Downbelow Station

Believe me. Talk to Kressich. And hurry about it, Mr. Lukas.”

He looked, caught Kressich’s eyes, nodded, and the party came closer… Kressich, as gray and wretched-looking as ever. But those about him were another matter: young, arrogant, cocky in their bearing.

“The councillor wants a share of this,” one said, small, dark-haired man with a scar on his face.

“You speak for him?”

“Mr. Nino Coledy,” Kressich identified him, surprising him with a direct answer and a harder look than Kressich had ever mustered in council. “I advise you to listen to him. Mr. Lukas, Mr. Jessad. Mr. Coledy heads Q security. We have our own forces, and we can get order when we ask for it. Are you ready to have it?”

Jon turned a disturbed look on Jessad, obtained nothing; Jessad was blank of comment. “If you can stop the mobs — do it.”

“Yes,” said Jessad quietly. “Quiet at this stage would serve us. Welcome to our council, Mr. Kressich, Mr. Coledy.”

“Give me com,” Coledy said. “General address.”

“Give it to him,” Jessad said.

Jon drew a deep breath, suddenly with questions trembling on his lips, what kind of game Jessad was playing with him, pushing these two into the inner circle; Jessad’s own, as Hale was his? He swallowed the questions, swallowed anger, remembering what was out there, how fragile it all was. “Come with me,” he said, led the way inside, took Coledy to the nearest com board. Scan was visible from there, Mazian still holding steady. It was too much to hope that Mazian would be easily disposed of. Far too much, that it would be easy. The Fleet had the area pocketed… Mazian’s ships, dotted here and there about the multi- level halo that was the merchanters’ orbit about Pell.

“Move,” he said to a tech, dislodged him, put Coledy in that place and himself punched through to com central. Bran Hale’s face lit up the screen. “Got a call for you to send out,” he told Hale. “This one goes on general override.”

“Right,” Hale said.

“Mr. Lukas,” someone called, breaking the general hush in central. He looked about. Scan screens were flashing intersect alert.

“Where is it?” he exclaimed. Scan had nothing definite. A peppering of yellow haze warned of something incoming, fast. Comp began to siren alarms. There were soft outcries, curses, techs reaching for boards.

“Mr. Lukas!” someone cried, frantic appeal.

iv

Finity’s End

“Scan,” the alarm rang out. Elene saw the flicker and cast a frantic look at Neihart.

“Break us loose,” Neihart said, avoiding her eyes. “Go”!

The word flashed ship to ship. Elene gathered herself against the parting jolt… too late to run for the dock, far too late; umbilicals were long since shut off, ships grappled-to only.

A second jolt. They were free, peeling away from station as the whole row of still-docked merchanters followed, counterclockwise round the rim; as any mistake in inside shutdown might mean a ruptured umbilical, as whole sections of dock might decompress. She sat still, feeling the familiar sensations she had thought she might never feel again, free, loose, like the ship, outward bound from what was coming at them; and feeling as if part of her were torn away.

A second invader passed… came zenith and disrupted scan, triggered alarms… was gone, on its way toward the Fleet. They were alive, drifting loose at their helpless slow motion rate, coming out on an agreed course, a general drift of all those undocking. She folded her arm across her belly and watched the screens before her in Finity’s command center, thinking on Damon, on all that was back there.

Dead, maybe; they said Angelo was dead; maybe Alicia was; maybe Damon — maybe… she hurled the thought at herself, trying to accept it sanely, if it had to be accepted, if there was revenge to be gotten for it. She drew deep breaths, thinking on Estelle, on all her kin. A second time spared, then. A talent for leaving disasters. She had a life in her that was Quen and Konstantin at once, names that meant something in the Beyond; names which Union would not find comfortable for them in future, that she would give them cause to remember.

“Get us out of here,” she said to Neihart, cold and furious; and when he looked at her, seeming amazed by this shift of mind: “Get us out. Run for jump. Pass the word. Matteo’s Point. Flash the word system-wide. We’re leaving, right through the Fleet.”

She was Quen, and Konstantin, and Neihart moved. Finity’s End overshot the station and kept going, broadcasting instruction to every merchanter near and far in the system. Mazian, Union, Pell — none of them could stop it.

Instruments blurred before her eyes, cleared again with a blink. “After Matteo’s,” she said to Neihart, “we jump again. There’ll be others… in deep. Folk who’ve had enough, who wouldn’t come to Pell. We’ll find them.”

“No hope of your own there, Quen.”

“No,” she agreed with a shake of her head. “None of mine. They’re gone. But I know coordinates. So do we all. I helped you, kept your holds full and never questioned your manifests.”

“Merchanters know it.”

“So will the Fleet know these places. So we hang together, captain. We move together.”

Neihart frowned. It was not characteristic of merchanters… to be together on anything but a dock-front brawl.

“Got a boy on one of Mazian’s ships,” he said.

“I’ve got a husband on Pell,” she said. “What’s left now but to settle accounts for this?”

Neihart considered it a moment, finally nodded. “The Neiharts will stand by your word.”

She leaned back, stared at the screen before her. They had scan image, Union insystem, ghosts ripping across scan. It was nightmare. Like Mariner, where Estelle and all the other Quens had died, holding to a doomed station too late… where the Fleet had let something through or something had gotten them from within. It was the same thing… only this time merchanters were not sitting still for it.

She watched, resolved to watch scan until the last, to see everything until the station died or they reached jump-point, whichever might happen first.

Damon, she thought, and cursed Mazian, Mazian more than Union, who had brought this on them.

v

Green dock

A second time G surged out of balance. Damon made a startled grab for the wall and Josh for him, but it was a minor flux, for all the panicked screams outside the scarred door. Damon turned his back against the wall and rolled a weary shake of his head.

Josh asked no questions. None were necessary. Ships had peeled away on the rest of the rim. Even here they could hear the sirens… breach, it was possible. It was encouraging that they could hear sirens. There was still air out there on the dock.

“They’re going,” Damon said hoarsely. Elene was away, with those ships; he wanted to believe so. It was the sensible thing. Elene would have been sensible; had friends, people who knew her, who would help her, when he could not. She was gone… to come back, maybe, when things settled — if they settled. If he was alive. He did not think he was going to be alive. Maybe Downbelow was all right; maybe Elene — on those ships. His hope went with them. If he was wrong… he never wanted to know.

Gravity fluxed again. The screams and the hammering at the door had stopped. The wide dock was no place to be in a G crisis. Anyone sane had run for smaller spaces.

“If the merchanters have bolted,” Josh said faintly, “they saw something… knew something. I think Mazian must have his hands full.”

Damon looked at him, thinking of Union ships, of Josh… one of them. “What’s going on out there? Can you reckon?”

Josh’s face was drenched with sweat, glistening in the light from the scarred door. He leaned against the wall, lifted a glance at the overhead. “Mazian’s liable to do anything; can’t predict. No percentage for Union in destroying this station. It’s the stray shot we have to worry about.”

“We can absorb a lot of shots. We may lose sections, but while we have motive power and the hub intact, we can handle damage.”

“With Q loose?” Josh asked hoarsely.

Another flux hit them, stomach-wrenching. Damon swallowed, beginning to experience nausea. “While that goes on we don’t have Q to worry about. We’ve got to chance it, try to get out of this pocket.”

“Go where? Do what?”

He made a sound deep in his throat, numb, simply numb. He waited for the next G flux; it failed to strike with its former force. They had begun to get it in balance again. The abused pumps had held, the engines worked. He caught his breath. “One comfort. We’re out of ships to do it to us again. I don’t know how many of those we can take.”

“They could be waiting out there,” Josh said.

He reckoned that. He reached a hand up, pushed the switch. Nothing happened. Closed, the door had locked itself. He took his card from his pocket, hesitated, pushed it in the slot and the buttons stayed dead. If anyone in central had any desire to know where he was, he had just given the information to them. He knew that.

“Looks like we’re staying,” Josh said.

The sirens had stopped. Damon edged over, chanced a look out the scarred window, trying to see through the opaque slashes and the light diffraction. Something stirred, far across the docks, one furtive figure, another. The com overhead gave out a burst of static as if it were trying to come on and went silent again.