I fought the stunblast ache and got my eyelids apart. Blinked a couple of times to clear my vision and then wished I hadn’t. My head was hanging down on my right shoulder and the only thing I could see under it was five hundred metres of empty space and the bottom of the mountain. The cold and the dizzy swinging sensation made abrupt sense. I was dangling like a hanged man from the grip of my own left hand.

The shock fired up again. I shelved it with an effort and twisted my head awkwardly to look upward. My fist was wrapped around a loop of greenish cable that disappeared seamlessly at both ends into a smoke-grey alloy cowling. Oddly angled buttresses and spires of the same alloy crowded me on all sides. Still groggy from the stunblast, it took me a couple of moments to identify the underside of the eyrie. Apparently, I hadn’t fallen very far.

“What’s going on, Dig?” I croaked.

“As you fell, you took hold of a Martian personnel cable which, in line with what we understand of its function, retracted and brought you up into a recovery bay.”

“Recovery bay?” I cast about among the surrounding projections for some sign of a safe place to stand. “So how does that work?”

“We are not sure. It would appear that from the position you now occupy, a Martian, an adult Martian at least, would be comfortable using the structure you see around you to reach openings on the underside of the eyrie. There are several within—”

“Alright.” I stared grimly up at my closed fist. “How long have I been out?”

“Forty-seven minutes. It appears your body is highly resistant to neuronic frequency weapons. As well as being designed for survival in high altitude, high-risk environments.”

No shit.

How Eishundo Organics had ever gone out of business was beyond me.

They could have had an endorsement out of me on demand. I’d seen subconscious survival programming in combat sleeves before, but this was a piece of sheer biotech brilliance. Vague memory of the event stirred in my stun-muddied recollection. The desperate terror of vertigo at full pitch and the realisation of the fall. Grabbing at something half-seen as the stun blast effects folded around me like a freezing black cloak. A final wrench as consciousness winked out. Saved, by some lab full of biotech geeks and their project enthusiasm three centuries ago.

A weak grin faded as I tried to guess what nearly an hour of locked muscle grip and load-bearing strain might have done to the sinews and joints of my arm. I wondered if there’d be permanent damage. If for that matter, I’d be able to get the limb to work at all.

“Where are the others?”

“They left. They are now beyond my sensor radius.”

“So they think I fell all the way.”