Bunny roared into the snocle shed. Adak was red in the face
and waving his hands, arguing with a uniformed soldier, but she had no time to be polite about interrupting them.
“Adak, quick, we’ve got to rouse the village! The river’s breaking up way early, and a lot of snocles are trapped on the river. Seamus fell into a crack bigger than a tree saving one of the drivers, and the others pulled him out.”
“You run and tell Clodagh, Bunka. She’ll let the village know, and I’ll get on the radio for help.”
“I told you, sir, I’m relieving you of duty,” the soldier said.
“Good. Then you get on the radio,” Adak said. “And I’ll use this vehicle to try to rescue the stranded drivers.”
“You can’t do that, sir. That’s a company-issue snocle, and not a private vehicle,” the soldier said. “Besides, I don’t know how to work this thing,” he added, staring at the microphone.
“Fine, then I will, and you go help the drivers, but keep your snocle off the river and for pity’s sake stop standing about arguing, man,” Adak snapped.
Bunny grinned as, without further argument, the soldier climbed into the snocle and gunned it back down the tracks it had just made. Bunny sprinted out of the shed as Adak was pulling on his headphones and picking up his microphone.
Whatever he was saying over the radio was lost, however, because all over town the sled dogs had begun to howl with the plaintive screams of tortured souls. As Bunny passed by Lavelle’s place on her way to Clodagh’s, she was even more surprised at the antics of Lavelle’s dogs. Still tethered to their kennels, some were standing on the roofs and howling; others were lying on the ground, whining and baying in turn. Dinah, the lead dog, had become a frantic canine acrobat. She raced to the end of her chain, then back and forth and in frenzied circles until her lead was tangled in her legs and around her collar, and her neck would soon be rubbed raw from the friction. Bunny stopped to untangle her.
Poor Dinah. She really missed Lavelle, Bunny thought, but then, when she stopped to touch her, she got an urgent flash of hot, panting thought: The boy, the boy, gotta go, gotta go, gotta get the boy, oh let me get him, gotta go, needs me, friend, friend, needs me, needs me needs me, gotta go, go go nowoooo …
“Shh, Dinah, shhh,” Bunny said. It didn’t feel strange to be talking to a dog: she did it all the time. But it did seem odd that the dog seemed to be talking, too. “Diego’s okay, Dinah. I just left him. Look, tell you what, you come with me and we’ll find Clodagh, okay? Don’t run off now when I unsnap you. Maloneys have had enough pain without losing you, too.”
The more of Dinah she untangled, the more the dog calmed, tail wagging cooperatively; but when the dog was at last free, she snatched herself out of Bunny’s grasp and bounded off toward the river.
Holy cow, sir, where did that volcano come from?” the pilot asked Torkel as the copter sped toward the westerly crash-site coordinates provided by SpaceBase. They were still a good distance away when he pointed to the port side.
Since his comments had crackled through the headsets everyone was wearing, Yana looked, too. The fiery glow, the pall of the ash hanging in the air, was plainly visible. The air was still full of turbulence from the initial eruptions, and the lightweight copter shook and tossed about like a Ping-Pong ball.
Beneath them the ground rolled and fissured while ash and smoke pumped from the newly blown cone, born on one of the low mountains to the west. Visibility was poor with airborne smuts that were beginning to build up on the ground. Yana realized that some of the quaking she had felt back at the clinic must have come from this eruption.
Sandwiched as she was between Giancarlo and Ornery, Yana had a clear view between the pilot and Torkel, riding in copilot position. She wasn’t at all reassured by the panorama. It looked like someone’s terraforming gone wrong, and she thought they would be smarter to make tracks from rather than to.