Double Helix 03_ Red Sector - Diane Carey [95]
But then the landscape opened up and reached for the sky. Black noise concussed between the mountains and the swamp forest, a great stick striking a great drum, and Stiles’s skull rang and rang. He tried to rise, to run again, but the flash blinded him and the raw force drove him into the depression, not more than eight inches lower than the level of the ground they’d run across.
Suddenly tie was lying in a furnace, pressed down by weight he couldn’t fight. He turned his head to one side and opened his eyes in time to see the blast wave blow over him in a single, solid white-hot sheet. The side of his face turned hot mid he buried his head in his arms and waited to die.
Into the muffling warmth of his sleeve, he murmured, “Go, Sassy, go, go… push …. “
The carnivorous shock wave sheeted across his body, raising the hairs on his neck and limbs. He couldn’t breathe-he sucked at a vacuum—
And just as the compression was about to crush his chest, Stiles took one more desperate attempt to breathe and got a lungful of warm dusty air. His head cleared almost instantly.
As he maneuvered his elbows, pinned under his chest, and tried to shove himself upward, a weight across his shoulderblades pressed him down and held him. A wave of cool air now flooded over him, replacing the rushing scalded air of the blast sheet.
“Stay down.” Spock’s voice rang in his ear. “Cover your head.”
Drowning out Spock’s words, a shattering hall of granite bits and shards of metal pulverized them as they lay crushed to the floor of the depression. Stiles shrank into the smallest crushed-up ball he could manage as his back was hammered by his own success. The wreckage of the beam housing had taken a little tour flight and was now coming to visit the two little elves who’d arranged the trip.
His chest heaving, he finally managed to press up onto his elbows, then to his ‘knees.
Crouched at his side, Spock was slapping him on the back over and over.
As Stiles was trying to figure out a way to tell the ambassador that he wasn’t choking and didn’t need to be patted, Spock simply explained, “Your clothes were burning.” “Oh… thanks. Was that… one… explosion… or two?” “Two. One concussion wave.” Spock spoke as if nothing had happened at all, then coughed. The cough made him seem perfectly mortal and gave Stiles a bit of comfort that otherwise might’ve slipped on past him.
As a shimmering cloud of debris-the last of the pulverized housing-drifted around them as if it were a theatre curtain lowering, he winced his way to a standing position and had to lock both legs to stay up. His whole body trembled and pulsed with aftershock.
Through the drifting dust, he peered at the mass of wreckage, completely flattened, in fact depressed into a crater. The steel structure that had held the beam’s emitter lay in mangled messes all over the grass, which had itself been seared brown.
“Think it worked’?” Stiles wondered. “Is the CST okay now?”
“If they veered off at the correct tangent, yes.” Spock made moves to stand up, but faltered. Instead he looked at his legs, first one, then the other, in a strangely clinical manner. Stiles turned to him. “Sir?”
Before he could ask the question that came up, he flinched bodily at what he saw-a shard of metal the size of a writing stylus embedded in the side of the ambassador’s left thigh, with a good two inches sticking out.
“Oh, sir…” Stiles knelt beside him. The cloth of Spock’s pantleg was stained with his blood, and the Vulcan was plainly stiff with pain, although he pretended this didn’t bother him much. “How deep in do you think it is?”
“No way to tell,” Spock said, and looked around at the sky. “The blast was substantial enough to have alerted the author/ties. Someone should be arriving soon.”
Shaken by that, Stiles also looked