Cofort had told him that she had proven capable at triage work when she had done her emergency room practical training, but he quickly realized that she was more than merely good. It was as if she were somehow reading her patients’ bodies and selecting those in whom the spark of life was burning the strongest.
Her skills, too, were superb. With all the limitations under which they had to operate, that was still apparent even to a layman like himself. Rael Cofort was practicing actual medicine with the first aid they had to offer.
The Medic’s side hurt abominably, but she strove not to visibly favor it as they clambered along the rubble-strewn remnant of the street. She would have been ashamed to do so even had she not been determined to conceal as much as possible of her continuing pain from Jellico. What right had she to study herself for so little in the face of the massive agony all around her?
She had little opportunity to dwell on her own difficulties. Conditions worsened with every step closer to the water that they took. Survivors were few, and they were not always easy to locate among the mountains of rubble and the mangled corpses of their fellows. Rael leaned on her talent, used the sickening unease that told her someone nearby was in trouble to locate those still able to receive help. It was difficult to pinpoint a particular source of suffering with the collective misery of the district pouring into her, but she forced herself to concentrate as she had aboard the Mermaid. Usually, it worked. Usually, but not in every case.
Sometimes, they located the victim but could not reach him. Sometimes, they could help a little but could not free their patient and had to leave him pinned or partly buried with only a cairn of debris raised nearby to alert properly equipped rescuers to his presence, markers whose meaning they would have to communicate to the appropriate authorities as soon as the opportunity presented itself.
Jellico’s hands balled into tight fists by his side. He felt sick with frustration and the seeming hopelessness of their efforts. He could do little for the people they found accessible in the streets and nothing for the handful of buried victims. He could not even be of much help to Rael Cofort as she faced and made decision after wrenching decision.
All he could do was stick with her, that and offer no protest in face or stance, do or say nothing to add to the weight she already carried.
They had traveled more than a third of the ruined street when suddenly both Free Traders stopped walking. They listened intently, their heads turning toward one of the remaining arches, the only one still standing on this block.
They spotted him quickly, a man sitting braced against its farther, seaward side, sobbing aloud. It was that sound which had caught their attention.
The pair hastened toward him. Rael’s eyes closed momentarily as they drew nearer. He was clutching a human leg to his breast. It had been severed at midthigh, and the material still clinging to it matched the blood-stained trousers he was wearing.
“I’m a Medic,” she said by way of introduction as she knelt beside him. “What happened?”
He stared at her blankly for a moment but then answered coherently enough. “I was walking along kind of fast when the explosion came. It knocked me down, but I got up again and started running. Then something, that metal thing over there, hit my leg. It was a red-hot … It hurt . . .” He squeezed the limb still tighter. “I fell, but I didn’t see for a minute . . .”
While he had been speaking, the woman was examining both parts of the wound. “You were lucky,” she declared, making herself speak matter-of-factly, as if she were discussing the result of a minor stumble. “The cut is straight and clean, and the missile was so hot that it cauterized as it sliced through.”
“Lucky .. .”
“Hold on to that leg. They’ll want to put it back.”
“It’s too late!” For the first time, emotion, anguish, broke through the numbness that had seemed to envelop him.
“It’ll be too late! There’re too many hurt. They’ll all need first-time treatment just to live before anyone’ll be able to do a fix-up job like this. The leg’ll be dead . . .”
“Nonsense,” she responded briskly. “Ultrahyperbaric restoration can reawaken life in tissue detached for a full two weeks and probably longer.”
Rael finished her examination. “You didn’t lose much blood. That’s standing you in good stead, but we’re going to help you to the center of the street where you’ll be easier to spot by the rescue teams.-I want you to lie back and set your mind on getting well. It shouldn’t be all that much longer now before you’re under full, proper care.”
“Space,” Jellico muttered as they moved away from the Canuchean. “I hope we don’t run into too many more like that one.”
“At least he’ll survive and regain all or most of his mobility,” she replied grimly.
It had been hard leaving the man, but he was not in dire peril. There was not a whole lot they could have done for him by remaining with him unless they had rigged up a stretcher from some of the debris and tried to carry him out, which they were not prepared to attempt at this point.
There were simply too many others for whom prompt first aid could mean the difference between survival and death.
They could not have evacuated him in any event. Given her own injuries, she could not have held up her end of a stretcher, not for any distance. Whatever her will to the contrary, broken ribs demanded and would force a certain degree of consideration.
The Medic sighed. “I doubt we’ll be able to do much of anything for very many of those that we’ll encounter from here on in.”
24
The off-worlders’ hearts pounded fast and painfully as they continued to make their way along the short stretch that still separated them from the sea and the site of the great explosion itself. If things were so bad here, what combination of the Federation’s hells would they find when they reached the source of all this chaos? Would they find anything, living or dead, whole or shattered, there at all?
Rael’s gloomy words proved accurate, and they encountered only the dead on the little length that remained of the ruined street.
They reached its end at last. Both paused, steeling themselves to face the horrors they knew lay beyond, then they passed between the final segments of the great mounds of rubble that confined them on each side.
There, they froze. Before them lay the Straight and the remains of what had been Canuche Town’s bustling docks.
Now little among these splinters indicated what had once stood here.
The Regina Man’s and the pier at which she had been loading were simply gone. Debris-littered water occupied the place where they had been. Of those who had been battling the fire, there was no sign, nor would there ever be for most of them. They had been atomized under the double impact of blast wave and blast wind, whose force at the point of their sudden creation could well have reached 2,400 miles per hour or more.
Bodies in plenty lay farther back, between their vantage point and the place where the Man’s had been. All were grossly damaged by the forces generated by the explosion itself, by fire, or from having been thrown at high velocity and great force against ruthlessly unyielding surfaces. They had died, all of them, before flying debris or collapsing structures could pose any threat to them. They would have to be examined all the same, but that was merely an exercise in humanity with no hope of reward.
Rael shuddered. The loss of life would have been immeasurably worse had they not succeeded in driving most of the spectators off the pier when they had, but what they found here was still purely the stuff of nightmare.
She wrenched her eyes away from the slaughter at her feet. The havoc that had rent the land had not spared the sea. Water and shoreline were dotted with the wrecks of boats that had gathered too near in their interest in the fire.
Most had been ripped apart, but a few had only been blown ashore or now silently rode the wavelets, crewless but otherwise apparently unhurt. The Salty Sue, the only big vessel berthed close to the Man’s, had, like those smaller ghost ships, survived surprisingly well. A transport-sized hole had been blown in her prow, and she herself had been more than half beached, but she remained a recognizable entity that could be repaired and put back to work again.
For the first time, the spacers got a good look at the slopes, both above them and on the opposite side of the harbor. Neither shore had been spared, though the nearer, of course, had taken infinitely harder punishment.