Downbelow Station

“Do you copy my instructions, Mr. Lukas?”

“Pell copies clearly. Do you understand our problem? We can’t guarantee there’ll be no trouble. Some of our docks are sealed off. We accept your troops in assistance. We are devastated by riot. You will have our cooperation.”

There was long hesitation. Other blips had come into scan, the riders which attended the carriers. “We copy,” Mallory said. “We will board with troops. Get my number-one rider safely docked with your cooperation or we will blow ourselves an access for troops and blow section by section, no survivors. That is your clear choice.”

“We copy.” Jon wiped at his face. The sirens had died. There was a deathly hush in the command center. “Give me time to get what security I can muster to the most secure docks. Over.”

“You have half an hour, Mr. Lukas.”

He turned from com, waved a summons to one of his security guards, by the door. “Pell copies. Half an hour. We’ll get you a dock clear.”

“Blue and green, Mr. Lukas. You see to it.”

“Blue and green docks,” he repeated hoarsely. “We’ll do our best.”

Mallory signed off. He pushed past com to key in the main com center. “Hale,” he exclaimed. “Hale.”

Hale’s face appeared.

“General broadcast. All security to docks. Get blue and green docks clear for operation.”

“Got it,” Hale said, and keyed out.

Jon strode across the room to the doorway where Kressich still stood. “Get back on com. Get on and tell those people you claim to control to stay quiet. Hear?”

Kressich nodded. There was a distractedness in his eyes, a not quite sanity. Jon seized him by the arm and dragged him to the com board, as the tech scrambled out of the way. He set Kressich down, gave him the mike, stood listening as Kressich addressed his lieutenants by name, calling on them to clear the affected docks. Panic persisted in the corridors where they still had cameras to see. Green nine showed milling throngs and smoke; and whatever they cleared panicked mobs would pour into like air into vacuum.

“General alert,” Jon said to the chief at station one. “Sound the null G warning.”

The woman turned, opened the security casing, punched the button beneath. A buzzer began to sound, different and more urgent than all other warnings which had wailed through Pell’s corridors. “Seek a secure place,” a voice interrupted it at intervals. “Avoid large open areas. Go to the nearest compartment and seek an emergency hold. Should extreme gravity loss occur, remember the orientation arrows and observe them as station stabilizes… Seek a secure place…”

Panic in the halls became headlong flight, battering at doors, screaming.

“Throw G off,” Jon sent to the op coordinator. “Give us a variation they can feel out there.”

Orders flashed. A third time the station destabilized. Green nine corridor began to show clear as people raced for smaller spaces, even smaller corridors. Jon punched through to Hale again. “Get forces out there. Get those docks clear; I’ve given you your chance, confound you.”

“Sir,” Hale said, and winked out again. Jon turned full circle, looked distractedly at the techs, at Lee Quale, who clung to a handhold by the door. He signaled Quale, caught his sleeve and hauled him close when he came. “The unfinished business,” he said, “down on green dock. Get down there and finish it, understand? Finish it.”

“Yes, sir,” Quale breathed, and fled… with sense enough to know, surely, that their lives rested on it.

Union might win. Until then they claimed station neutrality, held onto what they could. Jon paced the aisle, catching at chairs and counters in the occasional strong flux, trying to keep the whole center from panic. He had Pell. He had already what Union had promised him, and would have it under Mazian and under Union too, if he was careful; and he had been, far more than Jessad had ordered him to be. There were no witnesses left alive in Angelo’s office, none in Legal Affairs, abortive as that raid had been. Only Alicia… who knew nothing, who harmed no one, who had no voice, and her sons…

Damon was the danger. Damon and his wife. Over Quen he had no control… but if young Damon started making charges -

He cast a look over his shoulder, suddenly missed Kressich, Kressich and two who were supposed to be watching him.

The desertion of his own enraged him, of Kressich — he was relieved. Kressich would vanish back into the hordes of Q, frightened and unreachable.

Only Jessad… if they had not gotten him, if he was loose, near something vital -

On scan the riders were moving closer. Pell had yet a little time, before Mazian’s troops hit. A tech handed him positive id on the ships that waited out there; Mallory and Porey, Mazian’s two executioners. They had a name, the one for ruthlessness and the other for enjoying it. Porey was the other one, then. That was no good news.

He stood and sweated, waiting.

viii

Green dock

Something was going on outside. Damon walked over the littered floor of the dark shop and leaned there, trying again to see out the scarred window, jerked as the red explosion of a shot distorted in the scratches. There was screaming mingled with the grinding of machinery in operation.

“Whoever’s out there now, they’re moving this way and they’ve got guns.” He edged back from the door, moving carefully in the lessened G. Josh stooped, gathered up one of the rods that had been part of a ruined display, offered it. Damon took it and Josh got another for himself. He moved up near the doorway, and Josh went to the other side of it, back to the wall. There was no sound near them outside, a lot of shouting far away. Damon risked a look, the light coming from the other way, jerked back again at the sight of human shadows near the scarred window.

The door whipped open, carded from outside, someone with priority. Two men dashed in, guns drawn. Damon slammed the steel rod down on a head, eyes unfocusing for horror of it, and Josh hit from the other side. The men fell strangely in the low G, and a gun skittered loose. Josh scooped it up, fired twice to be sure, and one jerked, dying. “Get the gun,” Josh snapped, and Damon bent and pushed fastidiously at the body, found the unfamiliar plastic of the gun butt in a dead hand. Josh was on his knees, rolled the other body, began to strip it. “Clothes,” Josh said. “Cards. id’s that work.”

Damon laid the gun aside and swallowed his distaste, stripped the limp body, took off his own suit, struggled into the bloody coveralls… there would be men aplenty in the corridors with bloodstains on them. He searched the pockets for a card, found the papers there, found the card lying where the body’s left hand had dropped it. He canted the id folder to the light. Lee Anton Quale… Lukas Company…

Quale. Quale, from the Downbelow mutiny… and Jon Lukas’s employ; in Jon’s employ, and Jon had comp in his control — when Q happened to get the doors open, when Konstantins happened to have been murdered in Pell’s tightest security… when his card stopped working and murderers knew how to locate him — it was Jon up there.

A hand closed on his shoulder. “Come on, Damon.”

He rose, flinched as Josh used his gun to burn Quale’s face beyond recognition, the other corpse afterward. Josh’s own face was sweat-slicked in the light from the door, rigid with horror, but the reactions were right, a man whose instincts knew what they were doing. He headed for the dock and Damon ran with him, out into the light, slowed at once, for the docks were virtually bare. White dock seal was in place; the seal of green dock was hidden up the horizon. They walked gingerly across the front of the huge seal of white, got in among the gantries across the dock, walked along within that cover, while the horizon unfolded downward, showing them a group of men working at the docking machinery, moving slowly and carefully in reduced G. Corpses and papers and debris lay scattered all across the docks, out in open spaces which would be difficult to reach without being seen. “Enough cards lying out there,” Josh said, “to give us plenty of names.”

“For any lock not voice-keyed,” Damon murmured. He kept his eye to the men at work and those standing guard down by the green niner entry, visible at this range — walked out carefully to the nearest corpse, hoping it was a corpse, and not someone dazed or shamming. He knelt, still watching the workers, felt through the pockets and came up with a card and additional papers. He pocketed them and went to the next, while Josh plundered others. Then nerves sent him scurrying back to cover, and Josh joined him at once. They moved further up the dock.

“Blue seal is open,” he said, as that arch came down off horizon. He entertained a wild, momentary hope of hiding, getting to blue sector when the traffic in the corridors returned to normal, getting up to blue one and asking questions at gunpoint. It was fantasy. They were not going to live that long. He did not reckon they would.

“Damon.”

He looked, followed the direction Josh indicated, up through the gantry lines to the first berth in green: green light. A ship was in approach, whether Mazian’s or Union’s there was no telling. Com thundered out, echoing instructions in the emptiness. The ship was closing with the docking cone, coming in fast. “Come on,” Josh hissed at him, pulling at his arm, insisting on a break for green nine.

“The G isn’t going,” he murmured, resisting Josh’s urging. “Don’t you see it’s a trick? Central’s got the corridors cleared for their own forces to move in them. Those ships wouldn’t dock with G completely unstable; no way they’d risk that with a big ship. Just a little flux to quell the riot. And it won’t stay cleared. If we run into those corridors we’ll be in the middle of it. No. Stay put.”

“ECS501,” he heard over the loudspeaker then, and his heart lifted.

“One of Mallory’s riders,” Josh muttered at his side. “Mallory. Union’s retreated.”

He looked at Josh, at the hate which burned in the angel’s haggard face… hope cancelled.

The minutes passed. The ship snugged in. The dock crew ran to secure the umbilicals, thrust the connections in. The access slammed into seal with a hiss audible across the empty distance. Machinery whined and slammed beyond it, the lock in function, and the dock-side crew started running.

A handful of men poured out of the obscuring periphery of the gantries, unarmored… two running across to the far side, to take up position with rifles leveled. There was the sound of others running, and com was on again, warning of Norway itself inbound.

“Get your head down,” Josh hissed, and Damon moved slowly, knelt by the brace of one of the movable tanks where Josh had taken closer cover, tried to see what was happening farther up, but there was a skein of umbilicals in the way. Mallory was using her own men for dock crews; but Jon Lukas must still be in command