Part 17 (2/2)

The s.p.a.cers quickly traced the Canuchean's escape route to its source. All of them were slender, agile men armed with good head lamps, and they were not long in discovering that his report was accurate. By some presently unaccountable quirk of chance, the moderately large room in which they found themselves had taken relatively light damage, and they located its five other occupants without difficulty. One was dead, his neck broken, and another was fairly severely injured, but the remaining three were little worse off than the initial survivor.

These last, they led out first and then carried their more critically hurt co-worker, leaving the dead man for a future trip.

Before going back inside a second time, Mura gave a hasty report of what they had discovered over his portable transceiver. Conditions that had s.h.i.+elded one floor or room might have been repeated elsewhere, perhaps many times over. That could be the salvation of a lot of lives if it were known, and he dared not a.s.sume that they would be able to deliver the information in person. They would have to venture again and again into the ruins, where any s.h.i.+ft of the freshly piled, unsettled rubble or any other mischance could bury them forever.

Frank drew his sleeve across his face to wipe off the sweat, smearing the coating of grime, soot, and blood into an even tighter clinging paste.

The second office, which housed the clerical workers, was not so well preserved, and the one beyond it was infinitely worse. After that third chamber, they had been compelled to quit the ruins altogether lest they just bring the whole thing down on the poor wretches still trapped there. Only when a backup company armed with major emergency equipment arrived in response to Mura's report were they able to resume the ma.s.sive effort.

It seemed to be about over now, he judged. They appeared to have discovered all the survivors at this site. At least, all that had come out in the last several trips were bodies and parts of bodies.

His eyes shut with infinite weariness. Had j.a.pan suffered like this, he wondered, before volcano and giant wave had combined to throw her islands, population, and ancient culture beneath the cloaking surface of Terra's ocean? It had taken two days and the night between them. Had desperate rescue teams struggled on even as they were doing here in the face of ever-mounting calamity throughout all that first day and night and maybe part of the second day until an implacably furious nature had left none alive to save or be saved?

The Steward shook his head and looked with concern at the party just pulling itself out of the ruin. That was not his own history. It was not the history of his parents or grandparents. For Ali Kamil, this was his boyhood returned.

Apart from the fact that the cause had been cruel accident rather than human savagery, he had seen all this, lived it, and he had survived. Would he be able to do so a second time?

Frank watched the Engineer-apprentice haul himself erect and claim the luxury of stretching cramped, exhausted muscles. His face was blank, a mask, but his dark eyes were alive and afire, blazing like a pair of young stars pulled out of the depths of s.p.a.ce.

Kamil had been tireless in his efforts. More than that.

They all had worked and were working, but Ali had proven to be worth any three of the rest of them. He seemed to have no fear of the treacherous rubble and ventured time and again into it without hesitation or apparent qualm, and once inside, he rarely failed to accomplish his mission. He had an almost uncanny feel for it, for locating hidden, otherwise lost survivors, for figuring with a minimum of lost time how best to shove or pry or lift away the material confining them. When this day was over, it would be the darkly handsome s.p.a.ce hound that the greater part of the people brought alive out of this place would have to thank for their deliverance.

27.

Jellico twisted around. The Salty Sue was clearly visible from the shattered Patrol flier, and so, too, were the clouds of smoke and the sullen glow of flames rising from the broken dock beside her. He could not tell whether the freighter herself was already ablaze.

He came to his feet. ”The s.h.i.+p's my business,” he told Cofort and the injured yeoman. ”A Medic's what's needed here at the moment, and that we've got”

Rael looked up at him. ”Miceal . . .”

The Captain shook his head. ”You're hurt,” he said quietly, ”and Keil's hurt worse.” His voice dropped. ”He's also been alone through too much of this already.”

It was a command, however softly voiced. The woman's head lowered, as much to conceal the weight of grief and loss she feared she would not otherwise be able to mask as to give her a.s.sent.

Jellico said nothing more to either of them. He turned from the pair and ran for the threatened freighter. Maybe there was no chance, probably there was none, but he was not going to surrender to the Grim Commandant without the best d.a.m.n fight of his life. He would not quietly give over Rael or that wounded Yeoman or the rest of his crew, most of whom would by now be working in the ruins above, oblivious to the peril once again overshadowing them all.

His lips tightened. If only the Patrol agent's transceiver had not been shattered in the crash he would at least have been able to sound the alarm, but one quick look had been sufficient to tell him he would send no warning out by that route, and there would be no point at all in trying to do so on foot. With the possibility of flight blocked, the fires would have to be kept away from the Sally Sue's cargo if a second, even more violent explosion was not to rip them all to shreds.

For one instant, he knew a stab of regret as hard and sharp as a physical blow. Perhaps he should not have refused Rael Cofort's help, he thought. If nothing else, they might then at least have met their deaths together.

Angrily, he put that from his mind. The Medic had her own work to do, and with one or more cracked ribs, she would have been hard pressed to carry the strenuous activity that probably lay ahead of him if he was given the time to half begin. Fate had a.s.signed each of them his own task in this one. They had no alternative, either of them, but to accept that fact and get on with it.

The need for speed lay on him like the lash of a force whip, with only minutes or maybe mere seconds standing between them all and oblivion, but the course he had to run was neither smooth nor straight. Rubble of every conceivable size and nature lay strewn in his path. Some of it he could sidestep or jump. Some large pieces forced him to detour altogether.

Each time he had to try a new way, his heart beat faster in fear. If he miscalculated, failed to follow the route he had so hastily planned out for himself, and wound up in a mora.s.s of big stuff or blocked by a wall of rubbish that would require real climbing, he might as well just sit back and wait for death . . .

The Salty Sue was in front of him. To his relief, he saw that she was as yet untouched. Only the dock beside her was aflame. It was not a ma.s.sive conflagration, either, praise the Spirit ruling s.p.a.ce, but rather several small fires, two of them already perilously near the freighter, burning independently of one another.

Luck was with him. Access to the dock had not been blocked, and the freighter's deck was reasonably close to its surface. The Free Trader raced for her, dodging the flames and those places where the surface was splintered and either raised or altogether absent.

Only when he reached the Salty Sue did he at last come to a stop. Her rail was near but still far enough to make the gaining of it a challenge in itself.

It was a leap, he thought, even for a fully fresh man, but to judge by those fires, he had no option but to succeed and to do it in his first couple of tries.

Jellico steeled himself, tested his balance, and sprang.

His hands closed over the st.u.r.dy curve of the railing even as his feet slammed against the side. With that for a brace, he leapt again, this time vaulting over the rail onto the deck of the imperiled vessel.

Miceal did not pause. He had always liked watercraft and had indulged that liking by learning as much as he could about them, seeking practical experience as well as theoretical knowledge when he got the chance. That should stand by him here. Canuche of Halio was a typical industrial mechanized colony, and her people were not particularly innovative. They had no need to be with respect to the forms of transportation they adopted. The information he had picked up elsewhere should apply well enough here to allow him to accomplish what he had to do.

The freighter's hatches were open, blown off by the force of the explosion. He ran for the stern-most one and half climbed, half dropped below. To his relief, the seac.o.c.ks were where he expected to find them, and he threw them open, letting the cold ocean water into as many of the holds as were low enough to receive it.

That done, the s.p.a.cer returned to the deck and darted once more to the prow.

He had come up none too soon. One of the fires was already licking the Salty Sue's side.

Jellico's tongue ran across dry lips. The metal plates would not burn, but her deck would once the flames came so far.

That was irrelevant. As far as he knew, the ammonium nitrate inside did not require the actual touch of fire to go up. A significant rise in temperature would probably accomplish that just as effectively.

The fire guns, too, were stored where reason and his knowledge of similar vessels said they should be. He freed the one closest to the charging fires. Now, if only it still functioned. Equipment like this was built to keep on working under emergency conditions, but an explosion of such magnitude at such proximity . . .

The foam came. Miceal played it on the nearest fire, driving it back, away from the s.h.i.+p, then sprayed a longer stream on the second blaze that was making fast inroads toward her.

For the first time, he felt a touch of relief. As long as the press of battle remained close to this level, he should be able to hold the s.h.i.+p, provided the gun kicked over to seawater when the supply of foam was exhausted. There were others, of course, but none quite so well situated, and there was no guarantee any of them would work if this one did not.

Twenty minutes went by. A third fire was challenging the Sally Sue, bigger and hotter than the others and stronger by a large measure in its advance.

Great black clouds of hot smoke formed its van. The stuff stank, and he wondered precisely what was feeding it. His throat and chest felt as if they were burning in their turn with every breath of it that he was compelled to draw.

The stream of foam sputtered suddenly and was gone.

For an eternal instant, he was left with a limp feeder hose in his left hand, then it stiffened once more, and a strong, cold, silver river shot from the gun.

It looked lovely in that moment, but the man's eyes followed it somberly. The supply might be unlimited, but water was not as efficient as foam, and all the fires on the dock were rapidly gaining in strength, threatening to merge into one overwhelming conflagration.

They were definitely attacking along a wider front. It was a rare moment now when he was not faced with a serious a.s.sault, usually with more than one, and not a moment at all when the ultimate hopelessness of his stand was not starkly apparent to him.

Miceal acknowledged his doom when he finally noticed the barrels. There were about twenty of them lying in a jumble on the farther side of the dock, where the flames and smoke had combined to screen them from his sight and awareness. A sudden, brief clearing of the air revealed them, tall, st.u.r.dy metal cylinders with the word benzol emblazoned across them. He did not know how much heat that stuff could take, but he imagined there was a point, probably not terribly high, at which it would go up. When that happened, the Salty Sue would follow, and they would all die, Rael, himself, everyone in Canuche Town and what remained of Canuche Town itself. She was carrying so much more ammonium nitrate than the Man's that total obliteration was a certainty.

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