Session 3 — Thin Air
“Buy the mask. You can’t out-tough an atmosphere.”
Where: A Startown outfitter’s shop → the lower slopes of Mount Salbarii → a cold camp at 1,300 metres
The job: Climb a mountain that doesn’t want them on it, and get to the Highndry before anyone else does.
The Shop on the Way Out
The climb was won before it started, in a cramped outfitter’s shop in Walston Startown.
Krieger did the talking. The proprietor — Merrin Vos, who has sold gear to everyone foolish enough to go up Salbarii and to the smaller number who came back down — started the conversation as a merchant and finished it as an advisor. He walked the crew through what the mountain actually does to people, and what the government-issue filter masks conspicuously do not do: keep dust out of your lungs, yes; put oxygen into air that has almost none, no.
So the crew bought breather masks, all six of them, along with ropes, cold-weather layers, packs, and the rest of the unglamorous kit that keeps a body alive above a thousand metres.
That purchase is the reason this recap isn’t a list of casualties. Altitude sickness gutted the last crew that tried this. It never touched this one.
The Long Walk
The government crawler carried them to the 500-metre point and left — engine noise thinning out down the switchbacks until there was nothing but wind and the hiss of six masks.
The lower slope went easily enough. Walston’s weak gravity makes a loaded pack feel like a rumour, and the trail wound up through grey earth and black stone at a steady hundred metres an hour. Three hours of that put them at 800 metres, cold in every gap of their clothing but entirely unbothered by the thin air they were breathing through good equipment.
The Outcrop
At 800 metres the mountain stopped being a walk. A band of dark volcanic rock ran across the slope like a wall — a ten-metre sheer face straight ahead, or a ridge bending away around the shoulder of the peak.
They took the face. Dax led it, went up clean, and dropped the rope for everyone else. No falls, no drama, no one left clinging to a bad line — just the crew’s best hands doing the thing he’s best at while five people came up behind him one at a time.
The top of the outcrop held a quiet warning the crew did not linger over: two skeletons, half a century old, ruined climbing gear scattered around them, the bones picked clean. Somebody else had tried this. The crew noted it and kept climbing.
The Swarm
Above 1,100 metres the vegetation quit and the ground turned to rippled black stone. The wind picked up a dry ticking sound, like grit thrown against glass — except some of the specks in the air were moving against the wind.
Salbarii locusts. A brown stain of them gathering and dispersing across the slope, thick enough to cut visibility to a couple of metres.
The crew covered up and pushed straight through it. It worked, mostly. Dax and Hudson came out the far side bitten badly — not an irritation, real wounds, the kind a swarm inflicts when it finds skin and stays on it. But they came out, and they came out moving.
Loose Rock
The 1,200-to-1,350-metre stretch is where the mountain stops being weather and starts being a climb: overhangs, tilted slabs, narrow ledges balanced on beds of stone that keep falling long after they leave your boot.
Zane came off a sheer section and took the fall — down the rock, hard.
After that the crew stopped trying to move fast and started trying to move everyone. Dax rigged ropes to bring Krieger and Kael up the worst of it rather than let either of them try it free. It was the right call and it was not a free one: roping two people up a scramble costs hours, and the crew spent them.
Through all of it, Krieger’s medical kit was the thing holding the expedition together. Locust bites, a fall, the accumulated damage of a mountain — he treated every wounded member of the crew and got them back on their feet. Six people started the climb. Six people were still climbing.
Cold Camp at 1,300
They stopped at 1,300 metres, short of the final face, and made camp on bad ground in hard cold. The crater lip was close enough to see. One more push in the morning.
They set a watch — and the watch earned its keep.
Kael was the one who saw it: down the slope, figures coming out of the top of the locust swarm. The scavengers. The other crew who think the abandoned ship in the crater is theirs to strip, who started this climb behind the party and have been eating into that lead every hour the crew has spent on ropes, on wounds, and on bringing everyone up together.
They are lower on the mountain. They are not far enough lower.
Cliffhanger
The crew is one face — fifty vertical metres — from the crater lip and the first sight of their ship. They’re bitten, bruised, patched together by their medic, and camped on cold rock in the dark.
And somewhere below them in the ticking brown haze, a group of strangers with pry bars and empty packs is climbing through the night.
We ended here: the watch fire at 1,300 metres, and the scavengers coming up out of the swarm.
Next time: the final face, the crater lip — and who gets there first.