Now, how long had that been there? Had it actually been watching the house? Or was her imagination working overtime?
“The regeneration is all the more remarkable as it’s so totally improbable,” the medic was saying to his companion as they preceded Diego down the hospital corridor. “Never saw anything like this. And in such a short time. Woman was hacking her lungs out and not likely to live the year out.”
The man beside him asked a question that Diego could not hear, but he figured they had to be talking about Yana.
“No, no, can’t be a transplant. I’d believe that more than a natural remission but there’re no scars: not even a ‘scope hole.”
They turned to the right at the next corridor and he went on, thinking hard. Bunny had mentioned that Yana’s health had improved since her arrival on Petaybee. He snorted. His father’s sure hadn’t. What if . . . And he halted in his tracks for a long moment. Then he was jolted out of his reverie by tremors underfoot—which reminded Diego of other half-understood remarks by Bunny. Why wasn’t she around when she was needed? Why had she skitted out of the base as if something was after her?
More than anything now, he wanted to get Dad to Kilcoole and Clodagh. Petaybee had messed his dad up and now Petaybee could damn well cure him, like it had Yana!
It was, as Diego had hoped, slack time in the ward. Dad was sitting up in his chair, and dressed, which might have been a battle. Diego had stuffed another parka under his own, a real drag with the heat so high. Even his dad was sweating a bit. Diego got the wheelchair and, for the benefit of the other men in the ward, started his chatter.
“Dad, you wouldn’t believe the weather out today, so I’m goin’ to take you for a little stroll. See if we can’t chase the cobwebs out of your head. Here now, easy, you just sit tight, huh?”
His father, as usual, didn’t acknowledge his words with so much as a lifting of the eyes.
Diego wheeled him out of the ward, down the hall, and onto the ramp outside the infirmary.
For the first time he became acutely aware of how noisy it was at SpaceBase, of the change in the temperature and the air. Snocles that had once zipped down the snowy paths between buildings were racing their engines to escape being mired in slushy, melting snow. New vehicles, forklifts and track-cats, toiled to move the tons of equipment freshly delivered to the loading docks. One of the smaller track-cats was trying to shift a snocle entrenched in a snowbank.
Suddenly the ground bucked, the boardwalk collapsed at one end, and the wheelchair jerked from Diego’s grasp and rolled down onto the ground.
Diego jumped down and caught it before it turned over and dumped his dad in the slush. People ran past him, ducking for cover, as another jarring crash from somewhere nearby shook the ground. When he looked up, he saw that both the track-cat and the mired snocle, engines still running, had been abandoned by their drivers. The track-cat was just a few yards away, but the wheelchair was stuck in the slush.
“Come on, Dad, you’re going to have to help me,” Diego said, his fingers fumbling to unstrap the wheelchair’s safety belt. He placed his father’s arm around his own shoulders and tried to haul him to his feet, but Francisco was dead weight. Diego looked from the aged, uncomprehending face to the alluring track-cat.
He changed tactics. He slid his father back into the chair and darted for the track-cat. It couldn’t be much different from driving anything else, and he already knew how to drive hovercrafts and had watched Bunny drive her snocle. He released the tow chain and flung himself into the driver’s seat, fumbling for the throttle.
After a little experimentation, he managed to get it into reverse and backed it over to where his father sagged in the chair. Leaving the snocle idling, he hopped down beside his dad, pulling the limp and unresponding man back across his shoulders and attempting to hoist the older man up once more. This was hopeless! Dad just hung limply and could do nothing. In another minute the driver would return, or someone would pass by and see them, and then this perfect chance would be lost.
“What the hell are you trying to do?” someone said suddenly behind him.
Diego nearly jumped out of his skin, then recognized Steve’s voice just as his father’s partner stepped in front of him.
“I’ve been searching all over for you. I heard the explosions . . .”
“We’re fine,” Diego said hotly. “And we’d have been even finer if you hadn’t caught us. I’ve got to get Dad out of here and I will somehow.” He raised his chin defiantly and stared Steve straight in the eye.
Steve stared back, looking at Diego as if he were crazy; then all of a sudden he shrugged. “Okay, Diego, it’s your call. But I go, too.” And he picked Diego’s dad up in his arms as if the stricken man were a baby and climbed up on the companion seat in the track-cat.
Diego scrambled into the driver’s seat and, after a try or two, shifted the cat into forward gear and headed toward the village.
Bunny roared into the snocle shed. Adak was red in the face and waving his hands, arguing with a uniformed soldier, but she had no time to be polite about interrupting them.
“Adak, quick, we’ve got to rouse the village! The river’s breaking up way early, and a lot of snocles are trapped on the river. Seamus fell into a crack bigger than a tree saving one of the drivers, and the others pulled him out.”
“You run and tell Clodagh, Bunka. She’ll let the village know, and I’ll get on the radio for help.”
“I told you, sir, I’m relieving you of duty,” the soldier said.
“Good. Then you get on the radio,” Adak said. “And I’ll use this vehicle to try to rescue the stranded drivers.”
“You can’t do that, sir. That’s a company-issue snocle, and not a private vehicle,” the soldier said. “Besides, I don’t know how to work this thing,” he added, staring at the microphone.
“Fine, then I will, and you go help the drivers, but keep your snocle off the river and for pity’s sake stop standing about arguing, man,” Adak snapped.
Bunny grinned as, without further argument, the soldier climbed into the snocle and gunned it back down the tracks it had just made. Bunny sprinted out of the shed as Adak was pulling on his headphones and picking up his microphone.
Whatever he was saying over the radio was lost, however, because all over town the sled dogs had begun to howl with the plaintive screams of tortured souls. As Bunny passed by Lavelle’s place on her way to Clodagh’s, she was even more surprised at the antics of Lavelle’s dogs. Still tethered to their kennels, some were standing on the roofs and howling; others were lying on the ground, whining and baying in turn. Dinah, the lead dog, had become a frantic canine acrobat. She raced to the end of her chain then back and forth and in frenzied circles until her lead was tangled in her legs and around her collar, and her neck would soon be rubbed raw from the friction. Bunny stopped to untangle her.
Poor Dinah. She really missed Lavelle, Bunny thought, but then, when she stopped to touch her, she got an urgent flash of hot, panting thought: The boy, the boy, gotta go, gotta go, gotta get the boy, oh let me get him; gotta go, needs me, friend, friend, needs me, needs me needs me, gotta go, go go nowoooo . . .
“Shh, Dinah, shhh,” Bunny said. It didn’t feel strange to be talking to a dog: she did it all the time. But it did seem odd that the dog seemed to be talking, too. “Diego’s okay, Dinah. I just left him. Look, tell you what, you come with me and we’ll find Clodagh, okay? Don’t run off now when I unsnap you. Maloneys have had enough pain without losing you, too.”
The more of Dinah she untangled, the more the dog calmed, tail wagging cooperatively; but when the dog was at last free, she snatched herself out of Bunny’s grasp and bounded off toward the river.
“Holy cow, sir, where did that volcano come from?” the pilot asked Torkel as the copter sped toward the westerly crash-site coordinates provided by SpaceBase. They were still a good distance away when he pointed to the port side.
Since his comments had crackled throu
gh the headsets everyone was wearing, Yana looked, too. The fiery glow, the pall of the ash hanging in the air, was plainly visible. The air was still full of turbulence from the initial eruptions, and the lightweight copter shook and tossed about like a Ping-Pong ball.
Beneath them the ground rolled and fissured while ash and smoke pumped from the newly blown cone, born on one of the low mountains to the west. Visibility was poor with airborne smuts that were beginning to build up on the ground. Yana realized that some of the quaking she had felt back at the clinic must have come from this eruption.
Sandwiched as she was between Giancarlo and Ornery, Yana had a clear view between the pilot and Torkel, riding in copilot position. She wasn’t at all reassured by the panorama. It looked like someone’s terraforming gone wrong, and she thought they would be smarter to make tracks from rather than to.
As the copter drew nearer to the new volcano, a thin line of people emerged from the grayness beneath them and started waving frantically.
Torkel picked up the copilot’s microphone. “This is Flying Fish. We have you in sight. Please identify yourselves. Is Dr. Whittaker Fiske with you? Over.”
Rather to Yana’s surprise, a response came back immediately. “Flying Fish, this is Team Boom Boom. We see you. We have two severely injured people in our party. That’s a big Mayday. Please transport to SpaceBase pronto. Over.”
The pilot clicked the transmission button on his own microphone. “This is Flying Fish, Boom Boom. Gotcha. We’re setting down one-zero-zero meters due east of you. Over.”
But Torkel clicked on the copilot’s mike again before the stranded team could respond. “Boom Boom, this is Captain Torkel Fiske on the Flying Fish. Is Dr. Whittaker Fiske or any member of his team with you? Over.”
“Negative, Cap’n Fiske. Petaybee blew its top about the time the shuttlecraft was landing. The turbulence from the volcano blew the craft off course and we had to initiate evacuation procedures before we could search for survivors. Sorry, sir. Over.”
“Boom Boom, Flying Fish here. I’m sorry, too, but you’ll have to hang on while we radio SpaceBase for another craft to retrieve you. We need to look for the survivors soonest.”
“I can’t fly into that, sir,” the pilot said, glancing anxiously at Torkel. “It’d clog the jets. Let me pick up the wounded and get ground support.”
“Finding my father is number-one priority,” Torkel told the pilot in a command tone. Yana couldn’t see his face. She wondered briefly if Torkel wanted to save his father because of his importance to the mission, or simply because Dr. Fiske was his father.
“Flying Fish, you can’t leave us here. Our wounded are in bad shape and the rest of us are having trouble breathing from the ash. It’s smothering in there, sir. Please, at least pick up the wounded. Boom Boom over.”
The pilot, heedless of Torkel’s commands to fly into the face of the billowing ash clouds, began circling to land. Yana saw Torkel reach for his sidearm, but the pilot had anticipated a problem.
“Sorry, sir,” the pilot said, pointing a pistol at Torkel, “but you and the others will have to get out while we load the wounded. I’ll call for another aircraft and some ground support for you as soon as we’re in the air.”
Ornery started to draw his weapon, but his attention was on the pilot, not on Yana. With a well-placed chop to his wrist she numbed his hand and relieved him of his weapon before either he or Giancarlo could react. She stuck the muzzle of the gun under Giancarlo’s ear with one hand and extracted his sidearm from his holster with the other in a series of rapid movements that would have made her hand-to-hand combat trainer beam with pride. Ornery leaned menacingly toward her, but his numbed hand wasn’t following orders. She shook her head and jabbed Giancarlo meaningfully with the gun.
“This section of the aircraft is secured, pilot,” Yana said into her mouthpiece.
The pilot gave her a thumbs-up and said to Torkel, “I’ll take your sidearm, too, sir. And just in case you gentlemen want to claim this is mutiny or anything, I’m sure superior-officer types like yourselves are aware that, by chain of command, I am the pilot of this craft. I am therefore the temporary CO. Thanks to you, ma’am.”
He set the copter down and the stranded people surged toward it. He lifted a foot and kicked Torkel’s door open. “Out you go, Cap’n. You there, Corporal, open your own damn door and disembark. You too, Colonel. Under the circumstances, we’ll belay the ladies first shit.”
When the others had jumped out of the copter and the pilot turned to watch her go, Yana saw that he was a warrant officer, a green-eyed, lean-jawed man with curly black hair, broad prominent cheekbones, and the slight tilt to his eyes she had begun to identify with people from Petaybee. His nametag said O’SHAY.
14
The track-cat lumbered down the riverbank and into the trees, surely and slowly—much too slowly to suit Diego. What if someone caught them and tried to take them back? What would happen to them then? Would they send Dad off-planet? Would they split them up? Would he be charged with the theft of the track-cat?
Hours seemed to pass as the vehicle rolled, slowly but staunchly, up small hillocks and forded freshets of water and melting snow running toward the river.
The track-cat was open to the air, too, so it was a good thing the day was exceptionally warm or they all might have frozen. Diego’s dad lay inert against Steve, who clung tightly to his clothes to keep him from bouncing out of the vehicle.
The slushy, icy terrain was tough going even for the track-cat. Diego nursed it up a hill and down over the other side, only to lodge with one edge of the track in a ditch.
“Try rocking it,” Steve hollered. “Forward, reverse, forward, reverse! Let it dig its own way out.”
But the tracks could not bite or budge. Diego put it in neutral and climbed down to see exactly what the problem was. That was when he heard the noise from the other side of the trees and realized they weren’t the only ones in trouble.
He pointed to show Steve where he was going and, leaving the vehicle running, trudged through the slush until he was clear of the trees.
The snowy road that the snocles had been so blithely using had become separated from the bank by a foot of open, steaming water. A soldier waved his parka to keep oncoming traffic from adding to the twenty or thirty vehicles already slewed crazily over what remained of the iced river. Beneath snocles and the feet of the drivers, huge steaming cracks yawned and pieces of ice broke off and floated in the blue-black water.
As Diego watched, the ice broke and a snocle shifted, unbalancing its ice raft so that it and one of the men both slid slowly into the river.
Groaning at this new emergency, Diego raced back to the track-cat just as Steve slid out from under Francisco and fastened the safety harness around the flaccid body.
“What the devil’s going on over there?” Steve demanded as he sprinted toward Diego.
“The ice is breaking, and there’s people stranded on it,” Diego told him, panting and pointing urgently toward the river. “They need a lot of help and fast. We’ve got to let the village know right now.”
But Steve had to see for himself and swept past Diego to crash through the brush and look at the river. Diego followed uncertainly, torn between the crisis on the river and his father’s helpless body left alone in the snocle.
On the fracturing ice, maybe a half-dozen people now lay on their bellies, hands and feet linked, forming a human chain to fish for the man who had fallen into the river. He still had a perilous hold on the ice floe, which bobbed about, having tipped free of the snocle.
Steve stood poised on the bank for just a moment before he took a grip on Diego’s shoulder. “Get your father to the village on the double, Diego, and send back help. I’ll lend a hand here.”
“But, the track-cat’s stuck,” Diego reminded him.
“Deal with it,” Steve commanded in the same kind of gruff tone Diego had heard him use to talk to shipboard staff. Diego glared at him, resentfully.
Steve, seeing his face, added, “That’s our expedition team down there. See? The big fellow with the red bandanna? That’s Sandoz Rowdybush. And I think the guy on the ice is Chas Collar. Your dad and I have worked with them for ten years. I’m not about to desert them.”
“No, but you’ll desert Dad.”
Steve took a deep breath. “He’s got you, too. Go back to the cat. If you can’t get it moving, stick with your father till I can come for you. If you make it to the village, tell them this river is having a serious meltdown problem and we’ll need all the help they can muster.”
Not quite mollified but having no other option, Diego sloshed back to the track-cat. Sure the guys on the ice needed help, but what if help from SpaceBase came and found Diego’s stuck track-cat? Then Dad would never get the help Diego was now convinced was his only hope. There were plenty of other guys out on the ice already—why did Steve think they needed him more than Dad did? Angrily, Diego kicked at the brush surrounding the track-cat—which gave him an idea on how to free the vehicle. He tore into the vehicle’s locker, strewing a number of items on the floor until he found a hatchet, which he used to lob off enough branches to cushion the treads and give them some traction. Then he cleaned the mud out of the tracks as well as he could, all the while muttering to himself, as much to keep his own spirits up as to vent his frustration and anger.
Just about the time he had the cat ready to go, he had reached the conclusion that Steve had really had no other option but to go rescue his friends. On the other hand, there was no way Diego was going to wait tamely here. Not when he risked being found by the company corps, who might resent his appropriation of their vehicle. More importantly, they would take Dad back to the clinic, where nothing was being done for him, and Diego knew with a certainty he couldn’t have explained even to himself that he had to get his dad to the village, and away from the company. The people in Kilcoole understood what had happened to his dad, and they could cure him. He knew they could. They had to.
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