The bus settled a short distance from the transporter. As its engines died, the flurry of dust around it collapsed in the airless environment like a tenuous balloon deflating. From closer up, the remains of the domes and connecting buildings formed a wall of twisted and splayed metal bordering the rubble-strewn area where the vehicles had landed, sagging out from beneath the debris that had buried it like the spilled content of a gigantic rock sandwich. At one end, part of a flattened dome had been lifted aside—way back, in an operation that Caton himself had supervised—to open the way down to a section of the underground galleries that had escaped being totally pulverized. They’d had to tunnel under a bulkhead wall concertinaed between two levels of flooring that had been crushed together, he recalled. Fortunately, in the gravity of a body the size of Rhea, supporting the load above had not been as difficult as the sight suggested.
“This place certainly took a pasting,” Norburn commented, as he sat back from the port and unsnapped his restraining harness.
“You have to see it for yourself to get a real idea of it,” Caton agreed.
“Was there much left there below—where the opening goes down?”
“Just parts of a couple of levels. We got a bunch of survivors up from a compartment in the living quarters that had been sealed in. Most of them were just trainee kids. Too dazed to know which moon they were on. Nobody left in that dome up above, though. There was some nasty cleaning up to do in there.”
They stood up and took down their helmets from the rack above. “Well, now maybe we get to learn what this is all about, Del,” Norburn said. “Any bets?”
“I couldn’t even begin to guess,” Caton replied.
The pilot came back from the nose compartment and checked their suit readings before opening the lock. They bounced lightly down the extended steps and joined the group of three figures waiting in front of the tunnel, two wearing suits of Security Arm blue, the other’s yellow, all of them carrying hand lamps. The other two making up the party were at the transporter, unloading equipment of some kind. The SA officer in the suit with colonel’s insignia had Asian features and the name tag xelu on his chest pack. Caton judged him to be around thirty. He introduced himself, and then the others as Lieutenant Queele, SA, and Bor Ethan, a technical advisor.
“It was you who led the rescue team from Omsk, I understand, Mr. Caton,” Xelu said. “The Service will always be in your debt.”
“It was my privilege, Colonel,” Caton replied. “Just glad that we were here. Only sorry we couldn’t do more.”
“You did as much as anyone could have,” Norburn put in.
Colonel Xelu half turned, at the same time looking back toward the tunnel. “And you directed the digging under the debris there?”
“Right. We could tell from sonar scans that some of the underground levels were still intact farther down.”
“Can we go and take a look?”
Caton and Norburn looked at each other. Caton shrugged inside his suit.
“Sure,” Norburn said. The question seemed to have been more for form. It was what they had come out here for, after all. They followed Xelu into the opening, Queele and Ethan falling in to bring up the rear.
The beam from Xelu’s lamp revealed a path of trodden-down rock fragments and dust descending among fallen floor beams and crumpled wall sections. A cleared shaft going up marked where Caton’s team had cut their way through to check the upper parts. It didn’t bring back the torrent of memories that he had been half expecting. Too much else had happened in the meantime since the day of those events.
“I suppose we owe it to you to say what brings us here,” Xelu’s voice said in Caton’s helmet as they moved on and down. “The political situation in Kronia is getting complicated these days.” It wasn’t necessary for him to spell out that he meant on account of the agitation and demands of the Pragmatists. “What’s worrisome is that this Terran-instigated movement is being led by individuals who consider coercion and violence to be a legitimate means of achieving social goals—or at least, of imposing the appearance of having done so.” No Kronian would have considered results brought about by such means to have “achieved” anything.