Susan Hibson moaned, fighting to shut her mind down, clinging to the memory of her brother, and made herself dig onward.
"This may be one of the lift cars here, Ma'am. According to the DIR, anyway." Major Stimson's finger jabbed at a blur of light in the holograph generated by the deep-imaging radar mounted in the shuttle hovering overhead. The DIR was intended to probe for underground bunkers and similar installations, but it should have been equally useful for work like this. Except that the avalanche had carried so much debris down with it that they could never be certain exactly what they were looking at. It could have been a lift car . . . or a boulder . . . or a section of the lift tower.
"What about sonar?" Honor asked.
"No more definitive," Stimson said unhappily. "Whatever it is, it's about thirty meters down, and resolution is crap with both systems. Thing is, if DIR is right and it is a lift car, sonar ought to be indicating a void inside it, and it isn't. Of course, thirty meters is a long reach for a skinny's sonar. We really need more of the big units the alpine SAR people use. But still—"
He shrugged unhappily, and Honor forced her face to show no expression as she nodded. She knew what he meant, of course. Even if it was a lift car, there could be at least one very simple reason why neither the DIR nor sonar had revealed any open air spaces within it.
"All right, Frank," she said after a moment. "I want a squad working on it anyway. Get one of the pinnaces over and use its tractors and belly fans to clear the first ten or fifteen meters for them, then they can go in with the hand tractors and shovels."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am." The Marine nodded and began speaking into his own boom mike, and Honor turned away to survey the snow field.
More civilian rescue personnel were arriving now, but most of them were concentrating on the ski slopes higher up the mountain. That made sense, she supposed, given that at least half the missing had been on the slopes when the avalanche hit. Others had taken over the areas in which Novaya Tyumen had concentrated his efforts, digging down into buried buildings and freeing the people trapped inside them. She couldn't really fault their priorities, and her pinnaces were busy everywhere, moving people and equipment wherever they were needed and bringing their tac sensors to bear in response to requests from rescue teams. But she herself and all of her Marines were committed to the area here around the beginners' slope lift and the neighboring intermediate slope lift. Major Berczi was with them, limping painfully around with a face like beaten iron, as they drove themselves into exhaustion trying to find the children death had snatched away from them. At least there were enough other rescue personnel present now to let them concentrate their efforts here without ignoring other needs, and she tried to feel grateful that it was so.
They'd been at it since late morning, and the shadows of early evening were stretching out across the churned snow. The winter mountain twilight wouldn't last long, and the temperature was dropping, too. By morning, all the snow softened by the sun would have frozen hard, making their task that much more difficult. But, of course, by morning anyone who was still alive underneath this wilderness of hostile white would almost certainly be dead, anyway, she thought grimly.
Nimitz made a soft sound on her shoulder, and she reached up to comfort him. He pressed against her gloved palm for a moment, but then, to her surprise, he leapt lightly down. He landed in the snow and crouched there for a long moment, whiskers quivering and ears cocked, and then he began to move slowly away from her. She stared at him, her weary mind trying to figure out what he was up to, and he looked back over his shoulder at her. He flirted his tail and bleeked up at her, and then went bounding away into the shadows.
"Ranjit? Ranjit!"
Ranjit's eyes snapped open as the sudden panic in Andrea's voice penetrated his hazy thoughts. He blinked hard, then rubbed his face weakly, trying to scrub himself back to wakefulness. It didn't work very well, and his mouth moved in a parody of a smile as he realized why. It wasn't simple fatigue or sleepiness reaching out for him; it was blood loss from his damaged leg and the cold biting into him where his ski suit must have been rent and torn.
"Yes?" he said after a moment, and noted the hoarseness of his voice with a sort of dull bemusement.
"I—" Andrea paused. "I was afraid you'd passed out," she finished after a moment, and he astounded them both with a dry, coughing burst of laughter.
Passed out? I don't think so, he thought. You were afraid I'd gone and died on you, Andrea. But I haven't. Not yet.
" 'S okay," he said finally, when the laughter had released him. " 'M just tired, you know? Sleepy. G'on talkin' to me. It'll keep me awake."
"Are you sure?" The voice of the girl he couldn't remember ever having seen came back to him from the dimness, and he nodded.
"Positive," he said. The word came out sounding like a drunk he'd once heard, with a sort of exaggerated, woozy precision. He wanted to giggle some more at the thought, but he managed not to.
"All right," Andrea said. "You know, this was the first time I ever came to the Atticas for the skiing. We always went to the Black Mountains before. I don't know why. Just closer, I guess. Anyway—"
She went on talking, hearing the thin veneer of calm holding her own words together like glue against the terror quivering deep inside her. She'd never said anything so inane and pointless in her life, she thought. Yet somehow, however disjointed and pointless it might have been, it was also the most important thing she'd ever told anyone.
Because it proved she was still alive, she thought, just as the weakening grip on her ankle told her at least one other person still lived beyond the barrier which pinned her, and just as Ranjit's occasional responses to her questions proved he was still alive.
For now.
Susan's hands were more than simply abraded now. She'd been forced to work her blind, agonizing way through and around a tangle of broken limbs the avalanche had carried down from above with it, and she'd injured her right hand badly when she caught it in the angle of two of the branches. She couldn't tell how badly it was bleeding, and she was terrified of meeting another, worse tangle—one she couldn't find a way past.
She was weeping now. She couldn't stop. Every muscle and sinew ached and throbbed and burned, and she wanted so badly to make it stop. Just to make it end. But she couldn't. Ranjit depended on her, and so she drove her exhausted body upward.