Beaton looked to Gustav, who nodded without a word. The captain saluted, then headed down the steps, bellowing orders as he did so. His marines moved back down the steps and fanned out before them. The emperor’s Scots started to move with them, but were called back by Major Graham after Beaton threw a couple of terse sentences his way.
Gericke turned back to Gustav.
“My apologies, Emperor. With your permission, I need to join Captain Reilly and his men.”
“I will go with you,” Gustav said, tugging at his belt. “I want to see this for myself.”
“Oh, no you won’t,” Dr. Nichols said, appearing at the emperor’s side. “Inside. Rest. Now. If anyone’s going, I will. If the police captain is right, they’re going to need another doctor a lot more than they’re going to need you.”
Gustav stared down at the doctor. Nichols didn’t flinch, and his gaze bored back into the emperor’s eyes. Gustav finally sighed. “As you will, Doctor. You are a far greater tyrant than I could ever be. I hope that history records that.”
The imperial gaze swiveled to Ulrik.
“Go with them. Be my eyes and ears.”
Ulrik nodded.
Gustav turned and entered the palace, Kristina at one side, Caroline Platzer at the other, and Erling Ljungberg looming at his back.
* * *
Byron pulled up panting after the minute or so of flat-out sprinting. The back of his mind observed that his high school track coach would call him pathetic. But the front of his mind was occupied with looking at a scene that might have been found in Dante’s Inferno. The fence around the western edge of the construction site was leveled, and debris and detritus was scattered everywhere. Various piles of building materials were tumbled in heaps. Several of the partially-laid brick walls had been toppled. The crane structures were demolished, which he had suspected he’d find after seeing the derrick from the crane lying broken on top of a crumbled stretch of wall around the old city on the other side of the canal. So it must have been the crane’s boiler that blew.
Clouds of smoke and steam drifted in the air, seemingly idling above the windrows of bodies inside the worksite. That was perhaps the most horrific sight of all, and they hadn’t even gotten up close and personal with the corpses yet. He knew that many of the men would be losing their last meal soon, as they began to recover the dead.
People were starting to gather, some of them coming out of the nearby houses and buildings. Byron could see a lot of broken windows from where he stood, and there were a few people in the street who seemed to be injured.
“Spread out,” he yelled. “Nobody goes in without my say-so.”
“I see smoke, and I see coals all over,” Gotthilf huffed beside him, “but I don’t see any fire.”
“Yeah,” Byron said. “And the coals seemed to be dimming, at least out there.” He waved a hand at the disaster area.
“We need to get moving, try to help these people,” one of the sergeants proclaimed.
“Wait, Milich,” Byron said, lifting a hand. There was a thought niggling at the back of his mind, but it wouldn’t step forward.
“We can’t wait, they need us now!”
Just as the sergeant started to move forward, the thought came to Byron. It was a memory of his old granddad talking about his days in a factory in Pittsburgh, and about the disaster that caused him to leave the city and move back to Grantville.
“Yep,” Grandpa Buck had said, rocking in his chair on the front porch as his knife flashed in whittling a stick, “that job was great, until the big boiler blew. Steam filled the plant, killed everyone in it. Then it killed a bunch of guys from another building who tried to go in and help the others. Takes steam a while to cool off, it does, and them boys got fried just like the others. And when the steam did cool off enough to let men in without scalding them, a few more went in and died before someone realized that the steam had driven all the breathable air out from the building.” He’d paused in the rocking and whittling both, and pointed his pocket knife at the young Byron, who was sitting on the porch, arms wrapped around his knees. “You don’t never have nothing to do with steam, boy. It’s a killer.”
“Halt!” Byron yelled. He yanked Sergeant Milich back, faced the patrolmen and placed his hand on his pistol. “Nobody goes in until I say so, and I’ll shoot the first man who tries.”
The Polizei sergeants and patrolmen knew Byron for a no-nonsense sort, who wouldn’t say something if he didn’t mean it. Most of them had also seen him shoot. They froze in place.
At that moment, a pigeon launched off a roof across the street. It swooped down, headed for something that had caught its eye in the rubble. Three yards into the destruction zone, it flew through a patch of steam fog, folded in mid-air and crumpled to the ground.