Dies the Fire

by S. M. Stirling

  He thought the tail was still pointing up—the current would probably flip the little ship over on her back in a second or two, though.

  Get the hell out of here, gyrene, he told himself.

  It was still hard to pull his face out of the illusory safety of the bubble. He did, and then jerked himself through the hatch, pushing upward with all the wiry strength of his legs. The cold gnawed inward; water like this would kill you in ten minutes or less, and his sodden coat pulled at him. His head broke the surface with a gasp, and the moonlight was like a flare after the darkness of the sunken plane.

  "Over here!" he heard; Astrid Larsson's voice, and then her sister, Signe, joining her. "Over here! Dad, Eric, over here!"

  They were calling from the north bank about twenty feet away; he couldn't make much of it out, except a looming shadow, but he struck out in that direction, forcing limbs to move. The current was pulling at him too; he fought it doggedly. When he got close enough the girls held out sticks to him; he ignored them, clamped a hand on the trunk of a providential fallen pine, and levered himself up.

  "Eric, Eric!" one of the Larsson girls called.

  He turned his head; Eric Larsson was right behind him, sculling on his back with his father floating alongside on his back, held in an efficient-looking one-armed clamp. Havel turned to help him haul the dead weight out of the water, grunting through the chattering of his teeth.

  "Good work, kid," he said, as they pulled the older man up the slope and onto a ledge a little above the water, laying him down beside his wife.

  Didn't think you had it in you, he didn't add.

  "Senior year swim team," the boy stuttered. "Signe too. God, God, what's wrong with Mom?"

  "Death from hypothermia, unless we get a fire started," Havel said; his fingers had gone numb and clumsy, and it was getting hard to make them work.

  The temperature wasn't all that low, a couple of degrees below freezing, but they'd all been soaked to the skin by water as cold as water could get and not turn into solid ice; and a wet body lost heat twenty-five times faster than a dry one. Plus it was going to get a lot colder before sunrise.

  He had a firestarter kit in one pocket of the jacket—it was the main reason he hadn't shed it. The place they'd landed was good as anything likely to be close by, fairly dry and with a steep rise right behind it, even a bit of an overhang about twelve feet up. He gathered fir needles and leaves and twigs with hands that felt like flippers belonging to a seal a long way away, heaped them up and applied the lighter. Flames crackled, stuttered through the damp tinder, then caught solidly.

  "Careful!" he said, as Signe Larsson came up with an armful of fallen branches. "One at a time. Check that they're not too damp first. Get more and stack it near the fire to dry out."

  The fire grew, ruddy and infinitely comforting; he moved the two older Larssons to lie between it and the wall, where reflected heat would help a bit. As the light grew he tried to examine them as best he could; their children crowded around. The youngsters didn't have anything but scrapes and bruises, but the parents …

  "Your dad's had a bad knock on the head," he said. "He'll be all right." I hope, he added to himself; a concussion was no joke.

  Mrs. Larsson was a different story; semiconscious, and shivering uncontrollably. He turned her head to the light. No concussion there, thank God for small mercies.

  "Her right thighbone's broken," he said; despite the lightness of his touch on the swollen, discolored flesh she started with a squeal of pain.

  Christ almighty, how did she manage that, strapped in? A major fucking fracture, joy and delight undiluted. Looks like the bone ends cut things up in there. At least nothing's poking through the skin.

  "And her shoulder's dislocated. You two hold her."

  They did; he grabbed shoulder and arm, and gave a quick strong jerk. The shoulder joint went click as it slipped back into its socket; Mary Larsson's eyes turned up in her head, and she fainted. Which was probably all to the good, because there wasn't a thing on earth he could do about a major fracture of the thigh here and now.

  "No, don't build the fire any bigger," he said, looking up as Astrid came into sight doggedly dragging a small log. For a wonder, her cat was with her—out of his box, his orange fur slicked to his body, and looking extremely unhappy.

  "You get more heat out of a couple of small fires than a big one," he explained; you couldn't get close enough to a bonfire to get the full benefit. "Start another one, there. Let's get going—"

  He showed them what to do; build three medium-sized fires, and heap rocks close by on the river side of each blaze—when the stones had absorbed some heat they could be put around the injured couple, and in the meantime the rock would reflect some of the fire's warmth back towards them. For a wonder, there was plenty of fallen wood of about the right size to pile up in reserve; the only tool they had with them was his folding knife, and it wasn't much use as a woodchopper.

  "Get the wet clothes off and prop them up on sticks to dry near the fires, like this," he said. "OK, cover up with these dry leaves and cuddle up close to your folks. The body heat will help. Got to get their core temperatures up or they'll go into shock."

  By the time that everything was as close to finished as he could get it the numbness had faded, and he was just miserably cold. He looked at his watch—stopped at precisely 7:15—and then up at the stars, and the moon just clearing the heights to the south; maybe two hours since they'd hit. No point in delaying any further.

  "Right, kid, let me have your jacket," he said with a sigh.

  Eric Larsson had recovered a bit too, enough for physical misery to bring out irritation; his glare was sullen. "My name's not kid, and why do you want it?" he said.

  Havel fought back an impulse to snap; it wouldn't help right now. "Because my sheepskin's too heavy," he said. "Eric. Yours is nylon and it won't get soaked, but I need it to hold some water next to my skin when I dive, I'll lose a little less body heat that way. It isn't a wetsuit but it's the best we've got."

  The three youngsters stared at him. "Dive?" Signe Lars-son said incredulously, her breath smoking out from the heap of leaves and needles where she huddled.

  "Yeah, dive," he said, giving her a crooked smile, and jerked his head towards the black water that gurgled behind them. "The current could push the ship downstream overnight, and there's stuff in there we really need—the first-aid kit, and some emergency rations. We're a long way from anywhere, I'm afraid."

  * * * *

  By dawn Mary Larsson was awake enough to drink some of the hot sweet chocolate. Her husband held her head up, bringing the tin cup to her lips with infinite tenderness until she turned her head away and slid back into semi-consciousness.

  The morphine had taken effect, and an inflatable pressure-bandage immobilized her thigh; they'd put one of the high-tech thin-sheet insulating waterproofs under her, over a bed of pine boughs, and slipped her into the sleeping bag of the same material. The rest of the Larssons were taking turns with the two remaining sheets, using them as cloaks while they huddled by the hearths.

  Mike Havel squatted by one of the fires, concentrating on getting the last of the MRE out of the plastic pouch; then he wolfed down another chocolate bar and finished his cup of cocoa. That meant he'd put away about five thousand calories, and he'd need every one of them. It was barely forty degrees with the sun well up; the south-facing riverside cliff caught a welcome amount of the light, but it was still damned uncomfortable in their damp clothes.

  Signe was finishing her pouch, too, with no more than a muttered gross at the meat and the amount of fat. Havel gave her a wink as he finished and rose; she turned half away, spoon busy. The rations had been designed with heavy labor in mind, and the cold counted as that.

  Her father started slightly as the pilot touched him on the arm. He'd been murmuring something. It sounded like: I'm sorry, Mary-girl, I'm so sorry. Havel pretended not to hear, and said softly: "We have to talk, Mr. Larsson," he said, jer
king his head slightly to make clear that he meant in private.

  "Yeah," Larsson said. His face firmed a little as they walked a dozen paces upstream. "What the hell happened, Havel?"

  "The engines cut out," he said. "So did every damn electrical system in the plane. I tried to restart her, but—" He shrugged.

  Larsson sighed. "Water under the bridge," he said, then realized what he'd said, half chuckled, and stopped with a wince. "Signe and Eric told me how you got me out, by the way, Mike. Thanks."

  He held out his hand. Havel shook it briefly, embarrassed. "Part of the job, Mr. Larsson—"

  "Ken."

  "Ken. Couldn't leave you there, could I?"

  Larsson managed a smile. "The hell you couldn't," he said. "All right, let's get down to business. I remember a white flash … "

  "Me too, and your kids. That's not all, though." He showed his watch; it was a rugged Sportsman's Special quartz model.

  "This stopped. That might be an accident, but all your watches stopped at exactly the same time, just before we went down. I'd swear it was the same instant the engines died, too. The GPS unit in my survival pack is kaput, and I know that wasn't the water—everything in the pack came out of it dry—and it was secured and padded, too. The ELT in the plane is out, and those are real rugged. The flashlight and electric firestarter and the radio and everything else electrical in the pack are dead as well. Nothing visibly wrong, they just don't work. What's the odds on all that stuff going out at exactly the same time?

  Larsson's heavy face went tight. "EMP?" he said.

  "I don't think so," Havel said. "I don't know what the hell it was, though, but we're in deep shit. I know pretty well where we are—"

  He brought out the map of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness; it was printed on waterproof synthetic silk, colorfast and wrinkle-resistant.

  "Hereabouts." His finger touched down. "Here, just east of Wounded Doe Ridge, near as I can figure, and north of West Moose Creek."

  They knelt, putting rocks to hold down the corners of the map.

  "So we're not far from the State Centennial Trail, maybe twenty miles south as the crow flies. A lot longer on foot, of course, and most of it up and down."

  Larsson nodded; he was a part-time outdoorsman too. "Goddamn, but my head feels thick … what do you think we should do?"

  "Well … " Havel hesitated. "Normally—if there's such a thing as a normal crash—I'd say you and your wife and daughters stay here, Eric and I go out on foot and get help, and we send a helicopter to lift you out. There's not likely to be anyone on the Centennial Trail in March, but there's a ranger cabin with two-way radios along it and this sure as hell justifies breaking in. Two, maybe three days on foot for fit men pushing hard."

  Larsson frowned and rubbed a hand over his face, the skin of his palm rasping on the silvery-gray stubble that coated his jowls. "You don't want to do that?"

  "Mr.—Ken—I checked that plane myself, and Steelhead has good mechanics. There wasn't something wrong with the ship; she was knocked out. And by the same thing that screwed our watches and the GPS in my pack. OK, so say, worst case, the radio at the cabin isn't working either."

  "Ouch."

  Havel nodded: "That means sixty miles on foot out to U.S. 12, after we get to the Centennial. Call that two days and nights and most of the next morning, carrying a stretcher; one long day and a half, again for fit men pushing real hard. Assuming we can get help there, that's a week or worse for you here—not much food even if we leave you all of it, and no shelter to speak of. The nights get real cold hereabouts in March and it could snow, snow hard. Plus if it gets warmer, the river could rise right to the cliff with snowmelt. If we got her out to the trail, at least there would be shelter and food."

  He pushed down a whisper of cold apprehension. Of course we can get help on U.S. 12. It's a goddamned major road, after all.

  "Mary could die in a week here," Larsson said flatly. "But she could die if we try to move her. Over country like this, carrying her—"

  Havel shrugged slightly. "And it'll be a lot more than three days to the ranger cabin, with a stretcher. Call it six. It could go bad either way. That fracture is ugly. I've got antibiotics in the kit, but it needs a doctor to go in and fix things. The swelling looks bad, too. Moving will hurt, and it'll be dangerous. But staying here for a week, cold and hungry—" He spread his hands. "Your family—your call."

  Larsson held out a hand. "Let me see your watch."

  The older man turned it over and over; it had a thick tempered-glass casing set in stainless steel, and a set of tumblers in a row to show the day of the month.

  "I know these. Good model." He sighed and handed it back. "Christ, there's no right decision here, but we can't sit around with our thumbs up our ass, either." He looked up at the streaked gray clouds. "We'll carry Mary out."

  "Right," Havel said. It'll be a lot harder this way, but I'm glad he said that. "We'll rig a stretcher and I'll just test fire the rifle while you break this to your kids."

  Ten minutes later the pilot stared at the weapon in amazed disgust. "Now, this is just—" He cut himself off, aware of the audience.

  "Maybe the bullets got wet," Signe Larsson said helpfully.

  Michael Havel thought there was the hint of a smile around her lips for the first time since the accident; normally, he'd have enjoyed that, even if the humor was directed at him. Now he was too sheerly disgusted.

  "They're waterproof," he said tightly. "And the case was sealed and dry when I opened it. And I fired rounds from the same batch day before yesterday on the range."

  Kenneth Larsson held out a hand. "Let me have a round," he said. "And do you have a multitool with you?"

  There was an authority in his voice that reminded Havel that the older Larsson was more than a middle-aged fat man with plenty of money and bad family problems; he was also an engineer, and he'd managed a large business successfully for two decades.

  Havel worked the bolt, caught the 7.62mm round as the ejector flicked it out, and flipped it to Larsson off thumb and forefinger like a tossed coin.

  "This is a Leatherman," he added, handing over the multi-tool from his survival kit—something like a Swiss army knife on steroids, with a dozen blades and gadgets folding into the twin handles.

  "Good make," Larsson replied. "I prefer the Gerber, though."

  He took out his own, configured them both as pliers, and gripped one on the bullet and the other near the base of the cartridge case. Then he began to twist and pull, hands moving with precisely calculated force. When he'd finished he tossed the bullet aside and poured the propellant out on the dry surface of the rock.

  "Looks OK," he said, wetting a finger and touching it to the small pile of off-white grains to taste it. "If I remember my chemistry courses … yeah, dry and sharp. OK, let me have a splinter from the fire."

  They all stood back a little. Larsson watched in fascination as the nitro powder flamed up with a sullen reddish fizzle.

  "Well, I'll be damned," he said. "Did you see that, Mike?"

  Havel caught himself before he answered Yessir. "I did."

  "Yes," Larsson said. "Whatever's happened, the stuff is slower-burning now. Not really explosive propagation at all, even if the primer had gone off, which it didn't. Hand me another, would you? One of the ones you tried to fire."

  He repeated the process and returned Havel's Leather-man with an abstracted frown. "If I didn't know better, I'd swear this stuff wasn't nitro powder at all! It's not burning at anything like the rate it should be … but that's a physical constant!"

  Havel felt his mouth go dry. "So's what happens inside a battery, or an electric circuit," he said.

  "Wouldn't it be wonderful if all the guns everywhere have stopped working?" Signe Larsson said softly.

  Michael Havel stared at her for a moment, his face carefully blank; but he was thinking so hard he could hear his own mental voice in his ears: Girlie, if I were a bad guy and coming after you with evil intent, woul
d you rather shoot me or fight me hand-to-hand?

  Something of the thought must have shown despite his effort at diplomatic calm; she turned a shoulder towards him and busied herself with wrapping her share of the group's load in a spare shirt before tying that across her back with the sleeves. Havel shook himself; once they got back to civilization, her opinions would mean even less than they did now. He removed the telescopic sight from the rifle and dropped it into a pocket of his sheepskin coat; it might come in useful. Then he recased the Remington and tucked it into a hollow in the rock face before covering it with stones.

  Maybe it's useless now, he thought. He certainly wasn't going to lug an extra eleven pounds of weight through this up-and-down country. Still …

  He wouldn't have admitted it aloud, but he just didn't like discarding a fine tool that had given him good service. His freezer back in Boise still had a fair bit of last fall's venison in it.

  And maybe the freezer isn't working either, something whispered at the back of his head.

  Making the stretcher wasn't too hard, now that he had the puukko knife and the saber saw from his survival pack. Two ash saplings nearby had the right seven-foot length; he looped the flexible toothed cable around the base of one and began pulling the handles back and forth, careful not to go too fast and risk heating the metal. It fell in a dozen strokes, and the second went as easily.

  A cable saw was damned useful out in the woods and much lighter than a real saw or a hatchet, but if he had to choose he'd have taken the knife. The puukko was the Finnish countryman's universal tool, for everything from getting a stone out of a horse's hoof to skinning game to settling a dispute with the neighbors in the old days.

  His was a copy of the one his great-grandfather had brought from Karelia a hundred years ago; eight inches in the blade, thick on the back, with a murderous point and a gently curving cutting edge on the other side; a solid tang ran through the rock-maple hilt to a brass butt-cap. There were no quillions or guard; those were for sissies.