For Ritchie, the climb before lunch had been a piece of cake. She didn"t have as much climbing experience as most of the other cadets, but she had spent a lot of time familiarizing herself with the equipment. The gloves felt strange when they adhered to surfaces, but she soon got a hang of just the right movement to disengage the nanofabric so she could reach for the next handhold without jerking her whole arm. And unlike many of the others, she never once got tangled in her safety line.
But it was a good thing she didn"t let herself feel too smug about how she had tackled the first slope, because the four climbing segments they tackled between lunch and dinner grew successively harder. And each time, the walking segments between that offered something like a moment"s rest were shorter.
