Andre Norton - Redline the Stars

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 nitrate, 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."

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.