The Steel Tsar Read Online Free

and the ordeal was over at last.

CHAPTER FOUR
Prisoners
    I think I must have awakened briefly once and heard peculiar squeaky voices babbling from somewhere far away and I realized that the gas was escaping and thus causing the speakers to talk in high-pitched tones. Deciding that I was alive and sure to be rescued, I fell back into unconsciousness.
    When I next awoke I tried to move but could not. I thought that perhaps my back was broken, for there was little sensation save for the impression that something heavy was pressing down on me. Because of this pressure I found it very difficult to breathe in deeply enough to shout for the help that I was sure must be near, for I could hear people moving about quite close by.
    The voices were no longer squeaky but they were not familiar either. I listened carefully. The voices were shouting some variant of Malay difficult for me to understand. I thought at first that the local peasantry, the sulphur-gatherers who work the volcanoes, had come to rescue us. I could smell the acrid smoke and it made breathing even harder. My next attempt to cry out failed. Then I heard more shouts.
    And the shouts were followed by sharp reports which I did recognize. Gun shots.
    With a feeling of terrible impotence I tried to move my head to see what was happening.
    The shouting stopped. There was a stillness. Then a thin, hysterical scream. Another shot. Silence. A Malay voice giving rapid, savage commands.
    Painfully, at last, I managed to turn my head and peer out of a jumble of twisted struts and wreckage. I saw bodies impaled on jagged shards of fibreglass and beyond them a pall of smoke through which dim figures moved. As the smoke cleared I saw bright flashes of green, red and yellow silk. These Malays were not sulphur-gatherers, that was certain.
    Then I saw them clearly. They were clad in the familiar style of Malay bandits and pirates from Koto Raja to Timor. They wore richly coloured sarongs and embroidered jackets. On their heads were pitjis, turbans or wide coolie hats. There were sandals of painted leather on their brown feet and their bodies were crossed with bandoliers of cartridges. At their belts hung holstered revolvers, knives and parangs and they had rifles in their hands. I saw one come towards me, a look of cruel hatred frozen on his features. I dropped my head and shut my eyes, hearing him poke about in the wreckage above me. I heard a shot close to my face and thought he had fired at me, but the bullet landed in a corpse lying on top of me. He moved away.
    I looked up again.
    The bandits were herding the survivors down the mountain. Through the smoke I could see nurses in smudged, torn white uniforms, doctors still dressed in medical overalls or in shirtsleeves, airshipmen in sky blue, staggering ahead of their captors. But there were no patients among them. I watched in dazed despair until the smoke swallowed them up.
    Then slowly, as it dawned on me what had happened to my companions, pain began to flood through my body. I strained to twist myself round and see what pinned me in the wreckage.
    One of the relatively light bunks had fallen on top of me and in the bunk was the body of a child. Its dead face, the eyes wide open, stared into mine. I shuddered and tried to lift the bunk clear. It moved slightly. The child’s head rolled. I turned, reached out with bleeding hands and grasped a broken strut in front of me, pulling myself desperately from under the bunk until I was free and my breathing was easier. But my legs were still numb and I could not stand. I leaned forward and got a hold on another strut, using that to pull my body a few more inches over the wreckage, then I think I fainted for a few minutes.
    It took me a long time to pull myself over the struts and the broken slabs of hull and the corpses until I lay on the outer areas of the wreckage on hard stone.
    For all I was bruised and bleeding, I had no bones broken. The bodies of those who had died had saved me