“Careful, you prick! That hurt my ribs.”
“Shut it, Jeff. I’m getting you out.”
The panic diminished in the voice. “Sure, sure, Jim.”
The captain heaved and pulled at the tangle of equipment. Without his noticing it, Mac had come back again and started using his enormous strength to rip and tear the pile apart, finally revealing Jeff Thomas, flat on his back, glaring up at them.
His nose was smashed, purple and bloody, and there was a deep cut sliced from the corner of his right eye down to the swollen mouth. His neck and shoulders were slobbered with bright crimson blood.
“Get me up, guys,” he said, reaching a hand to them.
Now they could also see part of Kyle Lynch’s body, motionless on its side, head right in the corner of the cabin.
“I’ll take him out, Jim. Be right back.”
“Sure.”
Jeff doubled over as Mac helped him, none too gently, to his feet. “Oh, think I got broken ribs, as well.” He looked around him at the utter devastation. “Where’s everyone?”
Mac was tugging him toward the open door. “Some didn’t make it. Come on, Jeff.”
“Didn’t make it? You mean they’re dead, Mac? Who’s dead? I have to…”
The voice faded, and Jim was left alone with the four corpses and Kyle Lynch.
The tall, slender radio operator was breathing, and the pulse in his throat was beating strongly. His eyes were closed, and there was a thread of blood from his open mouth.
“Kyle. Time to move, son. Journey’s over and we’ve come home.”
He shook him gently, then harder. The young man’s head lolled on his shoulder, tongue protruding, drops of crimson dribbling from it.
“Here. I’ll take his feet, Jim. You hold his shoulders.”
Behind McGill one of the navigation computers exploded in a burst of fire and fountaining yellow-and-silver sparks.
“Barbecue’ll start real soon, Jim,” warned the big man.
The smell of the high-octane rocket fuel was even stronger outside the entrance to the Aquila. The two officers waded through the lake of volatile liquid, ankle deep in the furrowed crater created by the vessel.
Jim Hilton felt sick, his guts churning with bile. His head was spinning, and he staggered in the unaccustomed gravity of Earth.
He could dimly see the little group of survivors, sitting and standing together a couple of hundred yards away.
“Keep going,” urged McGill, taking most of the weight of the unconscious man.
“Want a hand?” yelled Jed Herne.
“No! Stay there.” Jim’s throat hurt, and the muscles in his thighs and shoulders were fast turning into jelly.
“Want to go back for the bodies?” panted Henderson McGill. Despite his great strength, the astrophysicist was struggling to keep going.
“Rest up some. Then get them. We’re nearly there.”
They reached the others and laid Kyle in the dusty grass.
At the same moment the wreckage of the Aquila exploded in a huge ball of fire and’ yellow smoke, the force of the blast sending Jim to his knees, his lungs sucking in the wave of intense heat.
“Mission over,” said Steve Romero.
Chapter Nine
The sun was low in the western horizon, beginning to set behind the Sierras. Shadows speared across the flat expanse of the Air Force base. Like a great black fist, the column of oily smoke from the burned-out wreckage of the Aquila punched into the cloudless sky, casting its own pall over the desert.
Jim Hilton sat in the dry dust, knees drawn up, staring blankly at the devastation of his command. He coughed, aware of a stabbing pain in his chest.
“You got something on the shoulder of your jacket,” said Steve Romero. “What is it?”
Jim wriggled his arm around to peer at himself and saw a thick, clotted smear of pinkish gray, like spilled food.
“Marcey’s brains,” he said.
A coyote howled somewhere near the western perimeter of the airfield. Everyone turned to look in that direction.
Jed shaded his eyes with his hand. “Reckon part of the main perimeter sec fence is down. Or is it my eyes?”
Jim struggled to focus across the sand and stubbled grass. It did look as though at least three of the metal support towers were down. He also noticed something else.