Ship of the Line - Diane Carey [48]
McClellan was twenty-six and had been doing the work of a fifty-year-old senior officer for months now, but suddenly he felt like a little boy again. Now he forgot all his training and plunged past Dan’s clutching hands and right out into the open, ignoring the plumes of explosive hitting the ground every few yards, every few seconds. Over the whine of salvos he shouted, “Mark! Mark! Mark!”
In the middle of the shattered spaceport mall, his brother looked completely confused. As the transport process finished and the sparkles faded away, Mark McClellan was left vulnerable and disoriented.
Damn, he looks exhausted—
Salvos deployed from the distant hills drove into the pavement every few seconds, each preceded by a telltale whine. The whines were twisting together into one vibrating sound as the salvos came more and more quickly. Each hit blew up a cone of ejecta, sharp and lethal shrapnel, too fast to be dodged. Realizing that he must appear like some kind of wraith bursting through the gouts of smoke, Steve McClellan dodged toward his stunned brother.
Mark looked like the wreck of their ship, exhausted and caved in, cheeks hollow, eyes weary and dazed, his wheat-brown hair dull and dirty. He was a ghost of the young officer he’d been when their ship had been wrecked, twelve … was it thirteen months now? Thirteen months, two weeks … what day was it? The eighth?
The eighth of May. Mark’s birthday. Mark McClellan was barely twenty-four as Steve reached out for him through the sulfurous snarl of the nearest salvo. Relief and regret crashed through Steve’s chest at the same time. His brother was alive, able to see this birthday, but he was also here.
“Steve?” Mark squinted in disbelief. Then, driven down by the impact of another salvo, he stumbled to one knee. A hundred yards away a water reservoir crashed to the dirt, spilling the rancid liquid inside. As the contaminated water spread, Mark turned and stared at it.
Accustomed to running on the shuddering ground, Steve McClellan wrenched his brother to his feet and pulled him into a run, wondering if he himself looked as haggard as Mark did. Everybody always said they could’ve been twins. The McClellans had been quite a set on the Durant’s bridge, one lieutenant, one helmsman, both Starfleet, nice and snappy, looking so much alike—if Mark had made lieutenant before they got caught, nobody’d be able to tell them apart.
But that hadn’t happened. Something else had.
“In here, Steve!”
That was Dan calling! But from a different location than the office doorway—Steve looked toward the sound, didn’t see anything, but angled his brother in that direction anyway. All around the running pair, the ground opened up every few feet under the deafening salvos. The bombardment had just started. They couldn’t count on its ending anytime soon.
Steve pulled his brother into the flimsy protection of a billboard just in time to get a slap of debris across both their backs. Through a wince, Steve shouted, “Call out again! I lost you!”
“Here! This way! Straight on! Come on, come on!”
“Is that Dan?” Mark choked.
“Get up! Run.”
Gritty with chunks of cracked sidewalk and broken glass, the pavement damned their every stride. With their boots skidding, the brothers scratched around a corner. Steve reached to his side and kept Mark on his feet. They plunged toward Dan Leith’s call.
There was Dan, looking like an illustration for one of those adventure South Sea holonovels that women liked. Even after all these months of stress and physical taxation, he still looked good, still blond, somehow still tanned. Just one of those lucky guys who were put together like some kind of statue.
A flash of movement caught his eye. Dan—waving frantically to them from inside a partially caved-in garage. How in hell had he gotten in there from the office building that shielded the rest of their crew?
But it was a good move. The angle of the bombardment had changed. Dan had anticipated that, and found better cover.