Weeks pulled the rope over his shoulders and lowered it until he was sitting in the loop, then gingerly let himself over the edge.
It was at once apparent that he had set himself no easy task. What he had described as a chimney was in fact no more than a relatively clear space in the sea of rubble, open more in the visual than the physical sense. He was not at all certain he would be able to get by all the obstructions extending into it. Also, the fire seemed much closer from this angle than it had from above.
It was a drop of less than fifty feet, but there could be no hurrying the descent if he did not want a broken leg or to find himself inextricably wedged. Every few inches, he had to wriggle and twist to escape collision with one shard or another, and there was no point in beginning to count the number of times he struck something despite all his care.
Assuming he lived to leave this miserable hole, he would have some interesting bruises to show for his work. Weeks swallowed hard. He was down about twenty-five feet now, and it was not his fear that was making him sweat like this. It was getting hot, and smoke was fouling the air.
Worse, the space seemed even tighter, and a new dread entered his mind. If it got much narrower than this, he would not be able to come back up with the girl in his arms, if he could reach her at all. He would have to send her up first, and he very much doubted the line could be lowered to him again, which would have to be done slowly for fear of its catching and tangling before . . .
It seemed that he was dropping by bare inches instead of feet, but in the end, he came within reach of the child, just barely ahead of the lead tongues of the fire.
Jasper tried to keep himself between the flames and the tot. They had not yet reached the point of actually touching her, but the heat was already blistering.
He could not quite come even with her, and she was not of an age that he could expect to get any help or information from her. He leaned over at a precarious angle until he could see how she was held and gave an audible sigh of relief. A piece of pipe had torn through the skirt of her frock, which had then become twisted about it. He could get to it readily and slice through it with his knife without hurting her.
The spacer grabbed hold of the little Canuchean with his left hand and held her tightly despite her yowl of protest and fear. He could not risk freeing her only to have her fall farther down.
It was done, but they were out of time. The material covering his thigh was smoldering.
“Karl, pull! I’ve got her!”
Bad as the journey down had been, the ascent was worse. Twice, he was seriously afraid they would not be able to pass at all, and several other times, they had to maneuver through places very nearly as tight. It required careful work to get through, and that took time, a constraint not binding the fire licking hungrily below. Ever in his mind and in the minds of those above was the knowledge that if the blaze suddenly leapt up toward the greater supply of air on the surface, they would both be cooked as they hung there. Only the fact that the ruins in this place were porous and also quite poor in flammable material had saved them thus far, a tenuous leash indeed to be holding so fearful a force.
They passed the worst stretch. A little more speed was possible after that, the small increase that could be permitted without threatening to snag the line or batter the pair too greatly.
There was no escaping some hammering. Weeks wrapped himself as a living shield around his tiny charge, but in so doing, he thereby vastly reduced the efforts he could make on his own behalf. Time and again, his body struck hard against solid projections, on several occasions sharply enough that he was scarcely able to retain his hold on rope and child.
Suddenly, unbelievably, there was only clear air above them. Hands reached out, drew him onto solid ground.
Jasper was conscious of broadly smiling faces and unrestrained cheering. He was smiling himself as he handed the little girl over to Craig Tau, then the world seemed suddenly to tilt sideways, and a not unwelcome darkness settled over it.
26
Van Rycke paused at the crest. “It doesn’t take much for us to do a proper job on ourselves, does it?”
“How could everyone have forgotten how dangerous ammonium nitrate can be?” Dane half asked, half demanded. So much misery, and most of it could have been averted had the salt been handled with the deference its nature demanded.
“Because no one else has used it on a large scale for a very long time, so it hasn’t had a chance to cause trouble. A lot of other things have and, thus, replaced it in our collective memory.” He grimaced. “Who expects death and destruction to come from a common, old-time fertilizer?”
Thorson did not try to suppress the shudder passing through him. All those poor people … “Where do we start first, sir?” The disaster was so vast, they would be of use no matter where they went.
“Down at the water. Nobody seems to have gotten that far, so the need’ll be greatest there, once we get far enough away from the explosion site that people could live through it. Of course, we’ll stop if we encounter anyone in dire trouble higher up.”
The younger man nodded his agreement but made no verbal answer. Their unvoiced hope was a slim and forlorn one. Their comrades had been very close to the Regina Man’s, maybe on the vanished dock itself. There was precious small chance that either of them had survived.
The Cargo-Master moved rapidly despite the rubble-littered streets, so quickly that Dane had to push himself to keep pace.
At first, there was little to be seen apart from the ruins of homes and businesses, but as they descended, corpses became an ever more frequent sight. While people remained still trapped or in need of care, little attention could be spared for the dead, and bodies were left lying where they had fallen or had been dropped after having been pulled from the rubble.
The apprentice tried to avert his eyes, but he found himself staring at the grim remains. The horror was such that it generated its own fascination, one he was powerless to resist completely.
He looked into the frozen face of one dead girl and stopped in mid stride. “Mr. Van Rycke!”
His chief turned around. He glanced sharply at the woman and then started to move away once more. “She’s dead. Has been almost from the start.” It depressed him to look at her. She was, or had been, younger than Thorson when he had first joined the Queen.
“But she’s been shot!”
Jan faced the corpse again. She lay where the force of the killing blow had thrown her, the once luminous eyes wide and starting, still showing the surprise of an instantaneous, utterly unexpected death. A large, round hole with burn damage at its edges marred the exact center of her forehead.
Van Rycke searched the ground around her for several minutes. At last, he picked up a small, partly flattened blob of metal and held it up for Dane’s examination. “There’s your pellet, or one like it. That it struck like this so far upslope was a vile turn of chance, but the load of screws, nails, and other small items the Man’s was carrying will have created real havoc below. We’ll be seeing more samples of its work if we get that far down.”
Frank Mura, Shannon, and Kamil pushed their way right through the residential section down into the commercial district. Only a few groups had penetrated this far as yet, and they had decided among themselves that they might be able to accomplish more good there than on the better-organized heights.
All three were quiet. Apart from the heavier nature of the materials comprising these ruins, there was little to differentiate them from those above. The destruction was such that there was no means of telling upon a casual glance whether a specific site had once held a home, office, or factory building.
There were more dead as well, and the corpses were more visible. The closer proximity of the explosion assured that, as did the fact that no one had yet been through this area to remove or stack them.
They encountered living victims as well. Many, they were able to help. For others, there was little they or anyone else could hope to do. In every case, the Free Traders did as they had been instructed and moved the injured into the center of the street for easy sighting and pickup by the fliers that would soon be coming over this part of the district.