Elene was afraid. It was clear behind the brittle, busy calm. They were all afraid. He slipped his arm about her; hers fitted his waist and she leaned there, saying nothing. Merchanter, Elene Quen, off the freighter Estelle, which had gone its way to Russell's, and to Mariner. She had missed that run for him, to consider tying herself to a station for good, for his sake; and now she ended up trying to reason with angry crews who were probably right and sensible in her eyes, with the military in their laps. He viewed matters in a cold, quiet panic, stationer's fashion. Things which went wrong onstation went wrong sitting still, by quadrants and by sections, and there was a certain fatalism bred of it: if one was in a safe zone, one stayed there; if one had a job which could help, one did it; and if it was one's own area in trouble, one still sat fixed— it was the only heroism possible. A station could not shoot, could not run, could only suffer damage and repair it if there was time. Merchanters had other philosophies and different reflexes in time of trouble.
"It's all right," he said, tightening his arm briefly. He felt her answering pressure. "It's not coming here. They're just putting civilians far behind the lines. They'll stay here till the crisis is over and then go back. If not, we've had big influxes before, when they shut down the last of the Hinder Stars.
We added sections. We'll do it again. We just get larger."
Elene said nothing. There were dire rumors drifting through com and down the corridors regarding the extent of the disaster at Mariner, and Estelle was not one of the incoming freighters. They knew that now for certain. She had hoped, when they had gotten the first news of the arrival; and feared, because there was damage reported on those ships out there, moving at freighters' slow pace, jammed with passengers they were never designed to handle, in the series of small jumps a freighter's limited range 17
Downbelow Station
made necessary. It added up to days and days in realspace as far as they had come in, and living hell on those vessels. There was some rumor they had not had sufficient drugs to get them through jump, that some had made it without. He tried to imagine it— reckoned Elene's worry. Estelle's absence from that convoy was good news and bad. Likely she had shied off her declared course, catching wind of trouble, and gone elsewhere in a hurry ... still cause for anxiety, with the war heating up out on the edge. A station ... gone, blown. Russell's, evacuating personnel. The safe edge was suddenly much too close, much too fast.
"It's likely," he said, wishing that he could save the news for another day, but she had to know, "that we'll be moved to blue, into maybe cramped quarters. The clean-clearance personnel are the ones that can be transferred to that section. We'll have to be among the ones to go."
She shrugged. "That's all right. It's arranged?"
"It will be."
A second time she shrugged; they lost their home and she shrugged, staring at the windows onto the docks below, and the crowds, and the merchanter ships.
"It's not coming here," he insisted, trying to believe it, for Pell was his home, in a way no merchanter was likely to understand. Konstantins had built this place, from the days of its beginning. "Whatever the Company losses— not Pell."
And a moment later, moved by conscience if not by courage: "I've got to get over there, onto the quarantine docks."
18
Downbelow Station
iii
Norway eased in ahead of the others, with the hubbed, unsightly torus of Pell a gleaming sprawl in her vid screens. The riders were fanned out, fending off the freighters for the moment. The merchanter crews in command of those refugee ships wisely held the line, giving her no trouble. The pale crescent of Pell's World ... Downbelow, in Pell's matter-of-fact nomenclature ... hung beyond the station, swirled with storms.
They matched up with Pell Station's signal, drawing even with the flashing lights on the area designated for their docking. The cone which would receive their nose probe glowed blue with the come-aheads. SECTION
ORANGE, the distorted letters read on vid, beside a tangle of solar vanes and panels. Signy punched in scan, saw things where they ought to be on Pell's borrowed image. Constant chatter flowed from Pell central and the ship channels, keeping a dozen techs busy at com.
They entered final approach, lost gee gently as Norway's rotating inner cylinder, slung gutwise in its frame, slowed and locked to docking position, all personnel decks on the station's up and down. They felt other stresses magnified for a time, a series of reorientations. The cone loomed, easy dock, and they met the grapple, a dragging confirmation of the last slam of gee— opened accesses for Pell's dock crews, stable now, and solidly part of Pell's rotation.
"I'm getting an all-quiet on dockside," Graff said. "The stationmaster's police are all over the place."
"Message," com said. "Pell stationmaster to Norway: request military cooperation with desks set up to facilitate processing as per your instructions. All procedures are as you requested, with the stationmaster's compliments, captain."
"Reply: Hansford coming in immediately with crisis in lifesupport and possible riot conditions. Stay back of our lines. Endit.— Graff, take over operations. Di, get me those troops out on that dock doubletime."
She left matters there, rose and strode back through the narrow bowed aisles of the bridge to the small compartment which served her as office 19
Downbelow Station
and oftentimes sleeping quarters. She opened the locker there and slipped on a jacket, slipped a pistol into her pocket. It was not a uniform. No one in the Fleet, perhaps, possessed a full-regulation uniform. Supply had been that bad, that long. Her captain's circle on her collar was her only distinction from a merchanter. The troops were no better uniformed, but armored: that, they kept in condition, at all costs. She hastened down via the lift into the lower corridor, proceeding amid the rush of troops Di Janz had ordered to the dock, combat-rigged, through the access tube and out into the chill wide spaces.
The whole dock was theirs, vast, upward-curving perspective, section arches curtained by ceiling as the station rim curve swept leftward toward gradual horizon; on the right a section seal was in use, stopping the eye there. The place was vacant of all but the dock crews and their gantries; and station security and the processing desks, and those were well back of Norway's area. There were no native workers, not here, not in this situation. Debris lay scattered across the wide dock, papers, bits of clothing, evidencing a hasty withdrawal. The dockside shops and offices were empty; the niner corridor midway of the dock showed likewise vacant and littered. Di Janz's deep bellow echoed in the metal girders overhead as he ordered troops deployed about the area where Hansford was coming in.
Pell dockers moved up. Signy watched and gnawed her lip nervously, glanced aside as a civ came up to her, youngish, darkly aquiline, bearing a tablet and looking like business in his neat blue suit. The plug she had in one ear kept advising her of Hansford's status, a constant clamor of bad news. "What are you?" she asked.
"Damon Konstantin, captain, from Legal Affairs."
She spared a second look. A Konstantin. He could be that. Angelo had had two boys before his wife's accident. "Legal Affairs," she said with distaste.
"I'm here if you need anything ... or if they do. I've got a com link with central."
20
Downbelow Station
There was a crash. Hansford made a bad dock, grated down the guidance cone and shuddered into place.
"Get her hooked up and get out!" Di roared at the dock crews: no com for him.
Graff was ordering matters from Norway's command. Hansford's crew would stay sealed on their bridge, working debarcation by remote. "Tell them walk out," she heard relayed from Graff. "Any rush at troops will be met with fire."
The hookups were complete. The ramp went into place.
"Move!" Di bellowed. Dockers pelted behind the lines of troops; rifles were levelled. The hatch opened, a crash up the access tube.
A stench rolled out onto the chill of the dock. Inner hatches
opened and a living wave surged out, trampling each other, falling. They screamed and shouted and rushed out like madmen, staggered as a burst of fire went over their heads.
"Hold it!" Di shouted. "Sit down where you are and put your hands on your heads."
Some were sitting down already, out of weakness; others sank down and complied. A few seemed too dazed to understand, but came no farther.
The wave had stopped. At Signy's elbow Damon Konstantin breathed a curse and shook his head. No word of laws from him; sweat stood visibly on his skin. His station stared riot in the face ... collapse of systems, Hansford' s death ten thousandfold. There were a hundred, maybe a hundred fifty living, crouched on the dock by the umbilical gantry. The ship's stench spread. A pump labored, flushing air through Hansford's systems under pressure. There were a thousand on that ship.
"We're going to have to go in there," Signy muttered, sick at the prospect.
Di was moving the others one at a time, passing them under guns into a curtained area where they were to be stripped, searched, scrubbed, passed 21
Downbelow Station
on to the desks or to the medics. Baggage there was none, not with this group, nor papers worth anything.
"Need a security team suited up for a contamination area," she told young Konstantin. "And stretchers. Get us a disposal area prepared. We're going to vent the dead; it's all we can do. Have them ID'ed as best you can, fingerprints, photos, whatever. Every corpse passed out of here unidentified is future trouble for your security."
Konstantin looked ill. That was well enough. So did some of her troops.
She tried to ignore her own stomach.
A few more survivors had made their way to the opening of the access, very weak, almost unable to get down the ramp. A handful, a scant handful.
Lila was coming in, her approach begun in her crew's panic, defying instructions and riders' threats. She heard Graff's voice reporting it, activated her own mike. "Stall them off. Clip a vane off them if you have to. We've got our hands full. Get me a suit out here."
They found seventy-eight more living, lying among the decomposing dead. The rest was cleanup, and no more threat. Signy passed decontamination, stripped off the suit, sat down on the bare dock and fought a heaving stomach. A civ aid worker chose a bad time to offer her a sandwich. She pushed it away, took the local herbal coffee and caught her breath in the last of the processing of Hansford's living. The place stank now of antiseptic fogging.
A carpet of bodies in the corridors, blood, dead. Hansford's emergency seals had gone into place during a fire. Some of the dead had been cut in two. Some of the living had broken bones from being trampled in the panic. Urine. Vomit. Blood. Decay. They had had closed systems, had not had to breathe it. The Hansford survivors had had nothing at the last but the emergency oxygen, and that had possibly been a cause of murder.
Most of the living had been sealed into areas where the air had held out less fouled than the badly ventilated storage holds where most of the refugees had been crammed.
22
Downbelow Station
"Message from the stationmaster," com said into her ear, "requesting the captain's presence in station offices at the earliest."
"No," she sent back shortly. They were bringing Hansford's dead out; there was some manner of religious service, assembly-line fashion, some amenity for the dead before venting them. Caught in Downbelow's gravity well, they would drift in that direction, eventually. She wondered vaguely whether bodies burned in falling: likely, she thought. She had not much to do with worlds. She was not sure whether anyone had ever cared to find out.
Lila's folk were exiting in better order. They pushed and shoved at the first, but they stopped it when they saw the armed troops facing them.
Konstantin intervened with useful service over the portable loudspeaker, talking to the terrified civs in stationers' terms and throwing stationers'
logic in their faces, the threat of damage to fragile balances, the kind of drill and horror story they must have heard all their confined lives. Signy put herself on her feet again during the performance, still holding the coffee cup, watched with a calmer stomach as the procedures she had outlined began to function smoothly, those with papers to one area and those without to another, for photographing and ID by statement. The handsome lad from Legal Affairs proved to have other uses, a voice of ringing authority when it regarded disputed paper or confused station staff.
" Griffin's moving up on docking," Graff's voice advised her. "Station advises us they're wanting back five hundred units of confiscated housing based on Hansford's casualties."
"Negative," she said flatly. "My respects to station command, but out of the question. What's the status on Griffin?"
"Panicky. We've warned them."
"How many others are coming apart?"
"It's tense everywhere. Don't trust it. They could bolt, any one of them.
Maureen was one dead, coronary, another ill. I'm routing her in next.
23
Downbelow Station
Stationmaster asks whether you'll be available for conference in an hour. I pick up that the Company boys are making demands to get into this area."
"Keep stalling." She finished the coffee, walked along the lines in front of Griffin's dock, the whole operation moving down a berth, for there was nothing left at Hansford's berth worth guarding. There was quiet from the processed refugees. They had the matter of locating their lodgings to occupy them, and the station's secure environment to comfort them. A suited crew stood by to move Hansford out; they had only four berths at this dock. Signy measured with her eye the space the station had allotted them, five levels of two sections and the two docks. Crowded, but they would manage for a while. Barracks could solve some of it ... temporarily.
Things would get tighter. No luxuries, that was certain.
They were not the only refugees adrift; they were simply the first. And upon that knowledge she kept her mouth shut.
It was Dinah that broke the peace; a man caught with weapons in scan, a friend who turned ugly on his arrest: two dead, then, and sobbing, hysterical passengers afterward. Signy watched it, simply tired, shook her head and ordered the bodies vented with the rest, while Konstantin approached her with angry arguments. "Martial law," she said, ending all discussion and walk away.
Sita, Pearl, Little Bear, Winifred. They came in with agonizing slowness, unloaded refugees and property, and the processing inches its way along.
Signy left the dock then, went back aboard Norway and took a bath. She scrubbed three times all over before she began to feel that the smell and the sights had left her.
Station had entered alterday; complaints and demands had fallen silent at least for a few hours.
Or if there were any, Norway's alterday command fended them off her.
There was comfort for the night, company of sorts, a leave-taking. He was another item of salvage from Russell's and Mariner ... not for transport on 24
Downbelow Station
the other ships. They would have torn him apart. He knew this, and appreciated matters. He had no taste for the crew either, and understood his situation.
"You're getting off here," she told him, staring at him, who lay beside her.
The name did not matter. It confused itself in her memory with others, and sometimes she called him by the wrong one, late, when she was half asleep. He showed no emotion at that statement, only blinked, indication that he had absorbed the fact. The face intrigued her: innocence, perhaps.
Contrasts intrigued her. Beauty did. "You're lucky," she said. He reacted to that the same way, as he reacted to most things. He simply stared, vacant and beautiful; they had played with his mind on Russell's. There was a sordidness in her sometimes, a need to deal wounds ... limited murder, to blot out the greater ones. To deal little terrors, to forget the horror outside. She had sometime nights with Graff, with Di, with whoever took her fancy. She never showed this face to those she valued, t
o friends, to crew. Only sometimes there were voyages like this one, when her mood was black. It was a common disease, in the Fleet, in the sealed worlds of ships without discharge, among those in absolute power.
"Do you care?" she asked; he did not, and that was, perhaps, his survival.
Norway remained, her troops visibly on duty on the dockside, the last ship berthed in quarantine. On the dock, the lights were still at bright noon, over lines which moved only slowly, under the presence of the guns.
25
Downbelow Station
3
i
Pell: 5/2a*/52
*Alterday
Too many sights, too much of such things. Damon Konstantin took a cup of coffee from one of the aid workers who passed the desk and leaned on his arm, stared out across the docks and tried to rub the ache from his eyes. The coffee tasted of disinfectant, as everything here smelled of it, as it was in their pores, their noses, everywhere. The troops stayed on guard, keeping this little area of the dock safe. Someone had been knifed in Barracks A. No one could explain the weapon. They thought that it had come from the kitchen of one of the abandoned restaurants on dockside, a piece of cutlery unthinkingly left behind, by someone who had never realized the situation. He found himself exhausted beyond sense. He had no answers; station police could not find the offender in the lines of refugees which still wended their way out there across the docks, inching along to housing desks.
A touch descended on his shoulder. He turned an aching neck, blinked up at his brother. Emilio settled in the vacant chair next to him, hand still on his shoulder. Elder brother. Emilio was in alterday central command. It was alterday now, Damon realized muzzily. The wake-sleep worlds in which they two seldom met on duty had gotten lapped in the confusion.