Hidden Empire - Kevin J. Anderson [55]
With every block as he closed the distance, the certainty became a grenade in the pit of his stomach. Using his shoulder, he crashed against jostling bystanders. "Let me through!" He swung his satchel of belongings to knock people out of his way, then finally dropped the food and shirt and the electronic puzzle, not caring.
His whole street was an inferno. Emergency vehicles raced overhead, rescue copters circling but unable to approach the raging fire or even attempt a rescue. At last Raymond reached the front lines to look up into the poisonous smoke and the crackling sky. From behind a hastily erected barricade, he saw the holocaust that remained of his apartment building.
In the hot air and crowded closeness of simmering violence, spectators stared with mixtures of fascination and horror. Raymond found himself speechless and sobbing, his face red, tears streaking the dust on his cheeks. He tried to duck under the barricade but ran into the padded uniforms of crowd-control officers. "Stay back," a gruff man said. "You can't go closer."
"That's my home, my family!"
"It's your death if you go closer. Keep back!"
The ground beneath the structure had become a smoldering crater, and the rest of the apartment had collapsed inside it, as if some volcano had erupted beneath the city streets. Wreckage lay scattered up and down the block. Black smears of soot from the explosion blistered the walls of nearby buildings.
A tall man in a formal business suit looked down at Raymond. He was the kind of person the young man would expect to see behind a boardroom table sipping coffee and filling out ledgers. The businessman explained with apparent glee, "Building owners were illicitly storing contaminated stardrive fuel in underground storage vaults. Nice hiding place, right under an innocent-looking dwelling complex." He shook his head as if in disbelief at the stupidity.
Raymond could barely find words, simply staring into the stinging fumes and furious heat. "Spaceship fuel...under our apartment building?"
"It must have been siphoned off, treated, and sold on the black market. But the vaults were poorly insulated, no protective systems. Everything by the seat of the pants. What a bunch of idiots. A disaster waiting to happen—and it happened."
It sounded improbable—ridiculous, even. But he knew that before dawn most of the families would have been home asleep. He couldn't believe it. Raymond's knees went weak and watery, but as he swayed, the press of the crowd held him upright. Oddly, he even saw a large black Klikiss robot, one of the few that had chosen to come to Earth, staring at the fire with red optical sensors, as if fascinated.
A group of men in flame-resistant environment outfits marched out of the blasted front door of the complex. Two of them carried bodies, possibly still alive. But only two bodies...of all the people inside the building. Raymond couldn't dare hope that one of those might be his mother or a brother.
"Can't get up past floor seventeen." One of the men spoke through a suit-transmitter so that his voice came out loud but filtered. "Walls are collapsed, and the doors are fused shut."
"What do you mean fused?" asked the rescue commander.
"Welded closed, barricaded from inside, I don't know. There wasn't time to stand around and make a full analysis. Are the suppressant ships coming in?"
The rescue commander directed the team to a staging area. Up in the sky five cargo copters closed in on the swirling blaze. They flew like bumblebees, heavily laden with chemicals. Through amplified loudspeakers, the rescue commander bellowed to the crowd. "Everyone stand back. Stay clear of the fire suppressant activities."
Before the lumbering mass of curiosity seekers could shift position, the cargo copters opened their belly-hatches and spewed copious amounts of greenish-white foam onto the inferno. Thermal updrafts and furious breezes trapped among the tall buildings flurried the descending foam, splattering globules in a broad radius. Splashed spectators backed