Coming down had been easy in the specific way that things were easy when you had no choice about them. Going up was a different kind of problem entirely.
He followed the Morag wall-markings for the first hour. They were precise — carved by someone who had known this network with the intimate familiarity of people who had lived on Vorga for generations and had mapped its underground the way his father's generation had mapped city streets, not because they were told to but because knowing your environment was the same thing as surviving it.
The markings indicated direction, passage width changes, points where the rock was load-bearing and points where it wasn't, and at one junction where three passages met, a symbol he had to read twice before the ring's translation delivered its full meaning: this way smells like the surface.
He appreciated Morag pragmatism.
