Redline the Stars sq-5

by Andre Norton

  Rael shuddered. The loss of life would have been immeasurably worse had they not succeeded in driving most of the spectators off the pier when they had, but what they found here was still purely the stuff of nightmare.

  She wrenched her eyes away from the slaughter at her feet. The havoc that had rent the land had not spared the sea. Water and shoreline were dotted with the wrecks of boats that had gathered too near in their interest in the fire. Most had been ripped apart, but a few had only been blown ashore or now silently rode the wavelets, crewless but

  otherwise apparently unhurt. The Salty Sue, the only big vessel berthed close to the Man's, had, like those smaller ghost ships, survived surprisingly well. A transport-sized hole had been blown in her prow, and she herself had been more than half beached, but she remained a recognizable entity that could be repaired and put back to work again.

  For the first time, the spacers got a good look at the slopes, both above them and on the opposite side of the harbor. Neither shore had been spared, though the nearer, of course, had taken infinitely harder punishment.

  As with the seaport and commercial areas, no building remained erect, only part of a wall standing here and there, and smoke seemed to be rising from a thousand different sources. For all the visible portion of Canuche Town, the catastrophe was total.

  Of greater significance at the moment than the magnitude of the disaster was the sight of figures moving about amidst the wreckage, some carefully, some rapidly and erratically. Death was not quite as universal up there as it was closer to the sea. Distance had given the residents that much grace.

  Even more heartening to see were the masses of people crossing the crest and heading down, a steady, organized flood of them. The remainder of the city had survived, then, and the rescue effort was under way.

  "It'll be a while before they make it as far as here," Rael remarked, quelling the hope rising in her heart. There would be more deaths yet before this was finally over and part of history.

  She frowned as she looked once more at the scene of carnage around them. "It should be worse," she said tightly. "The detonation had to have thrown out more fire."

  "Everything's wet. I'd say there was a pretty big splash, lucidly straight into the air and back into the bay again instead of a slosh and surge over the shore, or we'd have been drowned in our rat hole. The water must have kept the heat off the victims." The ones they could see here.

  Those on the ship herself and on the dock nearest her would have ceased to have physical form before they could be incinerated.

  All around them was the irrefutable physical evidence of the explosion's power. Not forty yards to Jellico's left, a 150-foot motorized floating dock had been dropped after having been blown a good 200 feet out of the water below.

  He tried not to think about what probably lay beneath it, or of what he could see on top of it, either. There lay the incredibly crushed remnants of three firetransports. A fourth vehicle, less heavily damaged, had been brought to a stop against its side. That one bore the black and silver colors of the Stellar Patrol.

  Rael saw the direction of his gaze and started for the displaced dock. Her own injuries made her grateful for her companion's help in scaling the monstrous thing, but she refused to give in further to them. If Miceal came to suspect the extent of the damage she had taken, he would pull her out of this hopeless fight, force her to return at once for aid. That she was not prepared to do, not while she herself was in no immediate danger and others decidedly were.

  She glanced at the nearest of the Fire Department vehicles, then involuntarily up at Miceal.

  The Captain shook his head. "Forget it, Rael," he told her gently. "None of them survived. It's impossible that they should."

  Still, they looked at each transport, confirming that there was no life in any of them. They held no dead, either. The blast had carried off the lighter bodies of their crews. Only one corpse was to be seen on the dock, a man's, naked except for one sock of a type adopted by seamen and others engaged in heavy physical outdoor labor the ultrasystem over. Jellico thought he might have been a sailor blown from a nearby vessel or else a dockworker. From the angle at which he was lying, they judged that his back had been broken in several places.

  "There's nothing we can do up here," the Medic said.

  The gnawing unease was flogging her again, demanding action despite her weariness and pain. "Someone around here is hurt. Let's check out that Patrol flier first and then hunt around the base of this thing. — Damn it, I wish some of those Canucheans would light their burners and get down here! To judge by what we've seen thus far, anyone we come across is going to be in a pretty bad way."

  "You're not in such a good way yourself," he said sharply after seeing her wince as she lowered herself to the dock in preparation to scramble over its side.

  "I don't pretend to be as tough as you, Miceal Jellico," she told him irritably. "These muscles are going to be singing me a sad story for some time to come. — You could give me a hand down if you'd like to be helpful."

  "Down here! Help!"

  Both froze.

  Jellico went to his knees beside his companion. The cry seemed to have come from the wrecked flier.

  They could see two people. One was lying across the rear seat, one in the front, the latter almost concealed by the great, jagged metal shard that had felled him. Had they not been studying the machine so closely, they would have missed seeing him.

  The spacers made no delay in climbing down. Rael hastened first to the victim in the back, that one being the more readily accessible.

  After a few moments, she drew back, her mouth twisting. First aid had been attempted, but injuries of this magnitude rendered any such effort worthless. The woman had been eviscerated, and the damage done to her lungs, while not visible, must have been greater still. How the poor creature had survived long enough to receive any treatment at all ...

  "Rael! Over here! He's alive!"

  She hurriedly backed out of the flier and ran to its opposite side, where Miceal was already beside the vehicle's second occupant.

  The woman caught her breath in horror. "Keil!"

  The Patrol-Yeoman did not look like the same man. He appeared years older, his face marred by pain, fear, blood, and plain dirt, but there was no doubting the accuracy of her identification. As if to confirm it, he turned his head at the sound of her voice. It was about the only part of his body, certainly the only visible part, with a full range of free movement. "Doctor Cofort?"

  "That's right, my friend."

  "Gayle? Yeoman Argile? She's dead?" There was more statement than question in that.

  She nodded. "Aye. That was inevitable anyway. Most of her lungs had to have been ruptured."

  His eyes closed in the infinite weariness of defeat. "I know. I had to try to get her out, though. — I was farther away and only got flattened, and the flier somehow wasn't damaged at all, so I took it and went back to the dock.

  Where it used to be. Gayle was near there, still alive. No one else was."

  He paused, then went on. "I did what I could for her and tried to make a run for it. That's when this thing hit me and made an end of me, too. I think it's part of the supports of one of the fuel tanks . . ."

  "Nothing's made an end of you, not yet!" She squeezed down beside him to try for a pulse count and to peer into his eyes. The pupils were even, at least. . . "Let me push in there so I can get a better look at you."

  "I'm finished," the Yeoman stated flatly, his manner calm and quite certain but with an urgency underlying it.

  "So are you two if you hang around here any longer. Maybe you are no matter how far you can run now."

  "What do you mean?" Jellico demanded sharply. Whatever one felt about the agents of the Stellar Patrol, they were not given to displays of hysterics even under gross provocation.

  "See that ship over there?" he asked, pointing toward the Sally Sue with a toss of his head. "She's got several holds full of that damned ammonium n
itrate, too, nine thousand nine hundred tons of it, plus a couple of thousand tons of sulphur and I don't know how many barrels of benzol on deck and below. She's on fire right now, or if she isn't, the pier right next to her certainly is in several places. One blaze or another will get to her soon enough, and she'll go up with a bang that'll make the Man's explosion seem like a harmless little puff of a dry run."

  25

  Doctor Tau was wedged in between Jasper Weeks and Karl Kosti, sharing with four Canuchean laborers a transport somewhat too small to carry so many.

  He was only vaguely aware of the discomfort of the journey. The people around them were taking almost the whole of his attention. Most of them were moving away from Canuche Town, lines of dazed, frightened refugees. A horribly high percentage of their number were obvious physical as well as emotional casualties of the disaster, struggling on with the assistance of their fellows to reach medical care at one of the temporary hospitals set up in the camp on the hardpan until the grave danger of fire subsided sufficiently for the facilities to return to the city itself.

  He did not see any of the more severe cases, of course.

  They were being brought in by flier and transport, but what he did observe was sufficient to reveal the scope of the catastrophe that had stricken this community. His trained eyes appraised each group, and he silently shook his head.

  In saner times, many of these so-called walking wounded would rightly be labeled gravely injured themselves.

  Just about all of Canuche Town's windows had shattered, and jagged shards of glass had flown everywhere, causing the greatest part of the injuries sustained in the outermost parts of the city. Others, and he realized there would be many more of them as people from farther within Canuche Town began reaching this point, had been struck by falling materials or were burn or gas cases. A few stumbled along, blood flowing from their ears and noses, victims of the blast concussion.

  Once more, he shook his head. Already, it was a nightmare, and it would only grow worse as they neared the place where the explosion had occurred. He acknowledged the bonds laid on him by the ancient oath he had taken, but that notwithstanding, he was not looking forward to the work that lay in front of them all.

  The spaceport, when they reached it, was alive with activity. It was to there that the relief convoys were coming, and several had arrived already.

  Relatively little visible damage had been sustained at the facility. It was located far enough from the coast that only a minute amount of debris had reached it, and most of the power driving that had been spent. He had learned from Colonel Cohn, however, that two people had been killed when a piece of sheet metal had skimmed over their transport and decapitated them. The potential for grave disaster had unquestionably been here, and the starships had done well to lift when they had.

  Once they passed through the port, their transport was not long in reaching Canuche Town itself and then the place where it was to pick up its load of badly wounded for the return trip.

  Tau walked over to the waiting stretchers to see what he and his comrades might expect to encounter.

  What he found there was no worse than he had anticipated, but seeing the actual victims drove the enormity of the horror more sharply home, and he returned to the others even more sobered.

  Their instructions were simple—to start searching the thickly populated slope above the harbor. Whenever they found a group engaged in a rescue that called on them for aid or discovered someone who was trapped, they were to provide whatever help they could.

  Since the Solar Queen trio had come bearing digging equipment and first aid supplies, they had no need to wait for gear to be issued to them. They separated from the Canuchean laborers who had traveled with them and started out at a brisk pace.

  When they crested the rise above the slope, all three stopped as if on command.

  The sight meeting their eyes was almost beyond credulity. Here and there, part of a wall rose up out of the ruin, windowless, roofless, more pathetic than the unidentifiable jumble around them. Nothing else remained. Even the bay was wreckage and desolation only.

  Total as the destruction obviously was, Ganuche Town was already crying its defiance. Fire and smoke were everywhere to be seen, but so, too, were those assembled to quell them. Fire brigades stationed in less dreadfully visited districts, bringing their equipment and foam in by flier and on their backs, had poured into the port region and had already begun to isolate and beat down a number of the individual blazes.

  That their efforts had begun to show effect so soon, that they were able to have an effect at all, lay in large part with the thoroughness of Macgregory's evacuation operation.

  The Caledonia plant itself was gone, a victim of the volatile materials already present within its walls, but with all the feeder and fuel lines shut down along their whole length, no new materials arrived to support the voracious fire that had consumed the installation itself. Had that not been done, given the key location of the place and the vast volume of the chemicals pouring into it, there would have been little hope of quelling the flames in this part of the seaport for a long time to come and no hope whatsoever for any living victims pinned in the rubble around it.

  The spacers were spared the horror of having to watch bloodstained adults and children frantically seeking one another amidst the ruins. The first people into the district had shepherded wounded into the hands of medical personnel and then to the refugee camp, where efforts to reunite families had already begun.

  That part of the tragedy should have been worse than it was, too, and once again, thanks was due to Adroo Macgregory that it was not. The Caledonia, Inc., workers and their people had formed a large percentage of the population of the heaviest-stricken areas, and no few of their neighbors, remembering the storm that had sparked such an evacuation before, had taken warning and fled with them. Those who remained, alive or dead, who had not already been discovered lay buried beneath the ruins of their homes and workplaces.

  The Free Traders passed several groups striving to free the trapped. Because they had to start someplace, the rescuers had begun their efforts at the crest of the slope. These first parties had their particular situations on the perimeter in hand by then. Much as they would have welcomed more help, they were willing to forgo it, realizing how desperately laborers were needed farther downslope.

  At last, they came upon a party more frantically engaged than any they had thus far encountered. The forewoman was alternately wielding her ax with no little skill and driving her navies on with a vocabulary that would have reduced any proverbial Navy Master Sergeant to a state of silent awe.

  She spotted the three and summoned them in one instant. "Stop gawking, space hounds, and get to work!

  There's a damn big job on here."

  They hastened to obey. "What's the specific problem?"

  Tau asked the grim-faced Canuchean when he reached her side.

  She pointed down, and his breath caught in sick horror.

  There, far below them, was a small child, a toddler. She was held in place, but apparently only by her clothing, for she was squirming around and was shrieking her discomfort and terror. They could have reached her and drawn her out with no more difficulty than that of hard, careful labor had they enjoyed the luxury of unlimited time, but that last they did not have. A slow fire was inexorably eating its way toward her, and it was patent even from one hurried glance that it would reach her long before they could hope to do so.

  "We won't get within twenty feet other in time," he said.

  "If that near. It's not far from her now."

  "Would you suggest that we stop working and just watch the show?" the woman snarled.

  "No!" Anger and anguish mixed equally in Karl's bellow.

  Jasper Weeks said nothing. He stood where he was, watching the tot and the fire. "This is like a chimney," he said quietly, as if to himself. "She probably fell or was blown down there, and she's certainly not badly stuck."

  "Very
observant," the Canuchean snapped. "Now start chopping, you son—"

  "No, listen! You've got plenty of rope. Someone small enough could be let down and try to get her."

  Her breath caught. She eyed him carefully, then the others. "It's got to be you or me. No one else'd have an iceberg's chance."

  "My idea. Besides, you're in charge here. You're needed more." There was no point in pretending to be oblivious to

  the danger a would-be savior faced of getting stuck himself

  and joining the child in her fate instead of rescuing her from it.

  The other nodded. "Have at it, space hound."

  With time in such short store, the work crew squandered none of it. Even while their chief and the spacer were discussing which of them should make the effort, they fetched and began to ready the rope.

  The harness they rigged was no more than a large loop held by a fixed knot that would neither release nor tighten in such a fashion as to squeeze in upon him. A smaller piece was fastened to it at chest height so that he would be able to tie himself and the little girl to it for additional support—if he could get to her in time.

  Jasper stripped off his belt lest it catch on any of the jagged debris but left his clothing on. The uniform was close-fitting, and he would need the protection it would afford.

  Kosti, by far the biggest man there, drew a length of the line about himself. He would belay while a monstrous stone block served as anchor.

  Weeks pulled the rope over his shoulders and lowered it until he was sitting in the loop, then gingerly let himself over the edge.

  It was at once apparent that he had set himself no easy task. What he had described as a chimney was in fact no more than a relatively clear space in the sea of rubble, open more in the visual than the physical sense. He was not at all certain he would be able to get by all the obstructions extending into it. Also, the fire seemed much closer from this angle than it had from above.