Chapter 3
DHOMHES
Dhomhes braced a foot against the damaged rail and pulled a catering worker over it.
The male landed badly, cried out, and tried to get up. His left boot pointed the wrong way.
“Stay down.”
“The platform—”
“Is holding for the moment.” Dhomhes signaled to a medic. “Here. He needs a cart.”
The backup repulsors hummed beneath the decking. He could feel their vibration through his boots. Two minutes ago, he had been hanging over the side wondering whether the entire structure would roll and drop him into the jungle.
Now people were going back aboard the ship.
Others were coming off it.
“Which way?” a woman asked him, holding another by the hand. “They said to go inside.”
He looked toward the ramp. Stron was there, the red-haired female from the second group arguing with him. Crew members were trying to clear the entrance. The guards coming onto the platform were taking people toward the banquet hall.
Too many orders.
“Follow that medic,” Dhomhes told her. “She'll take you off the platform.”
He waited until both women moved, then reached for his comm.
An eruption of voices came from the broken north side.
He turned.
A section of the edge had gone. A guard was lying flat near the break, one arm extended over it. Beside him, another pointed down through the smoke.
Fiviel had been there.
Dhomhes couldn't see him.
He crossed the damaged ground, stepping over a length of torn cable, and caught the guard by the back of his harness before the male could lean farther out.
“Who?”
The guard looked up.
“Who went down?”
“The liaison. The Gol-Vett with the—”
“I know which one.”
He looked over the edge.
Green branches shook below them. Farther down, smoke spread between the trees. There was no clean line to the ground. No sign of anyone falling, no moving figure, nothing he could reach.
“He caught her,” the guard said. “I thought he had her.”
Dhomhes gripped the harness harder.
Fiviel's laugh. Barely minutes ago.
“Gol-Vett.”
He released the guard. The male scrambled back from the edge.
“Get a descent line,” Dhomhes said. “And a team that knows this slope.”
“The fires—”
“Find them. Let them tell me what they need.”
The guard ran.
Dhomhes made himself turn away from the drop. Khalzin had gone with Janae. He had seen them leave, a medic ahead of them and his friend's arm tight around the little female. Both alive. Stron was by the ramp.
Fiviel had been alive too. Standing. Helping.
A vibration passed beneath his feet, stronger than the steady hum of the backups.
He raised his head.
Three minutes had passed since the first blast. There had been time to get people on their feet. Time for medics to arrive. Time to believe the platform would hold.
The next explosion threw him against the rail.
Armor burst across his shoulders and arms. He struck the metal hard enough to bend it and went down, one hand clawing for a hold in the decking.
The GA ship flashed white at its middle.
He saw the hull split. A line of smaller eruptions ran along it, too fast to count, blowing panels outward. He put his face down as something hot struck his raised armor.
The platform lurched again.
Through the smoke he saw the ship sliding, its broken bulk moving toward the edge. The ramp tore away. Metal screamed against stone until the vessel vanished from sight.
The impact came from below.
Dhomhes stayed down. Around him, debris rattled across the decking, and for several breaths all he could hear was a thin, high whine.
He tried his comm. His thumb slipped on the control.
Blood. His palm was bleeding.
He wiped it on his robes and tried again.
“Stron.”
No answer.
He pushed himself up, blinked dust out of his eyes, and searched where the ramp had been.
The upper end of the ramp was gone. He searched the people moving beyond it for a gray dress, a dark head turning toward him. Nothing stayed still long enough to count. He passed the nearest guard an order to clear the terrace stairs and kept looking.
A raised lattice of armor moved near the wreckage. Stron rolled onto one side with the red-haired woman held against him. She was moving. Pushing at him, by the look of it.
Dhomhes let his head hang for one breath.
Then he stood.
By the time his hearing began to return properly, Stron had the guards clearing a route to the banquet hall.
Dhomhes took the far end. He helped carry two injured women across the terrace, went back for a third, and found himself holding a stranger's hand while a medic worked beneath a blanket.
“My sister,” the woman kept saying. “She was right there.”
“Tell me her name.”
She did. He passed it to a staff member with a data pad.
He could do that much.
Near the hall entrance, a dark-haired volunteer stood beside an overturned serving cart. She was trying to get another woman to sit on an empty crate. The woman resisted, staring back toward the platform.
“Just for a moment,” the dark-haired one said. “Your leg is bleeding.”
The same female who had been beside Roemary at the top of the ramp. Gray dress. Blood drying across her knuckles. Alive.
Relief loosened his chest so abruptly that he had to stop beside the cart. His armor pressed against his sleeves again.
It had done that before the blast, when she looked down the ramp at him. Heat had struck through his chest, sharp enough to catch his breath. His feet had turned toward her before he thought to move. Even now, with her alive in front of him, his body strained to close the distance.
Shock could account for a great deal now. He held to that explanation while the injured woman finally sat.
“A medic is coming,” he told them.
The woman in gray nodded. Her eyes went past him to the doorway, then toward the terrace stairs. She shifted the crate slightly, bringing her companion farther out of the path of the incoming carts.
Practical. He might have asked her to keep helping, but a guard caught his attention.
“We have a terrain crew. They're assembling below the east access.”
Dhomhes turned at once.
He went to the east access, where three members of the terrain crew were unloading equipment. One had a live image from a drone spread above her wrist. Dhomhes bent over it, searching for anything he could recognize beneath the smoke.
“Can you get to them?”
“We can't get a line through that fire,” she said. “Not with anyone on it.”
“The adjoining slope?”
She shifted the view. Burning wreckage had struck across it, and loose stone was still coming down through the trees.
He stared at the image.
“How long?”
“Until suppression clears a route. Then we assess the ground.”
“There are people down there.”
“I know, Gol-Vett.” She met his eyes. “If I send my crew into that now, there will be more.”
He looked at the coils of line. The climbing harnesses. Equipment that would have let him do something, if the ground below had been different.
The crew leader put a hand on his arm.
“We need you here.”
Dhomhes almost shook her off.
“Stron is trying to get everyone counted,” she said. “No one knows how many came off the ship. Help him. I'll contact you as soon as we have a route.”
He hated that there was sense in it.
“Contact me the moment you can descend,” he told the crew leader.
She nodded.
She released his arm and turned back to her crew.
The food intended for a celebration was being passed among the survivors. Floating beds crowded the walls. A cleaner kept trying to polish the same strip of floor until someone finally moved it out of the way of the medics.
Dhomhes accepted a data pad from a GA crew member and asked for the departure roster.
“I'm accessing the backup.” The man looked at the pad as though he had forgotten how to use it. “It's taking time.”
“What do you have now?”
A list of names, incomplete. They started with that.
People crowded around them, asking questions. Where were they going? Was another ship coming? Had anyone found the missing?
Dhomhes answered what he could and refused to guess at the rest. By the third time he said he didn't know, he wanted to break something.
Roemary found him near a table where volunteers were collecting water.
“Gol-Vett.”
She had a small tear in her veil. Nothing about the way she held herself suggested an injury, though shock could hide those. He had seen several women collapse after insisting they were well.
“Have you seen a medic?” he asked.
“I'm unharmed. Though I certainly might not have been.” Her eyes filled, and she put a hand over her mouth. “Those poor people.”
He watched her lower the hand.
At the first explosion, he had looked toward the ramp. She had been standing at its upper end, watching the damage with her lips slightly parted. Silent. Then she had screamed and stumbled backward into a crew member's arms.
Two seconds, perhaps. He could not have sworn to it. People did strange things when frightened. He had drawn a knife before realizing there was nothing he could fight with it.
Still, he remembered her face.
“It must have been terrible up there,” he said.
“I had just come back from speaking to Graecey.” She hesitated. “She was very upset about the misunderstanding. The poor woman. I hope they find her.”
“So do I.”
He heard the roughness in his own voice and smoothed it before he spoke again.
“Can you tell me anything about what you saw?”
“The explosion. Everyone falling. And then we were waiting for them to get us off.” She drew in a breath. “I thought we were safe when it stopped moving.”
“You weren't alone in that.”
“And the way it went twice. The little one first, and then the terrible one. Like it was flushed—is that a word? I don't know why I said that.”
Dhomhes kept his expression sympathetic.
Sealed the charges. Flushed what was left.
The broker's voice was unpleasantly clear in his memory.
“There was a great deal of smoke,” he said.
“Yes. Exactly.” She looked relieved. “You understand.”
“Have you given your account to security?”
“No one has asked me.”
“They will. Details may help us establish what happened.”
Her fingers brushed his sleeve.
“You'll find whoever did this?”