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 s.p.a.ce 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.

It was a drop of less than fifty feet, but there could be no hurrying the descent if he did not want a broken leg or to find himself inextricably wedged. Every few inches, he had to wriggle and twist to escape collision with one shard or another, and there was no point in beginning to count the number of times he struck something despite all his care.

a.s.suming he lived to leave this miserable hole, he would have some interesting bruises to show for his work. Weeks swallowed hard. He was down about twenty-five feet now, and it was not his fear that was making him sweat like this. It was getting hot, and smoke was fouling the air.

Worse, the s.p.a.ce seemed even tighter, and a new dread entered his mind. If it got much narrower than this, he would not be able to come back up with the girl in his arms, if he could reach her at all. He would have to send her up first, and he very much doubted the line could be lowered to him again, which would have to be done slowly for fear of its catching and tangling before . . .

It seemed that he was dropping by bare inches instead of feet, but in the end, he came within reach of the child, just barely ahead of the lead tongues of the fire.

Jasper tried to keep himself between the flames and the tot. They had not yet reached the point of actually touching her, but the heat was already blistering.

He could not quite come even with her, and she was not of an age that he could expect to get any help or information from her. He leaned over at a precarious angle until he could see how she was held and gave an audible sigh of relief. A piece of pipe had torn through the skirt of her frock, which had then become twisted about it. He could get to it readily and slice through it with his knife without hurting her.

The s.p.a.cer grabbed hold of the little Canuchean with his left hand and held her tightly despite her yowl of protest and fear. He could not risk freeing her only to have her fall farther down.

It was done, but they were out of time. The material covering his thigh was smoldering.

"Karl, pull! I've got her!"

Bad as the journey down had been, the ascent was worse. Twice, he was seriously afraid they would not be able to pa.s.s at all, and several other times, they had to maneuver through places very nearly as tight. It required careful work to get through, and that took time, a constraint not binding the fire licking hungrily below. Ever in his mind and in the minds of those above was the knowledge that if the blaze suddenly leapt up toward the greater supply of air on the surface, they would both be cooked as they hung there. Only the fact that the ruins in this place were porous and also quite poor in flammable material had saved them thus far, a tenuous leash indeed to be holding so fearful a force.

They pa.s.sed the worst stretch. A little more speed was possible after that, the small increase that could be permitted without threatening to snag the line or batter the pair too greatly.

There was no escaping some hammering. Weeks wrapped himself as a living shield around his tiny charge, but in so doing, he thereby vastly reduced the efforts he could make on his own behalf. Time and again, his body struck hard against solid projections, on several occasions sharply enough that he was scarcely able to retain his hold on rope and child.

Suddenly, unbelievably, there was only clear air above them. Hands reached out, drew him onto solid ground.

Jasper was conscious of broadly smiling faces and unrestrained cheering. He was smiling himself as he handed the little girl over to Craig Tau, then the world seemed suddenly to tilt sideways, and a not unwelcome darkness settled over it.

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 pa.s.sing 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. n.o.body seems to have gotten that far, so the need'll 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 a.s.sured 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 sc.r.a.pes 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 pa.s.sed.

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 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 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 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 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 ship'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 ship, 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 ship, 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.