Downbelow Station

leisurely, a matter of shots fired when a rebel was clearly available as a target. The Company ships could not resurrect the stations immediately Earthward of Pell; they were no longer viable. The populations drifted to Pell and Russell’s and Mariner and Viking, and to Fargone and farther still.

Ships were built, as stations had been, in the Beyond. The technology was there, and merchanters proliferated. Then jump arrived — a theory originated in the New Beyond, at Cyteen, quickly seized upon by shipbuilders at Mariner on the Company side of the line.

And that was the third great blow to Earth. The old lightbound way of figuring was obsolete. Jump freighters skipped along in short transits into the between; but the time it took from star to star went from years to periods of months and days. Technology improved. Trade became a new kind of game and strategy in the long war changed… stations knit closer together.

Suddenly, out of this, there was an organization among the rebels farthest Beyond. It started as a coalition of Fargone and its mines; it swept to Cyteen, gathered to itself Paradise and Wyatt’s, and reached for other stars and the merchanters who served them. There were rumors… of vast population increases going on for years unreported, technology once suggested on the Company side of the line, when the need was for men, for human lives to fill up the vast dark nothingness, to work and to build. Cyteen had been doing it. This organization, this Union , as it called itself, bred and multiplied geometrically, using installations already in operation, birth-labs. Union grew. It had, in the course of two decades, increased enormously in territory and in population density, it offered a single, unswerving ideology of growth and colonization, a focused direction to what had been a disorganized rebellion. It silenced dissent, mobilized, organized, pushed hard at the Company.

And in final, outraged public demand for results in the deteriorating situation, the Earth Company back on Sol Station gave up the tax, diverted that fund to the building of a great Fleet, all jumpships, engines of destruction, Europe and America and all their deadly kindred.

So was Union building, developing specialized warships, changing style as it changed technology. Rebel captains who had fought long years for their own reasons were charged with softness at the first excuse; ships were put into the hands of commanders with the right ideology, with more ruthlessness.

Company successes grew harder. The great Fleet, outnumbered and with an immense territory to cover, did not bring an end to the war in a year or in five years. And Earth grew vexed with what had become an inglorious, exasperating conflict. Cut all the starships, the cry was now in the financing corporations. Pull back our ships and let the bastards starve.

It was of course the Company Fleet which starved; Union did not, but Earth seemed incapable of understanding that, that it was no longer a question of fragile colonies in rebellion but of a forming power, well-fed, well-armed. The same myopic policies, the same tug-of-war between isolationists and Company which had alienated the colonies in the first place drew harder and harder lines as trade diminished; they lost the war not in the Beyond, but in the senate chambers and the boardrooms on Earth and Sol Station, going for mining within Earth’s own system, which was profitable, and devil take the exploratory missions in any direction at all, which were not.

No matter that they had jump now and that the stars were near. Their minds were geared to the old problems and to their own problems and their own politics. Earth banned further emigration, seeing the flight of its best minds. It weltered in economic chaos, and the drain of Earth’s natural resources by the stations was an easy focus of discontent. No more war, they said; peace suddenly became good politics. The Company Fleet, deprived of funds in a war in which it was engaged on a wide front, obtained supplies where and as it could.

At the end, they were patchwork, fifteen carriers out of the once proud fifty, cobbled together at the stations still open to them. Mazian’s Fleet, they called it, in the tradition of the Beyond, where ships were so few at first that enemies knew each other by name and reputation… a recognition less common now, but some names were known. Conrad Mazian of Europe was a name Union knew to its regret; and Tom Edger of Australia was another; and Mika Kreshov of Atlantic, and Signy Mallory of Norway ; and all the rest of the Company captains, down to those of the rider-ships. They still served Earth and the Company, with less and less love of either. None of this generation was Earthborn; they received few replacements, none from Earth, none from the stations in their territory either, for the stations feared obsessively for their neutrality in the war. Merchanters were their source of skilled crew and of troops, most of them unwilling.

The Beyond had once begun with the stars nearest Earth and now it started with Pell, for the oldest stations were shut down as Earthward trade phased out and the pre-jump style of trade passed forever. The Hinder Stars were all forgotten, unvisited.

There were worlds beyond Pell, beyond Cyteen, and Union had them all now, real worlds, of the far-between stars which jump could reach; where Union used the birth labs still to expand populations, giving them workers and soldiers. Union wanted all the Beyond, to direct what would be the course of the future of man. Union had the Beyond, all but the thin arc of stations which Mazian’s Fleet still thanklessly held for Earth and the Company, because they had once been set to do that, because they saw nothing they could do but that. At their backs was only Pell… and the mothballed stations of the Hinder Stars. Remoter still, isolate… sat Earth, locked in its inner contemplations and its complex, fragmented politics.

No trade of substance came out of Sol now, or to it. In the insanity which was the War, free merchanters plied Unionside and Company Stars alike, crossed the battle lines at will, although Union discouraged that traffic by subtle harassments, seeking to cut Company supply.

Union expanded and the Company Fleet just held on, worldless but for Pell which fed them, and Earth which ignored them. On Unionside, stations were no longer built on the old scale. They were mere depots for worlds now, and probes sought still further stars. They were generations which had never seen Earth… humans to whom Europe and Atlantic were creatures of metal and terror, generations whose way of life was stars, infinities, unlimited growth, and time which looked to forever. Earth did not understand them.

But neither did the stations which remained with the Company or the free merchanters who carried on that strange crosslines trade.

Chapter Two

i

In Approach to Pell: 5/2/52

The convoy winked in, the carrier Norway first, and then the ten freighters — more, as Norway loosed her four riders and the protective formation spread itself wide in its approach to Pell’s Star.

Here was refuge, one secure place the war had never yet reached, but it was the lapping of the tide. The worlds of the far Beyond were winning, and certainties were changing, on both sides of the line.

On the bridge of the ECS 5, the jump-carrier Norway, there was rapid activity, the four auxiliary command boards monitoring the riders, the long aisle of com operations and that of scan and that of their own command. Norway was in constant com link with the ten freighters, and the reports passed back and forth on those channels were terse, ships’ operations only. Norway was too busy for human disasters.

No ambushes. The station at Pell’s World received signal and gave reluctant welcome. Relief whispered from post to post of the carrier, private, not carried on intership com. Signy Mallory, Norway’s captain, relaxed muscles she had not known were tense and ordered armscomp downgraded to standby.

She held command over this flock, third captain in seniority of the fifteen of Mazian’s Fleet. She was forty-nine. The Beyonder Rebellion was far older than that; and she had been freighter pilot, rider captain, the whole gamut, all in the Earth Company’s service. Her face was still young. Her hair was silver gray. The rejuv treatments which caused the gray kept the rest of her at somewhere near biological thirty-six; and considering what she shepherded in and what it portended, she felt aged beyond the forty-nine.

She leaned back in her cushion which looked over the upcurving, narrow aisles of the bridge, punched in on her arm console to check operations, stared out over the active stations and the screens which showed what vid picked up and what scan had Safe. She lived by never quite believing such estimations.

And by adapting. They all did, all of them who fought this war. Norway was like her crew, varied salvage: of Brazil and Italia and Wasp and jinxed Miriam B, parts of her dating all the way back to the days of the freighter war. They took what they could, gave up as little as possible… as from the refugee ships she guided, under her protection. There had been in decades before, a time of chivalry in the war, of quixotic gestures, of enemy rescuing enemy and parting under truce. They were human and the Deep was wide,and they all had known it. No more. From among these civilians, neutrals, she had extracted the useful ones for herself, a handful who might adapt. There would be protests at Pell. It would do them no good. No protests would, on this or other matters. The war had taken another turn, and they were out of painless choices.

They moved slowly, at the crawl which was the best the freighters could manage in realspace, distance Norway or the riders, unencumbered, could cross pushing light. They had come in dangerously close to the mass of Pell’s Star, out of plane with the system, risking jump accident and collisions. It was the only way these freighters could make haste… and lives rode on making time.

“Receiving approach instructions from Pell,” com told her.

“Graff,” she said to her lieutenant, “take her in.” And punching in another channel: “Di, put all troops on standby, full arms and gear.” She switched back to com: “Advise Pell it had better evacuate a section and seal it. Tell the convoy if anyone breaks formation during approach we’ll blow them. Make them believe it.”

“Got it,” com senior said; and in due time: “Stationmaster’s on in person.”

The stationmaster protested. She had expected so.

“You do it,” she told him — Angelo Konstantin, of the Konstantins of Pell. “You clear that section or we do. You start now, strip out everything of value or hazard, down to the walls; and you put those doors on lock and weld the access panels shut. You don’t know what we’re bringing you. And if you delay us, I may have a shipload dead: Hansford’s life support is going. You do it, Mr. Konstantin, or I send the troops in. And you don’t do it right, Mr. Konstantin, and you have refugees scattered like vermin all over your station, with no id’s and ugly-desperate. Forgive my bluntness. I have people dying in their own filth. We number seven thousand frightened civs on these ships, what left Mariner and Russell’s Star. They’re out of choices and out of time. You’re not going