by David Weber
Novaya Tyumen glared after her, and his face went apoplectic purple as she pulled an ear bug and attached boom mike from her parka pocket, clipped it into place, and spoke briefly into the mike. She listened for a few seconds, her head cocked to one side, then said something else into the mike, turned on her heel, and strode directly to Major Stimson.
Novaya Tyumen's eyes blazed with fury as she headed for the Marine, for there could be no mistaking her purpose, whatever he might have ordered. He couldn't believe the sheer gall of her, and rage boiled within him as Stimson looked up at her approach. Ensign Haverty was saying something to the baron, but he waved the young woman aside and went stamping through the snow after Honor.
"—start right there," she was saying to the Marine when Novaya Tyumen reached them. She pointed at a corner of the crumpled lift tower. "From the tac system overlays, it looks like the main thrust of the avalanche must have been roughly in this direction," she turned, sweeping her arm to illustrate her sentence, "and that checks with where Major Berczi tells me the one recovered car was found, so we'll want to head northeast. We'll go with a half-klick DIR sweep by two of the pinnaces first, then follow up with your people's skinsuit sensors and snow probes on anything they turn up. If we get a solid hit, we'll—"
"What the hell d'you think you're doin'?" Novaya Tyumen bellowed. "Goddamn it, I ordered you—"
"Now just one minute, you—" Major Stimson's head had snapped up as Novaya Tyumen approached, and his eyes flashed as he began a furious reply, but Honor's raised hand stopped him. She watched the Marine's face for a moment, as if to be certain he had himself under control, and then turned to Novaya Tyumen with what a casual observer might have called an attentive expression. Only the small muscle twitch at the corner of her mouth gave any overt lie to that impression, but the baron flinched involuntarily under the disgust in her dark eyes.
"I believe I was speaking to Major Stimson, not to you, Sir," she told him coldly.
"And just what were you talkin' to him about?" Novaya Tyumen sneered.
"Doing our job," Honor said flatly.
"Well whatever orders you were givin' him are countermanded right now, Commander!" Novaya Tyumen told her in a low, vicious tone. "And you can just report your ass back aboard ship under arrest!"
"I'm afraid I can't do that, Sir," Honor told him. Something about her expression rang an alarm bell in his mind at last, but he was too enraged to heed it.
" `Can't do that'?" he mimicked savagely. "Well that's too fuckin' bad! Major Stimson!" he wheeled to the Marine. "You will place this officer under close arrest and escort her immediately back to her ship!"
"I'm afraid the Major can't do that, either, Sir." Honor told him, and her smile looked like a Sphinx neo-shark rising out of deep water as she looked over Novaya Tyumen's shoulder at someone behind him. "I believe Ensign Haverty is trying to get your attention," she observed.
Novaya Tyumen glared at her, confused, despite his fury, by the apparent non sequitur. Almost despite himself, he turned and looked in the direction of her gaze, and his confusion grew greater as he saw the ensign struggling through the snow towards them.
"What the fuck d'you want?" he barked as Haverty reached him.
"I was trying to tell you, Sir," the ensign replied. "You've got a com message back at the CP." Haverty's eyes strayed towards Honor, despite her best effort to keep them locked on Novaya Tyumen's face. "It's from Captain Tammerlane, Sir. You are to report back aboard immediately."
"What?" Novaya Tyumen goggled at her. "But—but what about the operation down here?" he demanded.
"All I know is what the Captain told me, Sir," Haverty said. "When I told him you were away from the CP, he told me to find you, tell you to report back aboard Broadsword immediately, and inform you that Commander Harrington is now in command of all SAR operations."
"But I'm in command of—"
"You are in command of the Skyhawk evaluation exercise," Honor told him flatly, "and that is all you are in command of. This is no longer an evaluation exercise, and you are no longer in command of it. So get out of the way, Commander. Now."
He stared at her, his eyes sick as he realized who she had been speaking to on her earbug mike. It hadn't been Stimson after all. She'd been tied into the com aboard her pinnace, sneaking around and talking to Tammerlane behind his back, and—
"Excuse me, Sir?" He turned as if in a daze and found himself face-to-face with Chief Zariello. "Lieutenant Hedges just informed me that I'm to transport you back to Broadsword, Commander," the CPO told him. Novaya Tyumen blinked at him, and Zariello nodded respectfully to the waiting pinnace. "If you'll come this way, Sir, we'll have you aboard in no time," he said, and there was no expression in his voice at all.
Eternity crawled as Susan Hibson clawed her way upward through a shifting, icy world. Her ski suit kept her body warm, but her soul was another matter, and the darkness and closeness and fear drove a dreadful chill deep into the heart of her. She had no light, no guide but her sense of up and down, and she wanted more than she had ever wanted anything before to curl up into a ball and just huddle where she was until someone found her. But she couldn't do that. Ranjit was hurt—worse than he wanted her to believe, she knew—and Andrea Manders was trapped, and so was whoever had gripped Andrea's ankle, and that meant she couldn't stop.
She closed her eyes, feeling the ice against her cheeks as she reached forward once more in the dark, driving her gloveless fingers into the snow ahead of her and dragging herself through it like some sightless worm. She'd lost her broken ski pole, and her hands were like frozen iron claws at the ends of her arms, she could barely feel them now, but she knew they'd been abraded bloody long since. Not that there was anything she could do about it, and she tried not to think about it, just as she tried not to think about how much air she had, or whether the snow would let more air pass through. She didn't think it would, but she didn't know, and it wasn't something she could afford to worry about now anyway.
Her thrusting hands hit something hard, ramming into it with enough force to make her cry out in pain and shock. She snatched them back against her, hugging them to her chest and whimpering while she waited for the hurt in her fingers to subside. It seemed to take forever, but at last she uncurled a little and reached out once more, tentatively. It was another rock, she thought. It wasn't the first she'd encountered, but as her hands tried to explore it and find a way around it, she realized it was the largest so far. There was only one way around it, she told herself, and braced her hand against its support, then arched her back. The snow was just loose enough that she could wedge it away from her, packing it more firmly, using her own body to shape the tiny, moving open space she carried with her, and she arched her back again and again, panting through gritted teeth as she forced the all-enfolding snow to conform to her desires. At last she let herself slump back, pressing her forehead against the rough, icy surface of the rock she had never seen while she sucked in air. She was so tired. So very, very tired. But at least the space about her was big enough now, and she rose on her knees and reached over her head with aching, exhausted arms. She drove her hands into the snow directly above her and felt it shower down. It fell with frightening speed now that she was digging vertically through it, and she bit her lip, forcing herself not to sob with terror as she visualized hitting a looser patch of snow, having it lose its cohesion and come rushing down like crystalline quicksand, filling her tiny space, sealing her mouth and nose alone in the dark—
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 mu
ch 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.
How far down am I? she wondered in the small corner of her mind which had any energy to spare from the brutal task of pushing herself on. Surely I should be seeing some sign of daylight coming down from above by now, shouldn't I? Am I even still going up? Or did I get turned around somehow by those limbs? Have I started digging downward again?
She didn't know. She only knew she couldn't stop.
"What is it, Stinker?" Honor asked. She knelt beside Nimitz in the gathering twilight, and the 'cat sat up on his rearmost limbs, reaching up to pat her chest urgently. His eyes bored into hers like augers, and she knew he was trying to tell her something, but she couldn't quite bring herself to believe the most logical explanation. Treecats had been used over the years in search and rescue efforts on Sphinx, but not as often as one might have expected, for the range at which they could sense human beings they'd never met before appeared to be limited. There had been instances of 'cats who were able to home in on total strangers at distances of up to a hundred or even two hundred meters, even under the most adverse conditions, but such cases were extremely rare—more the stuff of rumors and legends than recorded fact. More to the point, perhaps, Honor couldn't recall ever having seen any indication from Nimitz that he might be capable of such a feat. Besides, they were over three hundred meters beyond the line the alpine SAR teams had calculated as the furthest any of the lift cars might have been carried from the lift tower. The shouts and machinery sounds of the rescue effort were small and lost here, little stronger than the whine and moan of the gathering wind, and she looked around, trying to see anything that might have brought him here.
The 'cat made a sound, half-pleading and half-commanding, that dragged her attention back to him. He captured her eyes once more, and then he took his right true-hand from her chest and made an unmistakable gesture with it. A gesture that pointed straight down into the snow.
"Here?" As well as she knew him, Honor couldn't quite keep the doubt out of her voice. "You think there's someone down there?"
Nimitz bleeked loudly, then chittered at her and nodded hard. She looked around once more, back to where the stump of the li
ft—the better part of two kilometers from where she knelt—poked up out of the snow, tiny with distance. There was no way a lift car could have been carried this far, she told herself. Was there? Yet Nimitz seemed so positive. . . .
"All right, Stinker," she sighed. "What do we have to lose?"
The 'cat bleeked again, even louder, as she keyed her com once more. And then, as she started to speak into it, he turned and began to burrow into the snow himself. Snow tunnels were a game he and Honor had played often during her childhood on Sphinx, and it was remarkable how rapidly a six-limbed creature with centimeter-long claws could tear through snow. By the time Honor was done speaking on the com, he was two meters down and going strong.
Susan froze. For a moment, her mind was too foggy and confused to tell her why it had stopped her, and then she realized she'd heard something. It seemed impossible, after so long sealed up alone with the sound of her own breath roaring in her ears, yet she was certain she truly had heard something. She strained her ears, and then her heart gave a tremendous lurch. She had heard it! A scraping, scratching sound, like something moving through snow—something moving towards her!
She screamed, lunging suddenly in her dark little world, thrusting towards the sound, fighting her way up out of the endless blackness. She punched and kicked and ripped at the snow, and then, suddenly, her right fist broke through some final barrier into open air and she froze once more, unable to move, paralyzed with a strange terror which dared not believe she might actually have clawed her way back into the upper world at last. She wanted to shout, to move, to cry out for help, to do something. . . and she couldn't. She couldn't move at all, and so she simply lay there.
But then something touched her hand. Strong, wiry fingers closed on her wrist, holding it, and something soft and silken pressed against her torn and bleeding palm. A half-heard, half-felt croon of comfort burned into her, and Susan Hibson went limp, sobbing in a sudden torrent of relief like agony as the reassurance of that touch filled her.
