Downbelow Station

to tell me no, sir.”

There was a pause, distance, and more than enough delay for distance. “We’ve sounded the evacuation for sections of yellow and orange dock. Captain Mallory. Medical services will be available, all that we can spare. Emergency crews are moving. We copy regarding sealing of the affected areas. Security plans will be set in motion at once. We hope that your concern is as great for our citizens. This station will not permit the military to interfere in our internal-security operations or to jeopardize our neutrality, but assistance under our command will be appreciated. Over.”

Signy relaxed slowly, wiped sweat from her face, drew an easier breath. “Assistance will be given, sir. Estimated docking… four hours, if I delay this convoy all I can. I can give you that much time to get ready. Has news about Mariner gotten to you yet? It was blown, sir, sabotage. Over.”

“We copy four hours. We appreciate the measures you urge us to take and we are taking them in earnest. We are distressed to hear about the Mariner disaster. Request detailed briefing. Further advise you we have a Company team here at the moment It’s highly distressed at these proceedings.”

She breathed an obscenity into the com.

“… and they’re demanding to have all of you turned down for some other station. My staff is attempting to explain to them the condition of the ships and the hazard to life aboard them, but they’re putting pressure on us. They consider Pell’s neutrality threatened. Kindly appreciate that in your approach and bear in mind that the Company agents have requested contact with you in person. Over.”

She repeated the obscenity, expelled a breath. The Fleet avoided such meetings when possible, rare as they were in the last decade. “Tell them I’ll be busy. Keep them off the docks and out of our area. Do they need pictures of starving colonists to take back with them? Bad press, Mr. Konstantin. Keep them out of our way. Over.”

“They’re armed with government papers. Security Council. That kind of Company team. They have rank to use and they’re demanding transport deeper Beyond. Over.”

She chose a second obscenity and swallowed it. “Thank you, Mr. Konstantin. I’ll capsule you my recommendations on procedures with the refugees; they’ve been worked out in detail. You can, of course, ignore them, but I’d advise against it. We can’t even guarantee you that what we’re disembarking on Pell isn’t armed. We can’t get among them to find out. Armed troops can’t get in there, you understand? That’s what we’re giving you. I’d advise you keep the Company boys out of our docking area entirely before we have hostages to deal with. Copy? End transmission.”

“We copy. Thank you, captain. End transmission.”

She slumped in place, glared at the screens and shot an order to com to capsule the instructions to station command.

Company men. And refugees from lost stations. Information kept coming steadily from stricken Hansford, with a calm on the part of its crew she admired. Strictly procedures. They were dying over there. Crew was sealed into command and armed, refusing to abandon ship, refusing to let a rider take Hansford in tow. It was their ship. They stayed by it and did what they could for those aboard, by remote. They had no thanks from the passengers, who were tearing the ship apart — or had been doing so, until the air fouled and the systems began to break down.

Four hours.

ii

Norway . Russell’s had met disaster, and Mariner. Rumor ran through the station corridors, aboil with the confusion and anger of residents and companies that had been turned out with all their property. Volunteers and native workers aided in the evacuation; dock crews used the loading machinery to move personal belongings out of the area selected for quarantine, tagging items and trying not to confuse them or allow pilferage. Com echoed with announcements.

“Residents of yellow one through one nineteen are asked to send a representative to the emergency housing desk. There is a lost child at the aid station, May Terner. Will a relative please come at once to the aid station?… Latest estimates from station central indicate housing available in guest residency, one thousand units. All nonresidents are being removed in favor of permanent station residents, priority to be determined by lottery. Apartments available by condensation of occupied units: ninety-two. Compartments available for emergency conversion to residential space, two thousand, including public meeting areas and some mainday/alterday rotation of occupancy. The station council urges any person with personal arrangements possible through lodging with relatives or friends to secure same and to key this information to comp at the earliest possible; housing on private initiative will be compensated to the home resident at a rate equivalent to per capita expense for other housing. We are five hundred units deficient and this will require barracks-style housing for on-station residency, or transfer on a temporary basis for Downbelow residency, unless this deficiency can be made up by volunteering of housing or willingness of individuals to share assigned living space. Plans are to be considered immediately for residential use of section blue, which should free five hundred units within the next one hundred eighty days… Thank you… Will a security team please report to eight yellow?…”

It was a nightmare. Damon Konstantin stared at the flow of printout and intermittently paced the matted floors of dock command blue sector, above the area of the docks where techs tried to cope with the logistics of evacuation. Two hours left. He could see from the series of windows the chaos all along the docks where personal belongings had been piled under police guard. Everyone and every installation in yellow and orange sectors’ ninth through fifth levels had been displaced: dockside shops, homes, four thousand people crowded elsewhere. The influx spilled past blue, around the rim to green and white, the big main-residence sectors. Crowds milled about, bewildered and distraught. They understood the need: they moved — everyone on station was subject to such transfers of residence, for repairs, for reorganizations… but never on this kind of notice and never on this scale, and never without knowing where they were to be assigned. Plans were cancelled, four thousand lives upset. Merchanters of the two score freighters which happened to be in dock had been rudely ousted from sleepover accommodations and security did not want them on the docks or near the ships. His wife, Elene, was down there in a knot of them, a slim figure in pale green. Liaison with the merchanters… that was Elene’s job, and he was at her office fretting about it. He nervously watched the manner of the merchanters, which was angry, and meditated sending station police down there for Elene’s protection; but Elene seemed to be matching them shout for shout, all lost in the soundproofing and the general buzz of voices and machine noise which faintly penetrated the elevated command post. Suddenly there were shrugs, and hands offered all round, as if there had been no quarrel at all. Some matter was either settled or postponed, and, Elene walked away and the merchanters strode off trough the dispossessed crowds, though with shakes of their heads and no happiness evident. Elene had disappeared beneath the slanted windows… to the lift, to come up here, Damon hoped. Off in green section his own office was dealing with an angry-resident protest; and there was the Company delegation fretting in station central making demands of its own on his father.

“Will a medical team please report to section eight yellow?” com asked silkily. Someone was in trouble, off in the evacuated sections.

The lift doors opened into the command center. Elene joined him, her face still flushed from argument

“Central’s gone stark mad,” she said. “The merchanters were moved out of hospice and told they had to lodge on their ships; and now they’ve got station police between them and their ships. They’re wanting to cast off from station. They don’t want their ships mobbed in some sudden evacuation. Read it that they’d just as soon be out of Pell’s vicinity entirely at the moment. Mallory’s been known to recruit merchanters at gunpoint.”

“What did you tell them?”

“To stand fast and figure there are going to be some contracts handed out for supplies to take care of this influx; but they won’t go to any ship that bolts the dock, or that tangles with our police. And that has the lid on them, at least for a while.”

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 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. Well 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.”