Rael made no comment. She fixed her attention on the street along which they were traveling.
All the structures lining it appeared to be old. They had been constructed of Canuchean stone rather than the metals and synthetics of a later stage, more prosperous colony, and all of them obviously had been put up at the same time from a single set of plans. One was the image of all the others.
Each of the buildings had an underground story, or maybe several, perhaps devoted to storage or deliveries. At least, the entrance was invariably a broad, steeply sloping ramp leading into an attractively arched, covered loading dock.
To Cofort’s surprise, Miceal did not turn onto the avenue when they reached it. “Why are we sticking to the back roads?” she asked curiously, knowing there was probably an excellent reason for taking the slower, more irregular route.
“Maybe for no purpose,” he responded grimly. “I hope we won’t have to find out.” His mouth compressed into a hard line. “I should be sent to the Lunar mines for criminal neglect. As soon as we reach the Queen, give your friend Colonel Cohn another call and have her order the Regina Man’s towed out to sea for the final cleanup. There would be no danger to the city now if I’d thought of it sooner.”
The woman frowned. “Neither did I. Power down, will you. We couldn’t work out everything. We’re just Free Traders, not a pair of professional disaster planners.”
She glanced up at him, mischief suddenly lighting her eyes as she laughed softly. “You’d make one fine tyrant, Captain Jellico,” she told him. “That was a masterful stroke with the fire gun.”
“One needs a variety of abilities in Trade . . .”
Whatever else he might have said was silenced as light avoid the chance of chain-reaction disaster but still close enough to offer a comforting sense of community. Most of their crews were also assembled beside their vessels, staring intently eastward.
“I could try to talk those port guys into bringing a flier out to us,” Rip ventured. “They’re probably not so mad that they wouldn’t do it for a share of the news. I could fly over the city …”
“You’ll keep your scrambled-circuited fins planeted where they are!”
Shannon was not the only one to stare at Alt. The Engineer-apprentice gripped himself. He resumed his normal casual manner, but the deadly serious note did not leave his voice. “You’d be looking for a quick ride on Sanford Jones’s comet, my boy. I saw fighters, big ones, blown out of the sky by the concussion of a major blast, never mind one of those little civilian bubbles. I wouldn’t want to be in the air in one of them even this far out, much less hovering over Canuche Town, if that accursed ship blows.”
“Is the Queen safe?” Jasper asked in concern. “And these others who followed us?”
“Out here, aye.” It was Johan Stotz who answered for his apprentice. He and the Cargo-Master had just come out of the ship to join them. “Van and I’ve been running a series of possibility scenarios on the computer. We’re well away from triple the blast we could expect even if two or more freighters went up, and shrapnel definitely won’t reach us, which was our biggest danger at the spaceport.”
“That’s over four miles from the coast, closer to five, in fact!” exclaimed Weeks.
“Not an impossible distance for a big explosion,” Kamil said tensely. “It wouldn’t take much. All you’d need is for a single piece of red-hot metal to pierce the liquid fuel reservoirs and none of us would have anything more to worry about, provided we’d led virtuous lives.” He turned to his chief. “A fire storm could travel this far. So could gas.”
“That’s why Jellico insisted that we go south as well as inland. We’re not in easy line with the city, and the winds’re blowing toward it, not us. They’re also augmented by the thermal breeze as long as the daylight and heat hold.”
Thorson looked eastward again, then back to his shipmates as an idea came to him. “Could we try to focus the near-space viewer on the town?”
“Probably!” Tang agreed eagerly. “Devices designed for use in space don’t work perfectly in an atmosphere, and we’ll have to play with the magnification, but we should be able to get something. It’ll be better than nothing, at any rate.”
The Solar Queen’s bridge was even smaller than her mess, but none of them grumbled about the lack of space as they gathered around the big screen while their Com-Tech adjusted one after the other of the controls directing its operation.
Gradually, the image of Canuche Town appeared before them, at first hazy to the point of uselessness, then as clear as if they were spying on it through impossibly powerful but otherwise standard distance lenses. Deftly, Ya depressed the focus until it rested right on the eastern horizon.
“We can’t see the docks,” Karl Kosti said, voicing the disappointment of all.
“Hardly,” Tang told him. “The whole seaport area is on a significantly lower level than the rest of the city. The viewer can’t penetrate solid rock or bend around it. We’ll know it if that ship explodes, but we won’t be able to observe the blast itself or its effects on its immediate, environs. — Sands of Mars! Look at all those people! There are thousands of them, and they all seem to be heading this way.”
“Macgregory’s staff and their families probably,” Van Rycke deduced. “He’s ordered evacuations before. The Captain or Rael will have warned him, too.”
“I could check, see if there’s something coming over the civilian waves or if the Patrol’s broadcasting anything on the public channels …”
Ya shook his head even as he finished speaking. It would not be well to have any auditory equipment actively receiving if a major explosion occurred. As an added precaution, he increased light and radiation screening on the visual receptors.
For a few minutes, he kept the lines of moving people on the screen, confirming that they were indeed making for the hardpan, then switched back to scanning the serene infinity of roof-fringed sky on the horizon.
More minutes went by. The tranquility of the unchanging scene began to draw some of the tension out of the spacers.
A burst of light ruptured the field of blue. A vast sound followed it, loud and sharp even at this remove.
As the first great flash of brilliance faded, a column of brown smoke clawed its way some six hundred feet into the air. Several dark specks seemed to balance for a moment on it, then fell back into it and plummeted to the concealed ground.
“Her hatches,” Dane heard someone, Shannon maybe, say.
Soon, in nearly the same instant, more debris shot into view, some of it dark, a lot glowing red. Much of what they saw was clearly discernible, stark proof of the sizes involved. Thorson gaped at it. That stuff was not just big. It was enormous, great pieces of what had moments before been the Regina Marts.
One sight, rather pretty in itself, puzzled him, as it did most of his comrades. Burning spheres accompanied by equally brilliant sparks and streamers filled one portion of the sky, held there a fraction second, and dispersed as would a burst of demoniac fireworks.
The Cargo-Master again supplied the explanation.
“Rope. The Man’s was shipping a load of it. The balls are aflame and are casting off fragments as they burn. — The Spirit of Space help the places where they land. They’ll be more than hot enough to torch anything flammable that they touch.”
Van Rycke’s grim prediction was not long in finding fulfillment as explosion after explosion followed that first mighty detonation. They did not have to actually see the stricken area to know what was happening, not with computer-generated possibility and probability scenarios to augment their own knowledge and imagination.
Many buildings collapsing under the awesome force of the blast wave took fire directly from the explosion’s heat as particularly volatile contents ignited or detonated. Others began to burn when flaming or blazing-hot shrapnel slammed into the rubble that was all that remained of many or through roof, walls, or splintered windows of those still partly standing, starting smaller fires that soon reached vulnerable materials. The exposed fuel tanks were almost immediate casualties, breaking and falling at once when the blast’s fist slammed into them or crumbling and exploding when struck by flying material that made them out as accurately as would missiles shot by a sentient foe.
Escaping chemicals, alone or in bastard combinations, released deadly gases. Others created corrosive pools or added still more fuel to the hellish caldron the seaport area had become.
The topography of the region magnified the effects of the already awesome disaster. In dooming its own, however, it to a great extent shielded the rest of Canuche Town as the high, sharp slopes deflected much of the force of the explosion back down on the already shattered communities below and caught the bulk of the debris it had set in deadly flight.