"Have you checked out this end of the car, Sooze?" he asked finally.
"This end?" she repeated, then shook her head. "I've been kinda busy," she added pointedly, and he surprised both of them with a breathless, pain-curdled chuckle.
"I guess you have," he agreed, and turned his head to meet her eyes. "But you're gonna have to check now, Sooze. This is the upper end of the car. That means it's the one closest to the surface."
"Closest to—?" Susan began, then cut herself off, and her eyes widened with a new, fresh fear as she realized what he meant.
Honor Harrington stood with her hands jammed deep in the pockets of her Navy-issue parka, and despite her total lack of expression, a fury far colder than Mount Pericles' snow blazed within her as she watched Commander Novaya Tyumen wave his hands and snap orders at the Marines and Navy ratings around him. It hadn't taken the baron long to get himself dirtside after Captain Tammerlane's brutal assessment of operational realities, and he had immediately snatched command back from Honor.
A part of her had wanted to let him have it without a struggle, for she was appalled by the scale of the destruction. The Star Kingdom hadn't seen a natural disaster like this one or such a heavy loss of civilian lives in decades, and very little in her Navy training had taught her how to cope with civilian death and devastation on such a scale. But even as that ignoble sliver of her had wanted to cringe away and let someone else decide how to deal with it, her own stubborn sense of responsibility had rebelled against Novaya Tyumen's authority. Partly, she knew, it was that she didn't trust his ability to cope with the situation, but there was more to it. Honor had been raised in the Copper Wall Mountains of Sphinx. She might never have seen a catastrophe of these dimensions, given Sphinx's sparser population, but she knew avalanches, and she'd pulled her share of the load in a couple of avalanche rescues before she left Sphinx for the Naval Academy at Saganami Island. But Novaya Tyumen was from Manticore, and she very much doubted he had ever even come close to anything as arduous and risky as something like this.
Besides, she told herself with brutal frankness, I know perfectly well that deep down inside I'm convinced I can do just about anything better than he can, now don't I?
She snorted at the thought, and Nimitz bleeked reprovingly from her shoulder. Insalubrious as humans might find the current weather conditions, the 'cat was quite comfortable. Gryphon weather might be more fractious and changeable than that of Sphinx, but Sphinx's winters were far colder, and Nimitz was equipped with the long, silky coat to survive them. Yet if the weather didn't worry him, the empathic 'cat had been savagely battered by the emotions of the humans around him. The worst combers of panic had passed, which helped, but rescuers had already dug out and brought in over fifty injured people. The echoes of pain coming from those who had been hurt, mingled with the desperate determination of those trying frantically to find still more injured in time, remained more than sufficient to keep him off balance and edgy. Yet he was getting on top of it once more, and his bleek scolded her for the sharp edge of self-condemnation in her thoughts.
She reached up to caress his ears, but she never took her eyes from Novaya Tyumen. The baron hadn't bothered with a single word of approval for anyone since he grounded, but he'd acted with dispatch and at least an outer appearance of being in command of both the situation and himself. He'd quickly taken the scanner data Honor had gathered on her approach to the resort (and plotted on an overlay from file sensor passes made earlier in the course of the exercise), and shouted for the senior member of the Athinai staff.
He hadn't had to shout. If he'd bothered to ask Honor, she could have introduced him to the man, because the resort's manager had been standing right beside her. The two of them had already agreed upon the rough outlines of a plan to use the Navy-gathered data to guide and coordinate search and rescue operations, and they'd been working out the best way to make use of the Marines and ratings aboard the pinnaces when Novaya Tyumen intervened.
Not that the baron had cared about anything Honor might have worked out. He didn't even ask about it. He'd simply begun giving the resort manager orders, as if the man were a boot spacer on his first deployment or one of the Agursky family's lackeys back on Manticore, and Honor had seen the fury blazing even behind the manager's frantic concern for the scores of guests and employees still unaccounted for. The man had looked at her for a moment, his face stark with his desire to appeal to her, but she had shaken her head minutely. She was fairly certain Novaya Tyumen hadn't seen her gesture—not that she'd really cared particularly. But the manager had, and after an instant, he'd nodded back ever so slightly. Finding and rescuing people mattered more than who got the credit for it—to the two of them, at least—and Novaya Tyumen was clearly capable of obstructing any rescue efforts which didn't bear his own personal stamp of approval.
And so Honor had found herself shunted aside. Technically, as the second ranking naval officer present, she was Novaya Tyumen's second-in-command. In fact, he'd chosen to completely—and pointedly—ignore her. He'd cut her entirely out of the loop and made it perfectly clear that he was about as likely to cut off his own right hand as he was to give her any share of the "glory" which might flow from the operation. It sickened her that anyone could be so petty as to think about stupid personal vendettas—especially vendettas which had nothing at all to do with anything anyone had ever done to them in the first place—when innocent lives were at risk. But Novaya Tyumen clearly could be and was, and furious though she was at the calculated insult, she had no intention of fighting him over it. As Broadsword's executive officer, she supposed she might have ignored him where her own people were concerned, but only a third of the pinnaces and personnel assigned to the drop exercise had come from her ship, and he obviously assumed that everything assigned to the exercise was still his to command. Honor was fairly certain that if she'd appealed to Captain Tammerlane again, her CO would have slapped Novaya Tyumen down once more . . . but she couldn't be certain. Novaya Tyumen was the senior officer present, after all. Under the circumstances, it made a lot of sense to leave him alone as long as he got the job done, however infuriating Honor might find his treatment of her or her people. And it was also true that the Service remembered an officer who made a habit of going over a superior's head or behind her back. However justified her actions, anyone who got a name for stabbing her superiors in the back could expect to pay the price for it down the road. Not that Honor would have let that stop her. Or she didn't think she would have, anyway. It was just that she had no desire to get Tammerlane involved once more. She didn't need any glory, and she refused to hamper operations by fighting some sort of turf war at a moment like this.
Better one person in command, even if he's not the best person for the job, than two of us fighting each other and getting even less done, she thought bitterly. But—
"Excuse me, Commander."
The voice came from behind her, and she turned quickly.
The woman who had spoken had dark auburn hair, only a little longer than Honor's, and gray eyes in a face whose high cheekbones promised more than a dash of Old Earth's Slavic inheritance. The left side of her face was a mass of bruises, the eye on that side was swollen almost shut, and she listed to port as she stood there, clearly favoring her left hip. But the unbruised side of her face was tight, almost desperate, and Honor heard Nimitz make a soft, muttery-snarly sound as the other woman's emotions hammered at him.
"Yes?" Honor replied cautiously.
"Are you Commander Harrington?" the woman asked.
"Yes. Yes, I am." Honor knew she sounded surprised by the question, because she was, but the other woman nodded as if in grim satisfaction and thrust out her right hand.
"Berczi," she said as Honor took it. "Major Csilla Berczi, late of Her Majesty's Marines."
"Ah." Honor returned her firm grip, then cocked her head to one side. "What can I do for you, Major?"
"What I'd like best would be for you to lend me a pulser and let me hav
e three seconds alone with that pompous, arrogant, mind-fucking son-of-a-bitch," Berczi said, jerking her head contemptuously to where Novaya Tyumen stood giving his orders. The glare she turned upon the commander for a long, poisonous moment was not one Honor would have liked to see directed at herself, but then the other woman shook herself and forced a humorless grin. "Short of your assistance in culling the human genotype, however, I need your help getting around the asshole, Commander."
"My help getting around him?" Honor gazed into the other's eyes and quirked an inquiring eyebrow.
"Yes." Berczi bit the word off, then flushed, as if ashamed of herself for showing her anger, and drew a deep breath. "Frank Stimson was one of my platoon commanders when he was a brand new lieutenant, Commander," she said, pointing with her chin—much less violently, this time—to where the commander of Broadsword's Marine detachment had set up his own CP to pass on Novaya Tyumen's orders. "When I asked him if there was anyone reasonable involved in managing this cluster fuck, he told me to talk to you."
"About?" Honor asked coolly, refusing to allow herself to be drawn into agreeing (openly, at least) with Berczi's obvious opinion of Novaya Tyumen.
"The beginners' slopes," Berczi said, and this time there was a raw, urgent note in her voice. "They're back that way—" she waved a hand in the direction of the avalanche's worst devastation "—and I can't get that bastard"—fresh venom crackled in her voice as she jabbed a thumb at Novaya Tyumen—"to even authorize search parties for them!"
"What?" Honor blinked.
"He says he doesn't have the resources," Berczi said viciously. "According to him, there's no chance anyone survived over there, and he `can't afford to divert' his efforts from areas where there may actually be someone to rescue. The resort has some people searching, but they don't have gear as good as the Navy or the Corps, and your precious Novaya Tyumen—" she made the title a mockery "—is insisting on telling them what to do, as well. As if he could find his own ass with both hands and a flashlight!"
"I see." Honor's soprano was colder than the mountain wind, and she felt Nimitz's quivering anger as he clung to her shoulder while she turned suddenly arctic eyes to sweep the area Berczi had pointed to. A part of her could follow Novaya Tyumen's argument, for they did have limited resources. But those resources would begin to grow as the emergency response teams from other resorts arrived. The three nearest ones were already here; within hours, there would be special alpine SAR units here from all over the planet. When that happened, Novaya Tyumen would probably find himself shouldered aside by the experts, and she couldn't quite help wondering if that was part of the reason for his present autocracy. Did he want to make perfectly certain that his name was firmly stamped on any credit that might emerge from the rescue operations before someone else arrived to supplant him?
But whatever he was thinking couldn't change reality, and the reality was that saving lives in a situation like this was enormously dependent on the speed with which victims could be found . . . and that Novaya Tyumen had chosen to organize his available personnel and equipment in a way Honor would never have accepted. She'd had personal experience of the incredible, improbable ways in which human beings could survive something like this. She'd seen men and women dug out of ten and even fifteen meters of snow, still alive and—somehow—breathing. But she also knew from that same experience how critical it was that such people be found and retrieved before hypothermia or exhaustion or untreated injuries killed them anyway.
But Novaya Tyumen didn't have her experience, and he had detailed the bulk of his Navy and Marine personnel into simple labor gangs, digging into areas where there were known survivors, whereas only a relatively small percentage of his strength was assigned to hunting for other victims. Now that she considered his operational patterns in the light of Berczi's savage comments, she realized things were even worse than she'd thought before. Even the pinnaces he had flying overhead were concentrated on a limited area, searching the portions of mountainside where the damage was less total and avoiding the areas of maximum devastation.
There was such a thing as refusing to throw away resources by reinforcing failure, Honor admitted, but now that Berczi's description had focused her thoughts and pulled them away from how Novaya Tyumen had shoved her aside, it was suddenly clear to her that he had completely written off those more devastated areas. If the resort employees wanted to divert their efforts, or if any of the other civilian rescue teams cared to search those areas as they arrived, that was fine with him, but he himself wasn't interested.
She tried to force herself to give him the benefit of the doubt. To remind herself that he was with BuShips—an engineering specialist more accustomed to a bureaucratic environment than finding himself at the sharp end of the stick. She even reminded herself of her own earlier thoughts about the need to avoid fragmenting command of the operation. But none of that really mattered to her any longer. Not compared to the fact that he had chosen to write off a third of the total resort area and make no effort at all to search for anyone who might be out there and alive. And not, she admitted with scathing self-honesty, now that she realized how her preoccupation with personal concerns and slights had prevented her from realizing sooner that he had.
"You mentioned the beginners' slopes, Major?" she said to Berczi.
"Yes." Berczi's eyes were locked to Honor's face. "There were six lift cars that I know of in the air on their way up the mountain when the slide hit. One of them, the one that was furthest up-slope when the slide hit, was discovered over there—" she pointed to a spot over five hundred meters from the demolished stump of lift tower still poking out of the churned snow "—almost immediately. Most of the people in it were kids. A third of them were dead." She swallowed, then drew a deep breath. "But I'm here with a field trip from the school I currently teach in, Commander, and there are at least five more lift cars out there. One of them had two of my kids and twenty or so other people aboard it." She turned to face Honor squarely. "That's bad enough, but their parents are already on board a fast transport inbound from the Unicorn Belt. I don't have an ETA yet, but it can't be more than a few hours from now, and if they get here and discover that the asshole idiot in charge refuses even to look for their children—"
She chopped herself off, staring at Honor in stark, simple appeal, and Honor nodded slowly. She understood Berczi's desperation now, and she supposed some people might have called it personal. Well, no doubt it was. But that made it no less valid, and Honor respected her no less for her determination to do something about it.
"I see, Major," she said, and her lips curled in what might have been called a smile. "I see indeed. We'll just have to see to it that they don't have to deal with that, won't we?"
"I don't know if I can, Ranjit," Susan said in a small voice. She hated herself for admitting it—more for admitting it to herself than for admitting it to him—but she couldn't help it. She knelt on the floor of the lift car, staring through the twisted opening which had once held a crystoplast window, and the hole she'd gouged out of the wall of snow beyond it with a salvaged ski pole looked back at her.
"I know it's scary, Sooze," Ranjit said, fighting to keep his growing pain and weakness out of his voice. "But it's the only way you can get out, and we don't have enough time to wait for them to find us." He managed not to add "If they find us," but from the way she turned her head to look at him, he knew she'd heard it anyway.
"I know," she said after a moment, and managed a weak smile. "I just wish I knew how stinking far down we are."
"I do too," he told her, trying to match her smile while his heart wept for the courage she clung to with both hands.
"Well, at least it's not packed as hard as it could be, I guess," she sighed. She knelt there a moment longer, then raised her voice. "Andrea?"
"Yes?" the older girl's strained voice floated up out of the shadows.
"You take good care of Ranjit while I'm gone, hear?" Susan called, trying to smile at her brother again. "H
e's a doof, but I kinda like him."
"I'll do my best," Andrea promised, and Ranjit blinked on tears as Susan nodded to him.
"Be back as soon as I can," she told him quietly, and climbed out through the window, taking her ski pole with her. She pushed herself up into the hole she'd already dug, and Ranjit turned his head as far as he could, watching more snow fall through the shattered window onto the lift car's floor. It fell quickly at first, then more slowly . . . and then not at all as Susan tunneled higher into the underbelly of the avalanche, burrowing her way through it, and the snow she excavated packed the tunnel behind her. He pictured her forcing her way through the cold, terrifying darkness, all alone in her tiny, moving airspace as she burrowed towards the sun like some small, blind creature, and he closed his eyes and prayed as he had never before prayed in his life.
* * *
"Don't be stupid, Commander!" Novaya Tyumen snapped. "Nothin' could possibly have survived over there!" He swept an angry arm at the area around the broken-off lift tower. "If we're goin' to find anyone alive, it'll be out there!" He jabbed an index finger at the zone in which he had concentrated his efforts.
"With all due respect, Sir, I disagree," Honor said. No one but her had to know how hard it was to keep her words level and dispassionate, but her eyes bored into Novaya Tyumen's. "We've already recovered one lift car that was in the area in question at the time the avalanche hit, and the majority of the people aboard it were still alive. On that basis, I don't believe we can ignore the possibility that others might have survived the initial disaster, as well. And—"