[Trial Site Six — Verrek. North Beach.]
[Friday, 6:40 AM]
The transport put us down on wet sand in a grey light with the sun not properly up yet, and for about ninety seconds nobody moved at all.
Verrek doesn't look like a place that's the first thing.
It looks like a piece of scenery somebody built and then forgot to soften it up.
It seems the ground were too sharp at the edges, the jungle coming down to the sand in a wall rather than a slope and the Spine standing up behind it in a long grey line with cloud sitting on the top of it.
Somewhere off to my left the river came out of the gorge mouth and went into the sea, and the noise it made was the only sound on that beach for a while.
Between us and all of it stood the barrier.
It went up the moment the transports cleared, a wall of pale light running the whole width of the beach from the rocks on one side to the river on the other, forty feet high and humming at a pitch that got into your back teeth.
