"Uh, no, Sir," Novaya Tyumen said quickly. "Of course not. I only wanted to avoid the sort of command confusion and, ah, impetuosity which might prevent us from makin' optimum use of our resources."
Honor glanced over at Chief Zariello. She shouldn't have, of course. It was prejudicial to authority, if nothing else. But she couldn't help herself, and she saw the same contempt flicker in the chief's eyes. Not that either of them had ever had any intention of obeying Novaya Tyumen. Bravo Three was already buffeting heavily as she sliced down into atmosphere, headed for the avalanche site at high mach numbers, and every one of Broadsword's other pinnaces followed right behind her while they listened to their coms and waited for their captain's response.
"No doubt that's a worthy ambition, ExCom," Tammerlane said, still coldly, "but the people who just got buried need help now—even if it's not the best organized rescue effort we could possibly arrange—one hell of a lot more than they need a well-organized effort after they've already died of suffocation or hypothermia. Don't you agree?"
"Yes, Sir. Of course!"
"Good. I'm delighted to hear that, ExCom. And since we're in agreement, why don't you just turn the rest of your pinnaces over to Commander Harrington until you can get `reorganized' dirtside yourself?"
"Of course, Sir." Novaya Tyumen sounded as if he were chewing ten-centimeter iron spikes, but there really wasn't much else he could say. "Bravo Three," the commander went on after a moment, and Honor didn't need any empathy to recognize the barely contained hate smoking in that grating tone, "you are in command until ExCom can move dirtside. All other pilots, Bravo Three is in command until you hear differently from me."
"Understood, ExCom." Honor tried very hard to keep any trace of triumph out of her own voice, but she knew she'd failed, and somehow, as she listened to the acknowledgments of the other section leaders, she couldn't seem to make herself care as much as she should have.
"All pinnaces will form on Bravo Three," she continued on more crisply. "Charlie Section, I want you out on my starboard wing. Hotel, you take port. We'll start with a line abreast flight down the main path of the slide with a full tac sweep. Drive those thermal sensors hard, people. All the junk that avalanche brought down with it is going to play hob with our sonar and DIR, so the thermals are probably going to be the best we have today. Then—"
She went on, giving her orders in a clear, strong voice, yet as she looked out at the vast swath of destruction below her, she knew deep inside how very likely it was that all their efforts would be useless for anyone who had been caught in its path.
"Ranjit? Ranjit?"
Ranjit Hibson groaned as a small hand shook his shoulder. His eyes slid open and he blinked, trying to orient himself.
His head was in his sister's lap. She was hunched over him, her shadowed face peering anxiously down at him, and he managed to pat her knee with his right hand before he rolled his head to look about him. The lift car was tilted at a crazy angle, he noted muzzily, and the light was all wrong. It wasn't sunlight through crystoplast, and it was dim, little more than a murky twilight. Then his mind cleared with almost painful suddenness. No wonder the light was dim! It came from a single one of the lift car's small emergency lighting elements somewhere behind Susan.
He tried to sit up, and cried out sharply at the sudden, wrenching stab of agony. Susan's hand had locked on his shoulders the instant she realized he was trying to move, and she pushed him back down hard.
Wish she'd figured out what I was doing just a little sooner, he thought with queer detachment, even as he locked his teeth against the groan of anguish still rattling about in his throat. The grotesque discrepancy between how much he hurt and the clarity of the thought made him want to laugh, although for the life of him he couldn't see why he thought it was so funny, and he made himself pat Susan's knee again.
"All—" He stopped and coughed. "All right, Sooze. I'm . . . all right."
"No you aren't," she told him, and the mixture of terror and determination to hang onto her self-control which quivered in her voice twisted his heart. "Your legs are both trapped. And I think the right one's broken. And I don't know where we are or . . . or what to do, and—"
She made herself stop and drag in a ragged breath as she felt her hard-held discipline begin to crumble. She stared down into her brother's pain-hazed eyes in the dim shadows and bit her lip for a moment. Then she made herself go on.
"And I think all the others are . . . are dead," she got out quietly, and Ranjit's hand clenched on her knee.
He stared up at her, trying to make his mind work, and then it was his turn to swallow hard as he remembered the tidal bore of snow and rock which had leapt out from the mountainside at the lift car. He couldn't recall any details after that, only a confused impression of shock and savage motion and screams of terror from the car's passengers as the avalanche batted it out of the air like a cat batting away a pellet of paper. Perhaps it was a good thing that he couldn't remember details, he thought, still with that queer sense of detachment.
Shock? he wondered. Could be. 'Cause Sooze is sure as hell right about my right leg. Maybe my left, too, the way they feel.
But he remembered enough to feel dull surprise that anyone in the car had survived, and a terrible sense of gratitude crushed over him as he realized that Susan must be mostly unhurt, since she'd been able to get his head into her lap in the first place.
"Help . . . help me sit up," he said after a moment.
"No! Your leg—"
"I've gotta see, Sooze," he told her through locked teeth. "Just help ease me up. I'll . . . let you lift me. Won't use my legs or stomach muscles at all. Promise."
He managed a white-faced smile. Fortunately, he had no idea how ghastly it looked in the dim emergency lighting, but Susan did. She stared at him dubiously for several seconds, remembering his breathless scream when he'd tried to move on his own, and her stomach churned at the thought of inflicting still more hurt on him. But at the same time, she knew how desperately she needed for her big brother to be in charge, to take the burden of solitary decision from her shoulders. And on the heels of that knowledge came an ugly little worm of self-contempt for wanting Ranjit to make the decisions when he was so badly hurt. Yet he was almost half again her age, and she needed him to help her decide what to do, and she was terrified, however hard she fought not to show it.
"All right," she said finally. "But you let me do all the lifting, Ranjit! You hear me?"
"Yes, Ma'am," he got out in an almost normal voice, and managed another smile.
"All right," she said again, and slid around, shifting position to get both her hands under his shoulders. He was much taller and heavier than she, but she'd signed up for the phys-ed martial arts elective taught by Csilla Berczi over a year ago, as part of her determination to pursue a career in the Marines. Now, for the first time, she drew seriously on that training, closing her eyes and concentrating on her breathing as she focused herself on her task. And then, smoothly and with a strength even she had never guessed she possessed, she raised her brother into a sitting position on the crazily tilted floor of the lift car.
Ranjit's eyes flared wide as the small hands raised him. He'd promised not to use his muscles, but he'd been privately certain he would have no choice, even though he'd known—or feared he knew—how much it would hurt when his thigh muscles tightened. He'd been wrong. Susan boosted him smoothly, if not as easily as he might have lifted her, and then she was kneeling behind him, bracing him upright while her hands moved to rest on his shoulders and hug him tightly against her.
"Thanks, Sooze," he said, and then sucked in another shocked breath as he saw the rest of the lift car at last.
It was crushed. Its structure had never been designed to endure the abuse it had suffered, and one entire side had crumpled like tissue paper. Snow had poured in through the shattered crystoplast windows, and Ranjit's mind flinched away as he saw the huge branch or tree trunk which had come from somewhere up-slope to
slam into the car like a battering ram. It had smashed in one entire side of the car, and crushed and lifeless bodies marked its path. There were at least three of them, he thought, but there could have been more. There was too much blood and mutilation for him to tell for certain.
He looked around in disbelief. There had been over twenty people in the car with him and Susan. Surely someone else had to be alive!
As if his thought had summoned it, a hand moved feebly down beside the tree trunk.
"Sooze! Did—"
"I saw it," she told him before he could finish the question.
"You've gotta go check," he told her.
"But—" Susan swallowed, trying to cling to the sense of focus she had summoned to lift Ranjit's shoulders. If she moved, he would have to support himself—if he could, with the car tilted this way. That would be bad enough. But she would also have to go over there by the tree trunk. By the broken bodies, and the blood. The prospect was enough to make her want to cry out in refusal, and the thought of what she might find attached to that feeble hand—the damage she might see, the dying she might have no way to prevent or ease—screamed at her to say no. But she couldn't.
"You need me to hold you up," she said instead.
"Find something and prop me," he replied, and put his hands on the tilted floor behind him. He leaned his weight on them and looked back at her, facial muscles tight with the fresh pain even that movement sent crashing through him. "I can hold myself up for a few minutes. Find something, Sooze."
"I— All right. Don't you move, though!"
She slid herself cautiously back, watching to be sure he truly could support himself, and then started fumbling through the wreckage. Within seconds, she had found several skis, including one of her own, and she dragged them back to him. It took her only a few more seconds to figure out how to wedge them between two of the stanchions (one now badly twisted) to which standing passengers had held for balance when the car was moving, and Ranjit gave a half-sigh and half-moan of relief as he let himself slump back against the support they offered.
"Great, Sooze. This is great. Now go check."
She nodded, not trusting her voice, and crawled slowly towards the moving hand. She had to pick her way with care, for the lift car's floor was badly buckled, with rents which could easily have swallowed her up to the waist, and she could hardly even see them in the dim light. Worse, she seemed to feel the car quivering. She told herself that was just her imagination, that the car was buried immovably under an unknown depth of snow. It couldn't be moving with all that piled on top of it! Yet it didn't feel that way, and whether it was real or not, that quiver—a vibration, like the potential for movement—was one more ripple of terror to wash at her jaggedly held self-control.
She reached the tree trunk at last, trying very hard not to think about the mangled human limbs and the smell of blood as she inched her way down it. She squashed her awareness down into a hard little shell, an armored citadel where nothing could reach it, and concentrated on what she had to do because she did have to do it. Because Ranjit certainly couldn't, and that meant there was no one but her.
She made her careful way down the trunk to the hand that had moved. It was a small hand, not much larger than her own, protruding from a wash of snow, and it moved again, weakly, as she reached it. She drew a deep breath and leaned forward to touch it, and then almost screamed as it twisted around like a snake to lock upon her wrist. It clutched with desperate strength, pulling frantically, demanding rescue, and the force it exerted jerked her off-balance. Her forehead slammed into the tree trunk, and she heard herself cry out as the impact bloodied her nose. But the shock also seemed to help somehow, as if the familiarity of the pain had broken through her sense of unreality and horror, and she heaved back. She managed to yank free, and the hand flailed frantically while a muffled sound came from the snow through which it emerged.
A part of Susan wanted to stamp on the hand's fingers for frightening her that way, but it was only a tiny part, for most of her understood only too well the terror which had driven it. And so instead of striking back at it, she simply avoided it and began digging into the snow with her own hands. She'd lost her gloves somewhere, and the snow quickly numbed her fingers, but it didn't take long. She was able to make a good estimate of where the rest of the hand's body was from the angle of the arm, and she quickly excavated downward to reach the shoulder. The hand stopped its flailing, making it easier for her to work, as its owner realized someone was digging away the snow, and long, snow-matted golden hair gleamed palely in the dim light as she uncovered it. She worked her way cautiously higher, and then a head flung itself upward the moment she'd shoved enough snow aside.
"Oh God!" The ragged, gasping cry seemed to fill what remained of the lift car, and Susan stared into huge, terrified blue eyes. The girl before her was about midway between her and Ranjit in age, and probably would have been quite pretty under other conditions. But these weren't "other conditions," and she blinked and squinted up at Susan from a face twisted with fear.
And no wonder, Susan thought. The other girl must have been pinned face-down when the tree trunk crashed into the car, and only the fact that she'd managed to curl her right arm under as she hit had held her face and chest just a little clear of the car floor, forming an air space until Susan dug her out.
"What— What hap—" the blonde began, then chopped herself off rather than ask the excruciatingly obvious question. That was the first thing about her of which Susan unreservedly approved, and she smiled tightly.
"Who are you?" the blonde asked instead.
"Susan Hibson," Susan replied, and jerked her head back over her shoulder. "My brother Ranjit is back there. He can't move either. Who're you and how bad are you hurt?"
The blonde blinked at her, then craned her neck, trying to push herself up far enough to look past Susan at Ranjit. It was little more than a reflex action, and she couldn't complete it anyway with all the weight piled atop her, and she shook herself.
"Andrea," she said after a heartbeat. "I'm Andrea Manders."
"How bad're you hurt?" Susan asked again.
"I . . . don't know," Andrea said. "I don't think I'm hurt at all. I just can't move."
"That's all?" Susan pressed.
"I think so. I can feel my feet and my legs and everything. I just can't move them, and—hneeeek!"
Susan jumped at Andrea's sudden, totally unexpected squeal.
"What?" she demanded. "What?"
"Someone—someone touched me!" Andrea gasped. "There's someone else under all this stuff! Someone's holding my ankle!"
Susan flinched at the very thought and stared desperately at the massive barrier of wood and snow and crumpled alloy blocking her from whoever else might be alive underneath it all. There was no way in the world she could dig her way through all of that, and her soul cringed as she imagined someone else, trapped even more completely than Andrea or Ranjit, alone in the suffocating dark and cold while they ran out of air and warmth.
"We've got to get them out!" Andrea was saying. "We've got to—"
"I know!" Susan interrupted harshly. "I just don't know how." She bit her lip, wiping unconsciously at the blood still trickling from her mashed nose, and thought hard for several seconds. "Look," she told Andrea finally, "I've gotta go talk it over with Ranjit. Then I'll see what I can do."
"Don't go!" Andrea gasped.
"I've got to," Susan repeated.
"Please!" Andrea whispered. "Don't leave me alone!"
"You're not alone," another voice said. It was Ranjit, his words harsh-edged with his own pain and fear. "I'm here too—Andrea, was it?" he went on. "But Sooze is right. She's the only one of us who can move. She and I have to talk. But you're not alone, okay?"
"O-okay," Andrea got out after a moment, still shaky but no longer hovering on the edge of panic, and Susan bent down to pat her shoulder gently and then started climbing back up to Ranjit.
Her brother looked worse when she g
ot back to him, but he smiled at her. He didn't mention that he thought his right leg was bleeding under the wreckage that trapped it, or that a deadly chill was creeping into the limb despite his ski suit's best efforts.
"How is she?" he asked quietly, jerking his head in the direction of the girl he couldn't actually see from his position.
"Okay, I think," Susan replied, equally quietly. "But she's scared, Ranjit—even more scared than I am!" Her lips produced a trembling smile.
"Is there any way you can dig her out? So maybe the two of you could get whoever else is under there out?" Ranjit hated to ask the question and drop the responsibility for an answer on her, but no one else could answer it. He watched her bite her lip, but she shook her head without hesitation.
"No way," she said, and he heard her self-anger in the flatness of her tone. "She's caught under a branch of that tree or whatever it is. I can't shift it to get her out, and I can't get past it to dig whoever else is under there out. Too much snow and metal and rocks and junk are all mashed up together with the tree, Ranjit. I don't see how anyone can be alive under there . . . or how they can last very long if we don't get them out quick."
"I see." Ranjit closed his eyes against his own pain and fear and sucked in deep, dragging draughts of air. Susan was right, he thought. None of them could know what conditions were like on the far side of that tree, but the lift car hadn't been all that big to begin with. The open space they knew about and the mass of stuff they could see took up at least two-thirds of its original volume, and that meant anyone trapped beyond the tree was already living on borrowed time. For that matter, so was he, if the way his leg felt was any indication. Even Andrea might be wrong about her own condition—Ranjit hadn't realized how badly he was hurt until he tried to move, after all—and they had no way to know if more than one person was trapped on the other side of the car. But Susan couldn't dig whoever it was out. And that meant. . . .