you, Peter. This is your project, after all. Maybe you should be putting your questions