They would have found it even without the scanners. A great canyon was in the process of ripping itself open in the ground some fifty kilometers from the Spire. The noise alone was excruciatingly loud. Each time the earth split, it was as if an impossibly large fist were being smashed into an infinite number of cymbals and drums.

  Great jets of combustible gas shot up from smaller cracks that opened near the new canyon, some igniting when they were struck by one of the bolts of multicolored lightning. There was smoke everywhere, and above them, the sky, once again, seemed to burn.

  Vale could only imagine what the primitive Orishans had thought the first time their god had appeared in the sky. Without a framework for understanding what was killing them, it was small wonder that they learned quickly to fear Erykon’s wrath.

  As Keru deftly avoided a sudden burst of flaming gas, Vale told him to get lower. The clouds of dust rising up from the upheaval below, coupled with the smoke from the burning jungle, made targeting whatever survivors there might be impossible. If she was going to salvage any of this, she needed a closer look.

  “It’s going to be bumpy,” he told her as he set the Ellingtonin a wide, downward-looping arc. “You’d better strap in.” She did as he asked quickly, hollering for Troi to do the same below.

  There was one harrowing moment when the black plume of smoke from one of the burning geysers enveloped them, completely stealing their view of the world outside. To his credit, Keru only grunted and altered the descent trajectory by a few points.

  They emerged from the black fog almost instantly and much closer to the trouble below. When her eyes were able to focus on the dying Orishan city, Vale almost wished she’d stayed behind with Ra-Havreii.

  From the air it bore a horrible resemblance to the maw of the creature that had tried to make a meal of Vale two days before. Instead of row after row of teeth, however, this opening was ringed with giant structures, buildings of some sort, most of which now either tottered at hellishly odd angles or, worse, had already slid down into the sinkhole at the center of the growing abyss.

  There were people down there. She could see them now. Some, those with wings, were attempting to fly their fellows out of danger in ones and twos, but the added drag on the gossamer-thin appendages mostly resulted in both rescuer and rescuee being sucked back down. They were the lucky ones. The mass of the Orishans were wingless and were thus forced to scramble and cling to anything that offered even a moment’s purchase. A few, too few to inspire hope, had managed to climb or fly up to the lip, but the majority of them were stuck screaming below.

  Troi was right. If they weren’t helped somehow, soon, all these people were going to die.

  “What’s the plan?” Keru asked her, wrestling to maintain control of the shuttle as another chunk of the crystal whizzed past them.

  “Closer,” said Vale, trying to think. “Get closer. We’re no good up here.” She activated the shields and, in doing so, gave herself an idea.

  “That’s only a field patch, Commander,” said Keru as the shields came up. “This thing wasn’t designed for maneuverability. Whatever you want done we’d better get to it.”

  “Easy,” she said, looking for the right candidate. Then, seeing it, “There! Ten o’clock! Go!”

  As he guided the shuttle that way, Keru tried to see what it was she planned to do. They were headed to the far edge of the canyon, where a row of the strangely curved structures was teetering like a ship sinking at sea.

  Hundreds of the Orishans had made it to the top side of the nearest edge and then realized to their obvious horror that there was no way to cross from that position to the relative safety of the solid ground. What was worse was the sight of so many of those still on the lower levels simply cowering in fear and not even attempting to save themselves.

  It was clear that was where Vale wanted him to go so Keru threaded a path between the flying rocks and crystals and the jets of exploding gas to bring the shuttle within a few meters of the target.

  “What are you doing?” he said as he noticed her hands inputting codes into the computer.

  “Changing our shield configuration,” she said. “There!”

  She told the computer to extend the new shield configuration to encompass the area ahead of them. Nothing happened in the visual spectrum but, via instruments, Keru could see that the shuttle was now at the apex of a giant, egg-shaped force field, the Ellington’s shield.

  He was about to protest that the shield would cut through the structure, that moving now would send the whole thing into the abyss when he realized that was precisely what she wanted.

  “Take us up,” she said.

  The shuttle rose and, as he had predicted, only took with it the part of the structure enveloped by the shield/ tractor combo. The rest, after straining to maintain coherence, broke off and fell tumbling away into the darkness below.

  The extra drag made navigation even more difficult, but Keru managed somehow, carrying the massive section of building and its many occupants to the relative safety of a wide flat area of veldt that, thus far, had not been touched by the tremors.

  With surprising delicacy he set the whole thing down there and, once Vale released the shields, watched as several hundred Orishans streamed gratefully out onto solid ground.

  “Nice work, Commander,” he said. “That was inspired.”

  “Nice work, yourself,” she said, grinning.

  “Now what?” he said.

  “Now we do it again, Ranul,” she said. “That was only a couple hundred. There are thousands of them down there and we don’t have much time.”

  They performed their strange ballet seven more times, scooping up nearly three thousand very surprised, very grateful Orishans in total. It wasn’t perfect or even close; as they raised their meager few to safety, they were forced to watch thousands more plummet to their ugly doom in the depths.

  On the eighth and probably final attempt they ran into trouble.

  “I can’t get closer,” said Keru, trying to do it in spite of what he said. “These damned gas jets are too powerful.”

  The last of the surviving structures, a sort of corkscrew tower now bent perpendicular to its normal position by the shifting ground, was only seconds away from falling in.

  A large cluster of Orishans, maybe six or seven hundred of them, stood and knelt at the farthest edge and wouldn’t budge. Either they hadn’t seen the previous rescues or they were all simply too petrified with fear to help save their lives.

  The shuttle’s modified shields could only extend so far and that limit was just shy of the area in which the Orishans now stood. They had to move forward, toward the danger if they were to be saved. Thus far none of them had, and Keru was antsy to get the shuttle clear as their luck at avoiding the flying debris couldn’t possibly hold out forever.

   “Ra-Havreii to Vale,”said the engineer’s voice.

  “Can it wait, Doctor?” she said. “We have our hands full now.”

   “Maybe,”said the Efrosian, clearly struggling with something of his own. “A very few minutes, Commander. No more.”

  “We have to leave them,” said Keru, meaning the Orishans. “There’s no time.”

  “We’re not leaving them,” she said, unhooking herself and heading for the access ladder. “Open the rear access hatch.”

  “Are you insane?” he said. “Commander, we have to go!”

  “Now, Lieutenant,” she said, and disappeared below.

  She found Deanna safely strapped to one of the emergency jump seats and flung herself into the other. Even as she closed the last buckle, the rear hatch opened, exposing the entire hold to the outside. A gust of hot air rushed in along with the cacophonous sounds of destruction that had been muffled before by the shuttle’s thick hull.