"How long have they been at it?"

"Full blast? Only about ten minutes. - Uh-oh, there goes the alarm. They want the Fire Department. That means they're kissing the cargo good-bye. - See, the crew're being sent ash.o.r.e."

"There shouldn't be all that much to be damaged, should there?" the Medic asked, trying to recall what Macgregory had told them about the kinds of goods the Regina Man's was taking on. "Just the rope. Her insurance should cover that."

"Sure, and the rest, too, but exporters don't like to ship with vessels that sacrifice their cargoes too willingly. Also, the season's rush on nitrate'll be over soon ..."

Rael Cofort's face went white. "What?"

"Ammonium nitrate. A fertilizer. My lads loaded fourteen hundred tons of it in her number two hold and another eight hundred and twenty tons in number four yesterday evening. The fire's between them in number three where the rope's stowed. Both're likely to be drenched and ruined . . ."

"Spirit of s.p.a.ce . . . ," she whispered.

"It's a common substance," he told her in surprise.

"Until you bring a flame or too much heat near it," Jellico said tersely. "Then it's a bomb."

"Bomb! What in . . ."

"Recently we saw an experiment to ill.u.s.trate that. If that ship goes up, it'll be like a low-grade planetbuster. You people would be smart to take off, pick up your families, and keep going until this is all over."

"Right," one of the women standing near them cut in. "We'd find something left out of our paychecks if we tried that."

"Better lose a few hours' pay to panic than not be able to collect it at all because you're dead."

"I'll take responsibility," their chief informant declared, confirming the s.p.a.cers' impression that he was the group's foreman. "I've got a kid up the slope in the Cup school. I'm taking him, my wife, and her mother and heading for the hardpan. The rest of you do the same." He glanced at the pair in the flier. "What about you two?"

"We like living," the Captain replied.

The Canucheans wasted no time in clearing after that.

Rael did not watch them go. Her eyes were fixed on Jellico. "Miceal, we can't . . ."

He gave an impatient shake of his head. "These eateries should all have public surplanetary transceivers, and they'll be empty with everyone out watching the fire. I'll warn the Queen and s.p.a.ceport. You tell Macgregory and the Stellar Patrol."

As Jellico predicted, they found available booths in the first eating place they entered and both hastened to sound the alarm before the dreaded explosion rendered it worthless.

Tang Ya was on duty at the Solar Queen's transceiver.

He, like the rest of the crew, had heard his comrades' report of the Caledonia experiment and required no detailed explanation. "We're ready to go now," he told him. "All the rest of us are on board, praise the Spirit of s.p.a.ce. How long do we give you?" He hated to ask that, but for the sake of the ship and the bulk of her company, there had to be a limit on the time they could afford to wait.

"Lift at once and make for the hardpan outside the city. Set down again a mile or so to the south of it to get you out of direct line with any residual blast effects, and wait there until I tell you the fire's out here or until the commotion stops. If the Man's does go up, they'll be needing help at that point. Rael and I'll either make our way out to you or be tied up with the rescue effort ourselves."

Most likely, they would either be in need of saving or beyond it, but his Captain was as aware of that as he was.

"Will do. We'll pa.s.s the word to the others here as well."

"Thanks, Tang."

Miceal's head bowed as he stepped from the booth. He loved the Solar Queen and had always imagined he would meet his death aboard her or striving in some manner for her.

The s.p.a.cer squared his shoulders and looked up. Death on Canuche of Halio might be a distinct possibility, but it was by no means a certainty for either of them. There was no reason to blindly a.s.sume that he and Rael Cofort would not be returning to the starship and to the cold, dark reaches of interstellar s.p.a.ce that was her domain.

He had to wait a few minutes for his companion, but she nodded gravely when she finally joined him. "I got to them both," she told him. "Mr. Macgregory's starting a full evacuation immediately. He'll also contact the Fire Department to let them know what we're facing and warn the hospitals to move as much of their gear as they can, especially their emergency facilities, out onto the hardpan so they'll be ready to start taking on cases at once if need be. Colonel Cohn's putting in calls for aid to the other towns all along the coast. - What about our own people?"

"They'll do what they must."

They found the battle against the ship fire raging in full fury when they went outside again, with fireboats and fliers pouring streams of foam and seawater into the Regina Maris's hold, augmented by the closer attention of the small firetransports crowding the dock and the men and women carrying the fight to the deck itself.

As the efforts to contain the fire became ever more spectacular, so the crowd gathered to watch it increased in proportion. Laborers delayed upon leaving their shifts or before going to their tasks; office workers left their desks to congregate outside their buildings or stood by windows offering grandstand views; messengers and pa.s.sersby with more time to spare shouldered their way through to the dock itself to secure as un.o.bstructed as possible an observation post. Rael judged that there had to be in excess of four thousand people in and around the Cup's seafront alone and easily that many again scattered farther away along the banks and on the opposite sh.o.r.e. A number of small merchant and pleasure craft had also drawn near, keeping just far enough away as not to interfere with the work of the fireboats.

"The smoke's coming up white now," her companion observed. "It looks like they've just about got it licked."

"I sincerely hope so. I won't object one bit if I come out looking like a total vacuum-brain in all of this." Her mouth hardened. It was not over yet, not quite. "If anything does happen, most and probably all of these people are going to be killed."

Before Jellico realized what she was doing, she had started pushing through the onlookers, showing consummate skill in weaseling her way with the deft aid of elbow and foot into minute s.p.a.ces that had not seemed to exist a moment before. He was hard pressed to keep up with her.

The Medic did not stop until she had reached the firetransport that was her target. Its crew, engrossed as both were in managing the big fire gun, did not notice her until she had leapt aboard.

"This thing's got a public address system?" she demanded before either could recover enough from his surprise to order her off.

"Of course ..."

"Switch it on!"

He complied, moved by her earnestness and air of authority. Besides, the fire was well under control, and he was curious.

"You people," the woman called into the mike he handed her, "the show's almost over, but the danger isn't. Until the last spark and hot spot has been extinguished, there's the chance of a serious explosion. You're exposed to the full force of it out here."

Miceal mentally nodded his approval. Even now, with the fire on the Regina Marts almost out, knowledge of the full peril she represented too suddenly imparted to all these people could provoke a panic that would almost certainly claim a large number of the lives they were striving to preserve.

A siren sounded farther up the sh.o.r.e. Rael glanced in the direction of the noise, then raised the mike again. "I spoke with Adroo Macgregory of Caledonia, Inc., before coming here. See, he has already evacuated his plant and ordered his people out of the city."

Someone near her laughed. "That kindergarten! Are they walking two by two with their fingers on their lips?"

She glared frigidly in the direction of the speaker, whom she could not actually identify. "This is a real evacuation, not a drill for which he planned well in advance. What in all the h.e.l.ls do you think it's doing to his business operations? People like Mr. Macgregory don't throw that Volume of credits away unless they believe there's a d.a.m.n good reason for doing so. - He called it right on target the last time he gave a similar order if I heard the story correctly."

Her audience greeted that with silence. Many looked uncomfortably over their shoulders. The storm to which she referred was recent enough history to still be sharp in the memories of all of them.

Miceal's eyes glittered coldly. Most of the watchers were inclined to move, but it would require some effort to push their way back, to reverse the general pressure of the crowd, and they were not sufficiently concerned to make the start.

Suddenly, he caught hold of the fire gun and whipped it around, depressing the nozzle as he did so. The powerful stream hit the pavement at the feet of the spectators with the force of a sledge, and those nearest it leapt back, cursing, as splintered pieces flew up in every direction.

"Get moving, now, or by all the Federation's G.o.ds, I'll give you a blast of this across the shins. If you're going to stay here and die, you might as well have a good excuse for doing it. I'm prepared to accommodate you and supply it."

The nearer fireman started to shove him aside, but the other, who had just closed their transceiver, intervened.

"Let him be. They're right." His voice dropped. "Except if the Mans blows, it won't be a small, contained blast affecting only the ship and this dock. It'll take out just about the whole Cup and maybe a great deal more besides."

His voice rose again as he took the mike from Rael. "All right, folks, move along. Leave the Cup area entirely. We've just been informed that there is still some danger of a detonation. If one occurs, we'll have to be able to get medical help in quickly for any of our people who're hurt. - Get going, now. You're blocking ground traffic and making it hard to bring in anything by air."

The onlookers muttered but slowly began to disperse. By now, most of them were upset enough by the talk of explosions to be grateful for the excuse to leave the threatened area without having to appear panicked themselves.

"Quick thinking," the fireman told the two s.p.a.cers. He shuddered. "It's almost over, but I wouldn't have been very happy working here all this time had I known what was actually shadowing us." He eyed the retreating civilians.

"You two had best join them," he added sternly.

"That's our intention," the Captain a.s.sured him as he slipped over the side of the vehicle and lightly dropped to the ground. He gave his hand to steady Cofort while she followed suit.

With much of the pressure of the throng easing up around them, they experienced little difficulty in working their way back to their machine.

Rael opened the door but paused beside it. Her eyes were dark, troubled. "If something goes wrong, they'll be needing Medics."

"Only live ones. - Move!"

She wasted no more time but sprang into the flier even as Jellico himself did.

The vehicle rose until it was a couple of feet above the heads of the pedestrians and started toward one of the narrow side streets leading into the open dock area.

"Wouldn't we make better time higher up?" the Medic asked.

"We'd also fall a heck of a lot farther if we got thrown down by a blast concussion."

Rael made no comment. She fixed her attention on the street along which they were traveling.

All the structures lining it appeared to be old. They had been constructed of Canuchean stone rather than the metals and synthetics of a later stage, more prosperous colony, and all of them obviously had been put up at the same time from a single set of plans. One was the image of all the others.

Each of the buildings had an underground story, or maybe several, perhaps devoted to storage or deliveries. At least, the entrance was invariably a broad, steeply sloping ramp leading into an attractively arched, covered loading dock.

To Cofort's surprise, Miceal did not turn onto the avenue when they reached it. "Why are we sticking to the back roads?" she asked curiously, knowing there was probably an excellent reason for taking the slower, more irregular route.

"Maybe for no purpose," he responded grimly. "I hope we won't have to find out." His mouth compressed into a hard line. "I should be sent to the Lunar mines for criminal neglect. As soon as we reach the Queen, give your friend Colonel Cohn another call and have her order the Regina Man's towed out to sea for the final cleanup. There would be no danger to the city now if I'd thought of it sooner."

The woman frowned. "Neither did I. Power down, will you. We couldn't work out everything. We're just Free Traders, not a pair of professional disaster planners."

She glanced up at him, mischief suddenly lighting her eyes as she laughed softly. "You'd make one fine tyrant, Captain Jellico," she told him. "That was a masterful stroke with the fire gun."

"One needs a variety of abilities in Trade . . ."

Whatever else he might have said was silenced as light avoid the chance of chain-reaction disaster but still close enough to offer a comforting sense of community. Most of their crews were also a.s.sembled beside their vessels, staring intently eastward.

"I could try to talk those port guys into bringing a flier out to us," Rip ventured. "They're probably not so mad that they wouldn't do it for a share of the news. I could fly over the city ..."

"You'll keep your scrambled-circuited fins planeted where they are!"

Shannon was not the only one to stare at Alt. The Engineer-apprentice gripped himself. He resumed his normal casual manner, but the deadly serious note did not leave his voice. "You'd be looking for a quick ride on Sanford Jones's comet, my boy. I saw fighters, big ones, blown out of the sky by the concussion of a major blast, never mind one of those little civilian bubbles. I wouldn't want to be in the air in one of them even this far out, much less hovering over Canuche Town, if that accursed ship blows."

"Is the Queen safe?" Jasper asked in concern. "And these others who followed us?"

"Out here, aye." It was Johan Stotz who answered for his apprentice. He and the Cargo-Master had just come out of the ship to join them. "Van and I've been running a series of possibility scenarios on the computer. We're well away from triple the blast we could expect even if two or more freighters went up, and shrapnel definitely won't reach us, which was our biggest danger at the s.p.a.ceport."

"That's over four miles from the coast, closer to five, in fact!" exclaimed Weeks.

"Not an impossible distance for a big explosion," Kamil said tensely. "It wouldn't take much. All you'd need is for a single piece of red-hot metal to pierce the liquid fuel reservoirs and none of us would have anything more to worry about, provided we'd led virtuous lives." He turned to his chief. "A fire storm could travel this far. So could gas."

"That's why Jellico insisted that we go south as well as inland. We're not in easy line with the city, and the winds're blowing toward it, not us. They're also augmented by the thermal breeze as long as the daylight and heat hold."

Thorson looked eastward again, then back to his shipmates as an idea came to him. "Could we try to focus the near-s.p.a.ce viewer on the town?"

"Probably!" Tang agreed eagerly. "Devices designed for use in s.p.a.ce don't work perfectly in an atmosphere, and we'll have to play with the magnification, but we should be able to get something. It'll be better than nothing, at any rate."

The Solar Queen's bridge was even smaller than her mess, but none of them grumbled about the lack of s.p.a.ce as they gathered around the big screen while their Com-Tech adjusted one after the other of the controls directing its operation.

Gradually, the image of Canuche Town appeared before them, at first hazy to the point of uselessness, then as clear as if they were spying on it through impossibly powerful but otherwise standard distance lenses. Deftly, Ya depressed the focus until it rested right on the eastern horizon.

"We can't see the docks," Karl Kosti said, voicing the disappointment of all.

"Hardly," Tang told him. "The whole seaport area is on a significantly lower level than the rest of the city. The viewer can't penetrate solid rock or bend around it. We'll know it if that ship explodes, but we won't be able to observe the blast itself or its effects on its immediate, environs. - Sands of Mars! Look at all those people! There are thousands of them, and they all seem to be heading this way."

"Macgregory's staff and their families probably," Van Rycke deduced. "He's ordered evacuations before. The Captain or Rael will have warned him, too."

"I could check, see if there's something coming over the civilian waves or if the Patrol's broadcasting anything on the public channels ..."

Ya shook his head even as he finished speaking. It would not be well to have any auditory equipment actively receiving if a major explosion occurred. As an added precaution, he increased light and radiation screening on the visual receptors.

For a few minutes, he kept the lines of moving people on the screen, confirming that they were indeed making for the hardpan, then switched back to scanning the serene infinity of roof-fringed sky on the horizon.

More minutes went by. The tranquility of the unchanging scene began to draw some of the tension out of the s.p.a.cers.

A burst of light ruptured the field of blue. A vast sound followed it, loud and sharp even at this remove.

As the first great flash of brilliance faded, a column of brown smoke clawed its way some six hundred feet into the air. Several dark specks seemed to balance for a moment on it, then fell back into it and plummeted to the concealed ground.

"Her hatches," Dane heard someone, Shannon maybe, say.

Soon, in nearly the same instant, more debris shot into view, some of it dark, a lot glowing red. Much of what they saw was clearly discernible, stark proof of the sizes involved. Thorson gaped at it. That stuff was not just big. It was enormous, great pieces of what had moments before been the Regina Marts.

One sight, rather pretty in itself, puzzled him, as it did most of his comrades. Burning spheres accompanied by equally brilliant sparks and streamers filled one portion of the sky, held there a fraction second, and dispersed as would a burst of demoniac fireworks.

The Cargo-Master again supplied the explanation.

"Rope. The Man's was shipping a load of it. The b.a.l.l.s are aflame and are casting off fragments as they burn. - The Spirit of s.p.a.ce help the places where they land. They'll be more than hot enough to torch anything flammable that they touch."

Van Rycke's grim prediction was not long in finding fulfillment as explosion after explosion followed that first mighty detonation. They did not have to actually see the stricken area to know what was happening, not with computer-generated possibility and probability scenarios to augment their own knowledge and imagination.

Many buildings collapsing under the awesome force of the blast wave took fire directly from the explosion's heat as particularly volatile contents ignited or detonated. Others began to burn when flaming or blazing-hot shrapnel slammed into the rubble that was all that remained of many or through roof, walls, or splintered windows of those still partly standing, starting smaller fires that soon reached vulnerable materials. The exposed fuel tanks were almost immediate casualties, breaking and falling at once when the blast's fist slammed into them or crumbling and exploding when struck by flying material that made them out as accurately as would missiles shot by a sentient foe.

Escaping chemicals, alone or in b.a.s.t.a.r.d combinations, released deadly gases. Others created corrosive pools or added still more fuel to the h.e.l.lish caldron the seaport area had become.