"Careers!" said another man, whose ashy parka bore the name "O'Neill." "Sure now, Colonel darlin'," he went on, his face angry, his words soft, and the Irish in his accent dangerously broad, the way the Petaybean accent became when mocking the stupidity of; higher-ups. "We're that worried about our careers havin' just outrun yer volcano there. Seems to me that if it's our lives we're after valuin', the dama's the one to be listenin' to." He deliberately and defiantly chewed and swallowed a large hunk of his ration bar.
"Colonel Giancarlo, please," Torkel said. "I know you mean well but you're playing into her hands."
Watching his face, in which the desperation she had seen before was now suppressed, she saw him begin to calculate the effect of each word and attitude on the survivors. He was smart enough to know that he had alienated them initially, and smart enough to know that if he wanted to regain control of the situation he was going to have to have them on his side. "Folks, you'll have to forgive Colonel Giancarlo. He doesn't mean to sound callous but he's absolutely right. Our mission is one of the utmost priority and this woman has sided with the Petaybean insurgents creating this catastrophe!"
His arm swept across the devastation behind the survivors, the pulsing mud in the valley at their heels, the glow of the volcano visible even through the ashy miasma cloaking the area.
"Right," Connelly said, "one skinny little woman, with or without help, caused a volcano? I'm a mining engineer, Captain. Pull the other one."
The third man coughed both to clear his lungs and to get attention. "They might have set strategic charges that triggered the volcano."
"Th-that's right," the last survivor, a woman, stammered. Until she had eaten her ration bar, she had been trembling so violently that she had looked on the verge of convulsions; now her fearful glance centered on the presence of the authorities as represented by Torkel, Giancarlo, and Ornery. "Teams have disappeared here before. It can't all be natural."
"Damned right it's not," Torkel said, following up his advantage. "We were interrogating Maddock here, trying to get information from her to head off this disaster, when it blew up in our faces. Meanwhile, my own father, Dr. Whittaker Fiske, was coming to join a team in your vicinity to suss out the situation."
"In case you don't know who Dr. Fiske is," Giancarlo put in, "he's assistant chairman of the board, direct descendant of the man who developed the terraforming process that transformed the rock into a viable planet, and is the company's top expert on the environmental development and stability of all of Internal's terraformed holdings."
"He's the one man who can save this project and everybody involved with it, which is why you must help me find him," Torkel said, adding with a catch in his voice that could have even been genuine, "and he's my father. That's why we tried to supersede your need to move your wounded and effect your own rescue. Another copter would have been here for you immediately, of course, but this woman"-he jerked his thumb at Yana-"took advantage of the pilot's humanitarian instincts to turn the situation against us. But if one of you will guide me to where the shuttle came down, she won't be able to stop me from going in after my dad and saving this rock."
"Okay, who's it going to be?" Giancarlo demanded. "We need to move here and move fast. You heard Captain Fiske. We need volunteers to take us to the crash site."
"Say what?" O'Neill asked, not believing what he heard. "We come out of that"-he waved to the steaming valley.-"by the skin of our teeth and you're after us to risk our necks again? You're bloody nuts!"
The third man just shook his head tiredly. His shoulders were stooped under the weight of a variety of cameras and other instrument packages, as well as under the weight of the terror and pain he had just lived through. The straps kept Yana from seeing all of his name but "Sven" was part of it.
Torkel shook his head firmly, staring O'Neill down. "No. I'm not nuts. I'd never ask you to risk yourselves except that this it absolutely vital. It is imperative to the well-being of this planet and the personnel on it that we find my father with all possible dispatch."
"Find him? In that?" Sven demanded in a voice rasped harsh by smoke.
"There's no alternative, man!" Torkel was getting agitated, as he looked from Sven to Connelly and then to the other two, the stocky O'Neill and the stammering woman. "You did see the shuttle go down, right?"
Sven and Connelly both nodded.
"Well, where did it go down? Point me out the direction from here. I've coordinates, but they're only good in a copter."
Sven gave Connelly a long look and then, angling himself, he faced in a west-northwest position. "Near as I can remember it. We were scrambling ourselves by then."
"Why bother?" O'Neill asked, a trace of exasperation in his voice. "Captain, the shuttle was trying to land just as the volcano blew. The shock wave hit it like a ton of fraggin' bricks. I saw the craft knocked out of the sky with my own eyes. There's nobody could survive that." He obviously felt his own survival was miracle enough for one day.
"That's not true!" Torkel said, his voice suddenly wild with denial as he grabbed O'Neill's coat front and began shaking him. "My father has to have survived, you bloody idiot!" Then he realized what he was doing and loosed O'Neill with one more plea. "Don't discourage me, man. Help me, for pity's sake."
Yana had been watching this, also making certain that neither Giancarlo nor Ornery made any sudden moves toward her. She thought maybe Torkel's emotional display was genuine, but the man was devious-it could as well be a diversionary tactic. She couldn't take any chances. "Chill out, Torkel," she said. "These people are exhausted and in shock. They're not going to be fool enough to risk their lives going back in there."
But if Torkel was acting, he was doing it with enough conviction that he ignored her waving the gun. "You didn't actually see the volcanic blast destroy the shuttle, did you?" he demanded of O'Neill.
"No," O'Neill said tiredly. "It was intact when the force of the blast blew it off course."
"Ah, but it blew it away from the path of the debris, right?"
"Well, yes. It was debris, too, as far as the volcano was concerned," O'Neill told him.
"But there could have been survivors of the crash?"
Connelly, who Yana sensed was slowly being convinced by Torkel's insistence, told him in a weary but not unsympathetic voice, "That was three hours ago, Captain, and that volcano's been raining down and spitting mud out…"
Torkel heard the sympathy in the man's voice and pounced on it. "Will you guide me?"
But he had pushed too hard. Connelly withdrew and favored him with a disbelieving look, shaking his head. "The only one I'm guiding is me, out of here, when the copter gets back."
"Listen up, Connelly, and the rest of you, too," Giancarlo said. "Captain Fiske is not just any military captain. As son of Board member Fiske, he also holds the position of ranking executive on this planet at this time. Failure to cooperate with him and with this mission will have serious repercussions on your career."
"So," Connelly said, "will death. I'm not sticking around here waiting for that mountain to blow again for the chairman of the board. Besides, in these flying conditions"-he waved his hand off to the north-"no copter, any copter, would stay airborne for more than ten, maybe fifteen minutes." He snorted. "You'd do better using your feet."
When Giancarlo started toward him angrily, Yana spoke up again.
"I wouldn't, were I you, Colonel," she said. "They've done enough just making it here. And you both should know," she added, flicking a glance at Torkel, "how useless it would be to fly a copter in there!"
"Then, by all that's holy"- Abandoning his frantic make-'em-see-reason attitude, Torkel drew himself up into a noble-against-adversity stance. -"I'll make it on foot. Your packs there," he said, pointing to the pile slowly accumulating a cover of ash, "can be replaced at company expense when you get back to base. They won't be of much future use to you considering their present condition, but I would very much appreciate being able to scrounge what I need from them."