But time passed, another night of their lives, and at last dawn came. Soon after sunrise they landed at a pipeline service airstrip above Shalbatana, and stayed with a group of refugees who had been working on the pipeline, and were now caught there. This group had no political stance in common, and wanted only to survive until things got back to normal. Nadia found their attitude only partly refreshing, and tried to get them to go out and repair pipelines; but she did not think they were convinced.
• • •
That evening they took off once more, again laden with supplies given to them by their hosts. And the following dawn they landed on the abandoned airstrip of Carr Crater. Before eight, Nadia and Sax and Ann and Simon and Sasha and Yeli were out in walkers, and up to the crater rim.
The dome was gone. There had been a fire below. All the buildings were intact but scorched, and almost all their windows had been broken or melted. Plastic walls were bent or deformed; concrete was blackened. There were splashes of soot scattered everywhere, and piles of soot scattered here and there on the ground, little heaps of blackened carbon. Sometimes they looked like Hiroshima shadows. Yes, they were bodies. The outlines of people trying to claw down through the sidewalks. “The city’s air was hyperoxygenated,” Sax ventured. In such an atmosphere human skin and flesh were combustible and flammable. That was what had happened to those early Apollo astronauts, stuck in a test capsule filled with an atmosphere of pure oxygen; when the fire started they had burnt like paraffin.
And so here. Everyone on the streets had caught fire and rushed around like torches, one could see that by the placement of the soot piles.
The six old friends walked down together into the shadow of the eastern crater wall. Under a circular dark pink sky they stopped at the first clutch of blackened bodies, and then walked quickly on. They opened doors in buildings when it was possible, and knocked on all the jammed doors, and listened at the walls with a stethoscope device Sax had brought along. No sound but their own heartbeats, loud and fast at the backs of their coppery throats.
Nadia stumbled around, her breath harsh and ragged. She forced herself to look at the bodies she passed, trying to estimate heights from the black piles of carbon. Like Hiroshima, or Pompeii. People were taller now. They still burnt to the bone, though, and even the bones were thin black sticks.
When she came to a likely sized pile, she stood staring at it. After a while she approached, and found the right arm, and scraped with her four-fingered glove at the back of the charred wristbones, looking for the dotcode tag. She found it, cleaned it. Ran her laser over it like a grocery clerk pricing goods. Emily Hargrove.
She moved on, did it again with another likely-sized pile. Thabo Moeti. It was better than checking teeth against dental records; but she wouldn’t have done that.
She was light-headed and numb when she came to a soot pile near the city offices, alone, its right hand splayed out so that she only had to check. She cleaned the tag and checked. Arkady Nikelyovich Bogdanov.
They flew west for eleven more days, hiding through the daylight hours under stealth blankets, or taking shelter with people they encountered en route. During the nights they followed transponders, or the directions of the last group with which they had stayed. Though these groups often knew of each other’s existence and location, they were definitely not parts of a single resistance, or coordinated in any way. Some hoped to make it to the south polar cap like the prisoners from Korolyov, others had never heard of this refuge; some were Bogdanovists, others were revolutionaries following different leaders; some were religious communes or utopian experiments, or nationalist groups trying to contact their governments back home; and some were merely collections of survivors without a program, orphaned by the violence. The six travelers even stopped at Korolyov itself, but they did not attempt to enter when they saw the naked frozen bodies of guards outside the locks, some of them propped in standing positions like statues.After Korolyov, they encountered no one. The radios and TVs went dead as satellites were shot out, the pistes were empty, and the Earth was on the other side of the sun. The landscape seemed as barren as before their arrival, except for the spreading patches of frost. They flew on as if they were the only people in the world, the sole survivors.
White noise buzzed in Nadia’s ear, something to do with the plane’s ventilators no doubt. She checked the ventilators, but they were okay. The others gave her chores to do, let her go on walks by herself before takeoff and after landing. They were stunned themselves by what they had found at Carr and Korolyov, and unable to bring much to the effort of cheering her up, which she found a relief. Ann and Simon were still worried about Peter. Yeli and Sax were worried about their food supplies, dropping all the time; the plane’s cabinets were nearly bare.