Downbelow Station

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 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 hy 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, to 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 dock-side, 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.

Chapter Three

i

Pell: 5/2a[1]/52

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.

“Go home,” Emilio said gently. “My turn, if one of us has to be here. I promised Elene I’d send you home. She sounded upset.”

“All right,” he agreed, but he failed to move, lacking the volition or the energy. Emilio’s hand tightened, fell away.

“I saw the monitors,” Emilio said. “I know what we’ve got here.”

Damon tightened his lips against a sudden rush of nausea, staring straight before him, not at refugees, but at infinity, at the future, at the undoing of what had always been stable and certain. Pell. Theirs, his and Elene’s, his and Emilio’s. The Fleet took license on itself to do this to them and there was nothing they could do to stop it, because the refugees were poured in too suddenly, and they had no alternatives ready. “I’ve seen people shot down,” he said. “I didn’t do anything. I couldn’t. Couldn’t fight the military. Dissent… would have caused a riot. It would have taken all of us under. But they shot people for breaking a line.”

“Damon, get out of here. It’s my concern now. We’ll work something out.”

“We haven’t any recourse. Only the Company agents; and we don’t need them involved. Don’t let them into this.”

“We’ll handle it,” Emilio said. “There are limits; even the Fleet understands them. They can’t jeopardize Pell and survive. Whatever else they do, they won’t risk us.”

“They have,” Damon said, focused his eyes on the lines across the docks, turned a glance then on his brother, on a face the image of his own plus five years. “We’ve gotten something I’m not sure we can ever digest.”

“So when they shut down the Hinder Stars. We managed.”

“Two stations… six thousand people reach us out of what, fifty, sixty thousand?”

“In Union hands, I’d surmise,” Emilio muttered. “Or dead with Mariner; no knowing what casualties there. Or maybe some got out in other freighters, went elsewhere.” He leaned back in the chair, his face settled into morose lines. “Father’s probably asleep. Mother too, I hope. I stopped by the apartment before I came. Father says it was crazy for you to come here; I said I was crazy too and I could probably clean up what you didn’t get to. He didn’t say anything. But he’s worried — Get on back to Elene. She’s been working the other side of this chaos, passing papers on the refugee merchanters. She’s been asking questions of her own. Damon, I think you ought to get home.”

“Estelle.” Apprehension hit through to him. “She’s hunting rumors.”

“She went home. She was tired or upset; I don’t know. She just said she wanted you to get home when you could.”

“Something’s come in.” He pushed himself to his feet, gathered up his papers, realized what he was doing, pushed them at Emilio and left in haste, past the guardpoint, into the chaos of the dock on the other side of the passage which divided main station from quarantine. Native labor scurried out of his way, furred, skulking forms more alien by reason of the breather-masks they wore outside their maintenance tunnels; they were moving equipage and cargo and belongings in frantic haste… shrieked and shouted among themselves in insane counterpoint to the commands of human overseers.

He took the lift over to green, walked the corridor into their own residence area, and even this was littered with displaced belongings in boxes, a security guard dozing at his post among them. They were all overshift, particularly security. Damon passed him, turned a face to a belated and embarrassed challenge, walked to the door of the apartment.

He keyed it open, saw with relief the lights on, heard the familiar rattle of plastic in the kitchen.

“Elaine?” He walked in. She was watching the oven, her back to him. She did not turn. He stopped, sensing disaster, another world amiss.

The timer went off. She removed the plate from the oven, set it on the counter, turned, managed composure to look at him. He waited, hurting for her, and after a moment came and took her in his arms. She gave a short sigh. “They’re gone,” she said. And a moment later another short gasp and a release. “Blown with Mariner. Estelle’s gone, with everyone aboard. No possible survivors. Sita saw her go; they couldn’t get undocked… all those people trying to get aboard. Fire broke out. And that part of the station went, that’s all. Exploded, blew the nose shell off.”

Fifty-six aboard. Father, mother, cousins, remoter relatives. A world unto itself, Estelle. He had his own, however damaged. He had a family. Hers was dead.

She said nothing more, no word of grief for her loss or of relief to have been spared, to have stayed behind from the voyage. She gave a few more convulsive breaths, hugged him, turned, dry-eyed, to put a second dinner in the microwave.

She sat down, ate, went through all the normal motions. He forced his own meal down, still with a disinfectant taint in his mouth, reckoning it clung all about him. He succeeded finally in catching her eyes looking at him. They were as stark as those of the refugees. He found nothing to say. He got up, walked around the table and hugged her from behind.

Her hands covered his. “I’m all right”

“I wish you’d called me.”

She let go his hands and stood up, touched his arm, a weary gesture. Looked at him suddenly, directly, with that same dark tiredness. “There’s one of us left,” she said. He blinked, perplexed, realized then that she meant the Quens. Estelle’s folk. Merchanters owned names as stationers had a home. She was Quen; that meant something he knew he did not understand, in the months they had been together. Revenge was a merchanter commodity; he knew that… among folk where name alone was a property and reputation went with it

“I want a child,” she said.

He stared at her, struck with the darkness in her eyes. He loved her. She had walked into his life off a merchanter ship and decided to try station life, though she still spoke of her ship. Four months. For the first time in their being together he had no desire for her, not with that look and Estelle’s death and her reasons for revenge. He said nothing. They had agreed there would be no children until she knew for certain whether she could bear to stay. What she offered him might be that agreement. It might be something else. It was not the time to talk about it, not now, with insanity all about them.

He simply gathered her against him, walked with her to the bedroom, held her through the long dark hours. She made no demands and he asked no questions.

ii

“No,” the man at the operations desk said, without looking this time at the printout; and then with a weary impulse toward humanity: “Wait. I’ll do another search. Maybe it wasn’t posted with that spelling.”

Vasilly Kressich waited, sick with terror, as despair hung all about this last, forlorn gathering of refugees which refused to leave the desks on dockside: families and parts of families, who hunted relatives, who waited on word. There were twenty-seven of them on the benches near the desk, counting children; he had counted. They had gone from station main-day into alterday, and another shift of operators at the desk which was station’s one extension of humanity toward them, and there