The Long War

Green, so she could learn all about this business of the favours for herself.

20
    I N THE M INE Belt, the Valientés aboard Gold Dust witnessed a crisis.
    The airship fleet had stopped a couple of times over the arid worlds of this band, to take on board ore of various kinds – not just bulky stuff like bauxite, or even obviously precious metals like silver and gold, but a slew of minerals that were scarce now on the Datum, or at any rate hugely valuable: germanium, cobalt, gallium.
    But it wasn’t a colonized world where the incident happened.
    The family happened to be making one of their visits to the wheelhouse at the time, and Helen and Dan saw it all. The twain had slowed because they were approaching a notorious Joker, some eighty thousand steps from the Datum, and the pilot knew to take care, driving them forward at only a couple of steps a minute. When they finally stepped into the Joker, the landscape of the neighbouring world – a sparse green with forest clumps and prairie – vanished to reveal bare, brick-red, dust-strewn rock. Even the local Mississippi was reduced to a rusty trickle, striped down the centre of a valley that looked much too wide for it. From unknown causes, this Joker happened to be suffering from some kind of global desertification. It was like a landscape on Mars.
    And here was the downed ship.
    She was called the Pennsylvania . She had been caught in a dust storm when she tried, cautiously, to cross the Joker, and then one of her helium sacs, maybe already carrying a fault, split open at the sudden expansion caused by the heat of the Joker’s dry air. The leak had been quick but the crash slow, relentless; it must have been a terrifying experience. The Gold Dust passengers saw the wreck now through a veil of windblown dust that hissed against the windows, the remnants of the storm that had killed the ship. From the air it was a six-hundred-foot reef already half covered by drifting red sand.
    The Gold Dust was the first of the following fleet to come upon the wreck, and the largest. As Dan and Helen hung back, trying to keep out of the way, there was a hasty conference call with the Captain in his cabin, and the commanders of the other craft as they arrived in this world. A strategy was soon cooked up, and the crew swung into action with an efficiency and dedication that warmed Helen’s soul. They dropped anchor, and soon had a kind of improvised elevator working, taking crew to and from the ground on an open platform. Helen saw Dan’s buddy Bosun Higgs go down, joining working parties assembled from all the crews of the fleet.
    Then, as the crew worked, the Captain used the ship’s intercom to ask for volunteers from among the passengers to go down to help. Volunteers from among the passengers . Helen’s heart sank when she heard that phrase.
    Of course she couldn’t stop him.
    It all went well enough, for three, four hours, as the sun slowly went down, and the sandstorm finally petered out. From Helen’s godlike point of view high in the sky, she watched what looked like very organized ants working on the carcass of the fallen ship. They cut channels through the wreckage, led out walking wounded, and carried out the worst afflicted, and the dead. A field medical post was set up under a tent, and soon the first of the most seriously injured were being brought up to the Gold Dust on the elevator. The Gold Dust was the best placed of the fleet to take the injured on board, with a well-equipped medical bay that could be quickly expanded into a hospital. Other parties worked at salvaging what they could of the Pennsylvania ’s cargo, mostly Corn Belt wheat. Still others performed the sad duty of digging out graves around the crash site.
    Then there was an alarm in the wheelhouse. One of the Gold Dust contingent had got himself trapped, deep in the interior of the Pennsylvania ’s envelope, when a bit more of the structure had collapsed around him as he was trying, heroically, to reach one last group of stranded passengers. He was stuck in the collapsed framework, too high off the ground to be able to step out safely. A rescue attempt was quickly improvised.
    ‘Wow,’ Dan said, listening to the crackly radio messages. ‘Who do you think it is, Mom?’
    Not your father, Helen pleaded silently. Not Joshua. Just this once, not Joshua.
    A new line was let down from the nose of the Gold Dust , with two individuals clinging to it: Bosun Higgs and Sally Linsay. Helen’s hopes