Redline the Stars

26

Van Rycke paused at the crest. "It doesn't take much for us to do a proper job on ourselves, does it?"

"How could everyone have forgotten how dangerous ammonium nitrate can be?" Dane half asked, half demanded. So much misery, and most of it could have been averted had the salt been handled with the deference its nature demanded.

"Because no one else has used it on a large scale for a very long time, so it hasn't had a chance to cause trouble.

A lot of other things have and, thus, replaced it in our collective memory." He grimaced. "Who expects death and destruction to come from a common, old-time fertilizer?"

Thorson did not try to suppress the shudder passing through him. All those poor people ... "Where do we start first, sir?" The disaster was so vast, they would be of use no matter where they went.

"Down at the water. Nobody seems to have gotten that far, so the need'U be greatest there, once we get far enough away from the explosion site that people could live through it. Of course, we'll stop if we encounter anyone in dire trouble higher up."

The younger man nodded his agreement but made no verbal answer. Their unvoiced hope was a slim and forlorn one. Their comrades had been very close to the Regina Man's, maybe on the vanished dock itself. There was precious small chance that either of them had survived.

The Cargo-Master moved rapidly despite the rubble-littered streets, so quickly that Dane had to push himself to keep pace.

At first, there was little to be seen apart from the ruins of homes and businesses, but as they descended, corpses became an ever more frequent sight. While people remained still trapped or in need of care, little attention could be spared for the dead, and bodies were left lying where they had fallen or had been dropped after having been pulled from the rubble.

The apprentice tried to avert his eyes, but he found himself staring at the grim remains. The horror was such that it generated its own fascination, one he was powerless to resist completely.

He looked into the frozen face of one dead girl and stopped in mid stride. "Mr. Van Rycke!"

His chief turned around. He glanced sharply at the woman and then started to move away once more. "She's dead. Has been almost from the start." It depressed him to look at her. She was, or had been, younger than Thorson when he had first joined the Queen.

"But she's been shot!"

Jan faced the corpse again. She lay where the force of the killing blow had thrown her, the once luminous eyes wide and starting, still showing the surprise of an instantaneous, utterly unexpected death. A large, round hole with burn damage at its edges marred the exact center of her forehead.

Van Rycke searched the ground around her for several minutes. At last, he picked up a small, partly flattened blob of metal and held it up for Dane's examination. "There's your pellet, or one like it. That it struck like this so far upslope was a vile turn of chance, but the load of screws, nails, and other small items the Man's was carrying will have created real havoc below. We'll be seeing more samples of its work if we get that far down."

Frank Mura, Shannon, and Kamil pushed their way right through the residential section down into the commercial district. Only a few groups had penetrated this far as yet, and they had decided among themselves that they might be able to accomplish more good there than on the better- organized heights.

All three were quiet. Apart from the heavier nature of the materials comprising these ruins, there was little to differentiate them from those above. The destruction was such that there was no means of telling upon a casual glance whether a specific site had once held a home, office, or factory building.

There were more dead as well, and the corpses were more visible. The closer proximity of the explosion assured that, as did the fact that no one had yet been through this area to remove or stack them.

They encountered living victims as well. Many, they were able to help. For others, there was little they or anyone else could hope to do. In every case, the Free Traders did as they had been instructed and moved the injured into the center of the street for easy sighting and pickup by the fliers that would soon be coming over this part of the district.

A cry, a wail for help, halted them. Even with the three of them searching and the shouting continuing, it took several minutes to locate its source, a crevice roughly half a foot square in the mound of rubble beside them. Inside, they could just see the face of a man.

Working with infinite care lest they dislodge more debris and turn that narrow place into a tomb, they slowly enlarged the hole until they were able to draw the victim out.

Incredibly, the Canuchean was whole apart from the most minor scrapes and bruises. He appeared dazed, but that was the shock of what had happened to him. There was no sign of head or other major injury.

He went of his own accord to the middle of the street and sat down, fixing his eyes on the slope above, which was fairly clearly visible from that place. "I was kind of lucky, I guess," he said more or less to his rescuers. "I was at my computer when I heard a loud bang and instinctively dived under the desk. I didn't even have time to turn around when the ceiling came down. It couldn't have been much more than that, or the desk couldn't have protected me.

"Anyway, when everything got quiet, I crawled out and just kept going until I got stopped here. I didn't want to go back into the dark, so I waited. Somebody had to come sometime."

He gave a great sigh. "That was my house up there, right next to where the grade school used to be."

"A lot of people got out," Rip Shannon told him gently,

"and a lot of others have been rescued by now. It wasn't

quite as bad higher on the slope even if it looks from here like it was."

All's voice was sharper. "You said only the ceiling seemed to have come down on you. Could anyone else be alive in there?"

"I— don't know. It was dark as an unlit mine, and I didn't hear anyone. There were six of us on the computer staff, though, and ten in the clerical pool next door ... "

Rip started to swear, but Mura's raised hand silenced him. He gripped his temper. It was not the Canuchean's fault. The man was stunned, and his mind could not yet grasp anything much beyond himself and his own situation. He had given them their lead. The rest was up to them. Hopefully, help would reach them before too many more hours had passed.

The spacers 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 shielded 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 assume that they would be able to deliver the information in person. They would have to venture again and again into the ruins, where any shift 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 massive 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 Japan 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 space.

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 space hound that the greater part of the people brought alive out of this place would have to thank for their deliverance.