The third man coughed both to clear his lungs and to get attention. “They might have set strategic charges that triggered the volcano.”
“Th-that’s right,” the last survivor, a woman, stammered. Until she had eaten her ration bar, she had been trembling so violently that she had looked on the verge of convulsions; now her fearful glance centered on the presence of the authorities as represented by Torkel, Giancarlo, and Ornery. “Teams have disappeared here before. It can’t all be natural.”
“Damned right it’s not,” Torkel said, following up his advantage. “We were interrogating Maddock here, trying to get information from her to head off this disaster, when it blew up in our faces. Meanwhile, my own father, Dr. Whittaker Fiske, was coming to join a team in your vicinity to suss out the situation.”
“In case you don’t know who Dr. Fiske is,” Giancarlo put in, “he’s assistant chairman of the board, direct descendant of the man who developed the terraforming process that transformed the rock into a viable planet, and is the company’s top expert on the environmental development and stability of all of Internal’s terraformed holdings.”
“He’s the one man who can save this project and everybody involved with it, which is why you must help me find him,” Torkel said, adding with a catch in his voice that could have even been genuine, “and he’s my father. That’s why we tried to supersede your need to move your wounded and effect your own rescue. Another copter would have been here for you immediately, of course, but this woman”-he jerked his thumb at Yana-“took advantage of the pilot’s humanitarian instincts to turn the situation against us. But if one of you will guide me to where the shuttle came down, she won’t be able to stop me from going in after my dad and saving this rock.”
“Okay, who’s it going to be?” Giancarlo demanded. “We need to move here and move fast. You heard Captain Fiske. We need volunteers to take us to the crash site.”
“Say what?” O’Neill asked, not believing what he heard. “We come out of that”-he waved to the steaming valley.-“by the skin of our teeth and you’re after us to risk our necks again? You’re bloody nuts!”
The third man just shook his head tiredly. His shoulders were stooped under the weight of a variety of cameras and other instrument packages, as well as under the weight of the terror and pain he had just lived through. The straps kept Yana from seeing all of his name but “Sven” was part of it.
Torkel shook his head firmly, staring O’Neill down. “No. I’m not nuts. I’d never ask you to risk yourselves except that this it absolutely vital. It is imperative to the well-being of this planet and the personnel on it that we find my father with all possible dispatch.”
“Find him? In that?” Sven demanded in a voice rasped harsh by smoke.
“There’s no alternative, man!” Torkel was getting agitated, as he looked from Sven to Connelly and then to the other two, the stocky O’Neill and the stammering woman. “You did see the shuttle go down, right?”
Sven and Connelly both nodded.
“Well, where did it go down? Point me out the direction from here. I’ve coordinates, but they’re only good in a copter.”
Sven gave Connelly a long look and then, angling himself, he faced in a west-northwest position. “Near as I can remember it. We were scrambling ourselves by then.”
“Why bother?” O’Neill asked, a trace of exasperation in his voice. “Captain, the shuttle was trying to land just as the volcano blew. The shock wave hit it like a ton of fraggin’ bricks. I saw the craft knocked out of the sky with my own eyes. There’s nobody could survive that.” He obviously felt his own survival was miracle enough for one day.
“That’s not true!” Torkel said, his voice suddenly wild with denial as he grabbed O’Neill’s coat front and began shaking him. “My father has to have survived, you bloody idiot!” Then he realized what he was doing and loosed O’Neill with one more plea. “Don’t discourage me, man. Help me, for pity’s sake.”