A new shock knocked both of us down. The deck heaved up under us and kept going, right on up and over.
“She’s tumbling,” I yelled to Ommu. “She’ll break up, fast, under this! Order the men to lifeboat stations!” A tubeman named Rusi showed up then, pale as chalk, hugging internal injuries. I gave him a hand and we crawled on floors, walls and ceilings, made it to our boat station. The bay door was blown wide and the boat was hanging in its davits with the stern torn out, and there were pieces of a dead man scattered around. I ordered the men up to the next station and started to help my walking wounded, but he was dead.
The upper bay was chaos. I grabbed a gun from a lanky grandpa who was waving it and yelling, and fired over the crowd. Nobody noticed. Ommu joined me, and with a few crewmen, we formed up a flying wedge. Ommu got the hatch open while the rest of us beat back the mob. All this time, Eureka had stayed close to me, with his ears flattened and his tail twitching.
“Take ’em in order,” I told Ornmu. “Anybody tries to walk over somebody else, I’ll shoot him!” Two seconds later I had to make that good when a beefy two-hundred-pounder charged me. I blew a hole through him and the rest of them scattered back. The boat had been designed for fifty passengers; we had eighty-seven aboard when a wall of fire came rolling down the corridor and Ommu grabbed me just in time and hauled me in across the laps of a fat woman and a middle-aged man who was crying, and Eureka bounded in past me. I got forward and threw in the big red lever and a big boot kicked us and then there was the sick, null-G feel that meant we’d cleared the launch tube and were on our own.
6
In the two-by-four Command compartment, I watched the small screen where five miles away the ship was rotating slowly, end-over-end, with debris trailing off from her in a lazy spiral. Flashes of light sparkled at points along the hull where smashed piping was spewing explosive mixtures. Her back broke and the aft third of the ship separated and a cloud of tiny objects, some of them human, scattered out into the void, exploding as they hit vacuum. The center section blew then, and when the smoke cleared, there was nothing left but a major fragment of the stern, glowing red-hot, and an expanding dust-cloud.
“Any other boats get away?” I asked.
“I didn’t see any, Billy.”
“There were five thousand people aboard that scow! We can’t be the only survivors!” I yelled at him, as if convincing him would make it true.
A powerman named Lath stuck his head in. “We’ve got some casualties back here,” he said. “Where in the Nine Hells are we, anyway?”
I checked the chart screen. The nearest world was a planet named Cyoc, blue-coded, which meant uninhabited and uninhabitable.
“Nothing there but a beacon,” Ommu said. “An ice world.”
We checked; found nothing within a year’s range that was any better—or as good.
“Cyoc it is,” I said. “Now let’s take a look at what we’ve got to work with.”
I led the way down the no-G central tube past the passenger cells that were arranged radially around it, like the kernels on a corncob. They were badly overcrowded. There seemed to be a lot of women and children. Maybe the mob had demonstrated some of the chivalric instincts, after all; or maybe Ommu had done some selecting I didn’t notice. I wasn’t sure he’d done the right thing.
A big man, wearing what had been expensive clothes before the mob got them, pushed out in the aisle up ahead of me, waited for me to come to him.
“I’m Till Ognath, member of the Ahacian Assembly,” he stated. “As highest ranking individual aboard, I’m assuming command. I see you’re crew; I want you men to run a scan of the nearby volume of space and give me a choice of five possible destinations within our cruise capability. Then—”
“This is Chief Danger, Power Section,” Ommu butted into his spiel. “He’s ranking crew.”
Assemblyman Ognath looked me over. “Better give me the gun.” He held out a broad, well-tended hand.
“I’ll keep it,” I said. “I’ll be glad to have your help, Assemblyman.”
“Maybe I didn’t make myself clear,” Ognath showed me a well-bred frown. “As a member of the World Assembly of Ahax, I—”
“Ranking crew member assumes command, Assemblyman,” Ommu cut him off. “Better crawl back in your hole, Mister, before you qualify yourself for proceedings under space law.”
“You’d quote law to me, you—” Ognath’s vocabulary failed him.
“I’ll let you know how you can best be of service, Assemblyman,” I told him, and we moved on and left him still looking for a suitable word.
7
The boat was in good shape, fully equipped and supplied—for fifty people, all of whom were presumed to have had plenty of time to pack and file aboard like ladies and gentlemen. Assemblyman Ognath made a formal complaint about the presence of an animal aboard, but he was howled down. Everybody seemed to think a mascot was lucky. Anyway, Eureka ate very little and took up no useful space. Two of the injured died the first day, three more in the next week. We put them out the lock and closed ranks.
There wasn’t much room for modesty aboard, for those with strong feelings about such matters. One man objected to another man’s watching his wife taking a sponge bath—(ten other people were watching, too; they had no choice in the matter, unless they screwed their eyes shut) and knocked his front teeth out with a belt-buckle. Two days later, the jealous one turned up drifting in the no-G tube with his windpipe crushed. Nobody seemed to miss him much, not even the wife.
Two hundred and sixty-nine hours after we’d kicked free of the foundering ship, we were maneuvering for an approach to Cyoc. From five hundred miles up, it looked like one huge snowball.
It was my first try at landing an atmosphere boat. I’d run through plenty of drills, but the real thing was a little different. Even with fully automated controls that only needed a decision made for them here and there along the way, there were still plenty of things to do wrong. I did them all. After four hours of the roughest ride this side of a flatwheeled freight car, we slammed down hard in a mountain-rimmed icefield something over four hundred miles from the beacon station.
CHAPTER SIX
The rough landing had bloodied a few noses, one of them mine, broken an arm or two, and opened a ten-foot seam in the hull that let in a blast of refrigerated air; but that was incidental. The real damage was to the equipment compartment forward. The power plant had been knocked right through the side of the boat. That meant no heat, no light, and no communications. Assemblyman Ognath told me what he thought of my piloting ability. I felt pretty bad until Ommu got him to admit he knew even less about atmosphere flying than I did.
The outside temperature was ten below freezing; that made it a warm day, for Cyoc. The sun was small and a long way off, glaring in a dark, metallic sky. It shed a sort of gray, before-the-storm light over a hummocky spread of glacier that ended at blue peaks, miles away. Assemblyman Ognath told me that now we were on terra firma he was taking charge, and that we would waste no time taking steps for rescue. He didn’t say what steps. I told him I’d retain command as long as the emergency lasted. He fumed and used some strong language, but I was still wearing the gun.
There were a lot of complaints from the passengers about the cold, the short rations, the recycled water, bruises, and other things. They’d been all right, in space, glad to be alive. Now that they were ashore they seemed to expect instant relief. I called some of the men aside for a conference.
“I’m taking a party to make the march to the beacon,” I told them.
“Party?” Ognath bellied up to me. “We’ll all go! Only by pulling together can we hope to survive!”
“I’m taking ten men,” I said. “The rest stay here.”
“You expect us to huddle here in this wreck, and slowly freeze to death?” Ognath wanted to know.
“Not you, Assemblyman,” I said. “You’re coming with me.”
He didn’t like that, either. He said his place was with the people.
“I want the strongest, best-fed men,” I said. “We’ll be traveling with heavy packs at first. I can’t have stragglers.”
“Why not just yourself, and this fellow?” Ognath jerked a thumb at Ommu.