Steampunk Prime_ A Vintage Steampunk Reader - Mike Ashley [135]
Some few, cooler than the rest, managed to put on their life-belts and launch away; but only a part of these made the correct adjustments. Most of them fell like lead, the gyroscopic neutralizers failing to work after the initial plunge. Probably not over two-score, in all, reached the surface of the Pacific still alive.
Scorched from the liner by the anguish of shriveling heat or numbed by poisonous gases, the others dropped off. Some, actually on fire, leaped into the abyss and swirled away, torches of living flame. As ripe fruit falls, clustered, from the bough they fell. Men, women, children, singly and in groups, seared by the roaring gusts of incandescence, flung themselves into moonlit vacancy. Horribly whirling, they vanished.
Merciful oblivion received all these before their bodies broke against the midnight blackness of the sea; its surface — struck at such speed — hard as a plate of burnished steel.
Clinging to their perilous niche below the flaming, drifting hulk, Hale and Jeanne tugged with bleeding fingers at the adjustments of their belts.
“Quick!” He commanded. “She’s going fast — we’ve got only a minute, now!”
He drew the last buckle tight about her, while the glare of the on-sweeping conflagration flooded them with a ghastly, yellow-greenish glare. Puffs of hot smoke and strangling gases swirled about them. Within the wreck, dull concussions vibrated. The last sustaining vacuum-chambers were collapsing.
“All right?” Demanded Hale, strapping his own belt fast. “Now, then, off with you! Jump!”
The girl, shaking terribly, sank almost fainting against him.
“Oh — I can’t, I can’t!” She gasped. “We’re still a mile high — and the sea — ”
“It’s that or burn to a crisp here!” He shouted with sudden passion, above the roaring of the gas-flames.
Still she could not muster courage for the leap.
Brutally he seized her, with overmastering rage. They grappled a second. Reeling, they swayed together on the narrow beam. Then he dominated her; he broke her desperate clutch and hurled her bodily — her scream piercing his ears — into the void.
A second he watched her drop like a plummet, in the moonlight, as he crouched pale and sick upon the dizzy perch.
“Thank God!” He breathed, thinking to see her swift trajectory checked just before she plunged through the cloud-curtain still a thousand feet below.
Delaying no longer, he stood up again. He leaped boldly outward from the flaming wreck; he plumbed after her into the horrifying nothingness of the abyss.
V
RETURNING consciousness — for the sheer drop before his own apparatus had functioned had robbed him of his senses — brought him a confused realization of cold, of motion, of dim light. For a moment he understood nothing. Then his mind cleared, and he knew that he was swinging on the surface of a troubled sea, heaving on league-long rollers, with moonlit clouds slow-drifting far and far above him.
Buoyed by his vacuum-belt he rose, fell, and heaved up again on the crumbling surges. Here, there, he made out a few twinkling sparkles of light, like stars moving on the breast of the mighty waters; signal-flashes from such of the survivors as had lighted them. He vaguely distinguished dim forms, hardly distinguishable against the blackness of the sea-men and women who, like himself, had reached the sea with life-pelts. Living? Dead? He could not tell. But one or two nearer things, wallowing limply, in the supreme abandon of death, told him of those who had leaped with, no supporting apparatus.
Vague thoughts drifted through his brain. Had any kinetogram been sent from the Imperatrice, for rescue, he wondered dully. And sharks — were they plentiful in this latitude? How long could