"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.