Ginger Gianesco had never scrambled so hard in her life.
The few transports they had left were either far too small or far too slow. The big ore transports would never make a forty-kilometer dash in seven minutes, not with a top speed of ten KPH. And the aircars . . .
"Pack the smallest children into those scout cars!" she shouted into her radio, which relayed her instructions through loudspeakers that were part of the meeting hall's emergency system. The mob of refugees crowded aside, making way for anyone with children. "Move it, people!" When the volunteer packing the first aircar in line tried to close the hatch with only five kids aboard, Ginger snatched it open again. "Pack 'em in tighter, dammit! I don't care if they can breathe or not, stuff 'em in and redline those engines, but get 'em full!"
She could hear Hank Umlani talking to the pilot of the descending medical shuttle by radio, asking what kind of harness to rig on the ore carrier they'd be packing full of nearly everyone in town. Hank's problem, she told herself harshly. Confused, frightened children were pulled, shoved, stuffed into the aircars, toddlers and infants passed over by frantic mothers.
"I need teenagers with pilot ratings! Stat!"
She found seven skinny kids, thirteen and fourteen years old, to pilot the aircars, saving the space an adult pilot would've taken up. They used the space savings to pack extra little ones into the cockpit. Five children, six, seven, ten children crammed into cabin space designed for two adults and a minimum of equipment. Seven surviving aircars, a hundred kids under the age of fifteen. The numbers were against them. Ruthlessly, Ginger dragged out of line anybody older than twelve.
"Go!" she shouted as each car was filled to capacity.
Engines whined, protesting the overload as the aircars lifted, one by one, over the wall and sped northward. Ginger didn't have time to watch them go. "Adults and teens, to the refinery! The Darknight shuttle's going to airlift the rest of us out in an ore freightbox. Go, go, go!"
People ran, slid on icy patches, carried those too injured to run on their own, hauling them through the gap in the defensive wall where the Bolo had knocked a hole in it. Ginger ran through the shelters, the meeting hall, the warehouse, checking to be certain everyone was out.
They were.
She arrived at the refinery with a burning stitch down her side. Hank Umlani had already divided the arrivals: teens and anyone under 5' 5" in line for the medical shuttle, everybody else into an empty freightbox. A team of five worked feverishly under Hank's direction, rigging steel cables for a cargo sling. The cargo freightbox was an immense steel oblong, designed to haul a full ton of refined saganium ore for transfer to an orbital ore freighter. It boasted hinged doors at the top for easy loading at Rustenberg's refinery and a hopper-type door at one end, which could be tilted over the hopper of an off-world fabrications plant, dumping the refined ore directly into the smelting furnaces.
That hopper door made an emergency entrance for the crowd of refugees.
"No shoving," Ginger shouted as the line threatened to disintegrate into shambles. "We've still got time." The line settled down, moving faster once order had been reestablished. Reassured that loading was going as smoothly as possible, Ginger craned her neck skyward. She spotted it within seconds, the flare of light that marked the Darknight's incoming shuttle. Ginger checked her watch. Four minutes, twelve seconds to reach safety . . .
The shuttle fired braking engines at a terrifyingly low altitude, rocking visibly. The pilot fought the bucking craft, having waited until the last possible second to reduce speed. They came in at an angle and set down four yards from the line of teenagers, at exactly T-minus-four minutes. Pneumatic doors opened with a hiss. A uniformed officer jumped down and beckoned urgently.
"Go!" Ginger shouted. "No shoving, but keep moving! Go!"
Seventy people, the shuttle pilot had said. By packing in teens and the shortest adults, they crammed in eighty, loading them in one minute forty-three seconds. The officer—introduced over one shoulder as "Lieutenant Commander Gerhard Lundquist, Assistant Ship's Surgeon"—called out, "Okay, Carter, we're loaded up. I'll help 'em hook up that cargo carrier."
Ginger led him toward the cable crew at a dead run. "Hank! You got those cables ready?"
"That's a roger, but we're not fully loaded yet."
"Hook 'em up now, we can't wait 'til the loading's done!"
Hank's crew dragged the long loops of cable back to the shuttle, where the ship's surgeon helped fasten them to cargo hooks fore and aft. The team had the cables hooked and secured in sixty-eight seconds flat. Loading proceeded unbroken, moving at a frenzied pace. The cargo bin had already swallowed more than five hundred people, jammed in standing on the floor, even on one another's shoulders. Ginger helped push in the last three-hundred-plus refugees, ignoring cries of pain as elbow, knees, and feet jabbed, knocked, and stepped on tender regions. Hank shoved in his assistants last, then bodily lifted Ginger onto someone's shoulders—several someones, judging from the bony projections shifting under her hips and shoulderblades. Hank was shouting at the surgeon, "Somebody's gotta latch this shut and drop the bars from the outside!"
"Get in—I'll take care of it!"
As Ginger craned her neck around to look, Hank sucked in his nonexistent gut and slid between several sets of feet. The big steel hopper doors swung ponderously shut with a massive, reverberating clang. The heavy bars slammed down, pegging the doors into place. Ginger counted off the seconds on her glowing wrist chrono's dial, waiting for the shuttle's liftoff. Her radio sputtered. She heard the surgeon snarling at the pilot, "Go, dammit! I knew the risk when I signed on. There's not room back there for a housefly and you know damned well we've got kids jammed so tight into the pilot's compartment, you'll need a crowbar to get 'em out. Go!"
Omigod . . .
The shuttle's engines whined savagely. There was one godawful jerk as the cargo carrier shifted. Gasps and cries of pain bounced off steel walls. Then they swayed into the air, tilting slightly in the way of cargo slung beneath an airborne transport. They picked up speed. They were moving fast already and kept accelerating. Ginger desperately tried not to think about that young surgeon back there, who had just volunteered for suicide, if the unknown war agent was as deadly to humans as it was to Tersae. Her vision didn't want to focus properly.
Think about what we accomplished, she told herself fiercely. Seventy-seven kids out in Rustenberg's aircars. Eighty more in the shuttle. Another eight hundred twelve adults and teens stacked like cordwood under Ginger's battered, bruised backside. All racing potential death through the clouds.
They had sixty-two seconds to travel forty kilometers.
And unless the gods were very kind, that courageous surgeon had only sixty-two seconds left to live.