Relics - Michael Jan Friedman [10]
For an awful moment, his head swam and he felt as if he were going to be sick. The moment passed.
Unfortunately, the pain in his arm was mounting, getting worse. It felt for all the world as if it were on fire. Ignoring the terrible ache for the moment, he peered through the stinging smoke, trying to get a handle on the situation.
Suddenly, a geyser of sparks erupted from somewhere nearby, throwing the immediate vicinity into stark relief. Scott saw at least one more body-bloody, inert, lying on the deck in an impossible position.
Was he the only one who’d lived to tell the tale, then? Could his luck have been that good?
Again, the pain came washing over him, making his knees weak … challenging him for control of the flesh that was Montgomery Scott. But hanging onto the console, he beat it back by force of will.
And noted that the engineering station was still working. Its screen was still alive-dusted with soot from the smoke, but still functional. Wiping away a thin layer of soot with his hand, Scott called up a bioprofile of the Jenolen.
It wasn’t good news that confronted him there. It wasn’t good news at all.
Besides himself, there was only one other survivor. Scott shook his head in disbelief. Only one?
How could that be? Brows knit, he checked to see that the station wasn’t malfunctioning-but it passed the diagnostic review with flying colors.
Scott massaged one of his temples with a forefinger. Out of all those passengers and crew members… only two had survived? It wasn’t possible. If he had come through the crash, surely the men and women abovedecks, in their nice, secure turbulence-berths, should have fared even better.
They had to be alive. They had to—
And then he saw it a flashing light in the screen’s hull-integrity field. Scott moaned in sympathy.
That’s why the others hadn’t made it. The impact had created a tiny rupture in the hull-probably no larger than his palm, but big enough to suck out all the air on the passenger deck.
The force of the crash hadn’t killed them. They’d bloody well suffocated.
Scott wanted to cry out. He wanted to howl at the injustice of it, at the loss of life.
But it wasn’t the first time he’d wanted to do that. Like all the other times, he bit his lip and went on.
There was another survivor, he reminded himself, forcing his eyes to focus on the monitor again. Somewhere in all this charred ruin, there was a life that could still be preserved. And the man was lying somewhere nearby-not more than a few meters away, he judged from the floorplan.
Then, as if to confirm that the internal sensors knew what they were talking about, there was movement amid the drifts of smoke. A shape, dark and stumbling. A familiar profile, glistening wet with blood in the spark-shot chaos.
“Franklin!” called Scott. His voice was a harsh rasp-but it did the trick. It got the ensign’s attention. “Over here, lad!”
The younger man’s head turned. His eyes glittered wildly, reflecting the fireworks spewing out of a caved-in console. And he said something, though Scott couldn’t quite make it out.
“I cannae hear ye!” he croaked.
Franklin lurched forward until he could grab the older man’s shoulder. His head bleeding from a gash in his forehead, he leaned close and said “They’re dead, sir. They’re all dead.”
Scott gripped the hand that held his shoulder and met the ensign’s horror-stricken gaze. “I know, lad, I know. But we’re still alive. And if we want to stay that way, we’ve got to make some sense out o’ this mess.”
Franklin nodded. Taking a deep breath, he regained control of himself. “All right,” he said at last, his voice still trembling a bit, but stronger than before. “I’m with you, sir.”
“Good lad. Now then …” Punching up the ship’s diagnostic systems, Scott considered the damage. No welcome news here either. The crash had disabled everything except auxiliary life support and communications-and those systems might go down