Downbelow Station

blankets and other items, a general flow down to the trough of the hills, where motors whined and headlamps showed. They had the trucks ready. He started down there, faster and faster, walked into the chaos that swirled about the vehicles. They were putting on the field dome and some spare plastic; a staffer showed him a checklist as businesslike as if they were loading for a supply trip. Some people were trying to put their personal loads on the trucks and staff was arguing with them, and Q was arriving, some of them carrying more than they ought on Downbelow.

“Trucks are for essential materials,” Emilio shouted. “All able-bodied walk; anyone too old or too sick can perch on the baggage, and any room left, you can put heavy items on… but you share loads, hear? No one walks light. Who can’t walk?”

There were shouts from some of the Q folk who had caught up, and they put forward some of the frailer children, some of the old ones. They yelled that there were some still coming, shouts with a tone of panic.

“Easy! We’ll get them all on. We’ll not be going fast. A kilometer down the road, forest starts, and there’re no armored troops likely to hike into it after us.”

Miliko reached him. He felt her hand on his arm and put his arm about her, hugged her to him. He remained slightly numb; a man had a right to be when his world ended. They were prisoners up there on station. Or dead. He began to think of that possibility too, forcing himself to deal with it. He felt sick at the stomach, shaking with an anger which he kept in that numb place, away from his thinking process. He wanted to strike out at someone… and there was no one at hand.

They got the com unit on. Ernst supervised the loading of it onto the truckbed, and between emergency power and portable generator they had that for information… if any came.

Last of all, the people who would ride, and room enough for bedrolls and sacks, a protective nest. People moved at a run, panting, but there seemed less panic; two hours yet till dawn. The lights were still on, on stored power, the domes still glowing yellow. But there was a sound missing, in all the noise of the crawler engines. The compressors were silent. The pulse was gone.

“Move them out,” he shouted when there seemed order, and the vehicles started up, began to grind their patient way along the road.

They fell in behind, a column shaping itself to the road as it began to parallel the river. They passed the mill and entered the forest, where hills and trees closed on the right hand of the night-bound landscape. The whole progress had a feeling of unreality, the trucks’ headlamps shining on the reeds and the grass tops and the hillside and the trunks of trees, with the silhouettes of humans trudging along, the hiss and pop of breathers in curious unison, amid the grinding of the engines. There were no complaints, that was the thing most strange, no objections, as if a madness had seized them all and they agreed on this. They had had a taste of Mazian’s governance.

The grass moved beside the road, a serpentine line in the waist-high reeds. Leaves moved among the bushes beside the road hillward. Miliko pointed to one such disturbance, and others had seen it, pointing and murmuring in apprehension.

Emilio’s heart lifted. He reached for Miliko’s hand and pressed it, left her and strode out into the weeds and under the trees while the trucks and the column kept on. “Hisa!” he called aloud. “Hisa, it’s Emilio Konstantin! Do you see us?”

They came, a handful, shyly advancing into the lights. One came holding out his hands, and he did. The Downer came to him and embraced him energetically. “Love you,” the young male said. “You go walk, Konstantin-man?”

“Bounder? Is it Bounder?”

“I Bounder, Konstantin-man.” The shadowed face looked up at him, dim light from now-stopped trucks glinting off a sharp-edged grin. “I run, run, run come back again watch you. All we eyes to you, make you safe.”

“Love you, Bounder, love you.”

The hisa bobbed in pleasure, fairly danced with it. “You go walk?”

“We’re running away. There’s trouble in the Upabove, Bounder, men-with-guns. Maybe they come Downbelow. We run away like the hisa, old, young, some of us not strong, Bounder. We look for a safe place.”

Bounder turned to his companions, called something which ran up and down scales and chattered from them back to the trees and into the branches above. And Bounder’s strange, strong hand slipped about his as the hisa began to lead him back to the road, where all the column had stopped, those rearmost crowding forward to see.

“Mr. Konstantin,” one of the staff called from the passenger seat of a truck, nervousness in his voice, “they all right coming in with us?”

“It’s all right,” he said. And to the others: “Be glad of them. The hisa are back. The Downers know who’s welcome on Downbelow and who isn’t, don’t they? They’ve been watching us all this time, waiting to see if we were all right. You people,” he called out louder still to the unseen masses beyond, “They’ve come back to us, you understand? The hisa know all the places we could run to, and they’re willing to help us, you hear that?”

There was a murmuring of distress.

“No Downer ever hurt a man,” he shouted into the dark, over the patient rumble of the engines. He closed his hand the more firmly on Bounder’s, walked down among them, and Miliko slipped her hand within his elbow on the other side. The trucks started up again, and they walked, at the same slow pace. Hisa began to join the column, walking along in the weeds beside the road. Some humans shied from them. Others tolerated the shy touch of an offered hand, even Q folk, following the example of old staffers, who were less perturbed by it.

“They’re all right,” he heard one of his workers call out through the ranks. “Let them go where they like.”

“Bounder,” he said, “we want a safe place… find all the humans from all the camps, take them to many safe places.”

“You want safe, want help; come, come.”

The strong hand stayed within his, small, as if they were father and child; but for all of youth and size it was the other way about… that humans went as the children now, down a known human road to a known human place, but they were not coming back, might never — he acknowledged it — might never come back.

“Come we place,” Bounder said. “You make we safe; we dream bad mans away and they go; and you come now, we go dream. No hisa dream, no human dream; together-dream. Come dream place.”

He did not understand the babble. There were places beyond which humans had never gone among hisa. Dream-places… it was already a dream, this mingled flight of humans and hisa, in the dark, in the overturning of all that had been Downbelow.

They had saved the Downers; and in the long years of Union rule, when humans came who cared nothing for the hisa… there would be humans among the hisa who could warn them and protect them. There was that much left to do.

“They’ll come someday,” he said to Miliko, “and want to cut down the trees and build their factories and dam the river and all the rest of it. That’s the way of it, isn’t it? If we let them get away with it.” He swung Bounder’s hand, looked down at the small intense face on the other side. “We go warn other camps, want to bring all humans into the trees with us, go for a long, long walk. Need good water, good food.”

“Hisa find,” Bounder grinned, the suspicion of a great joke shared by hisa and humans. “Not hide good you food.”

They could not hold an idea for long… so some insisted. Perhaps the game would pall when humans had no more gifts to give. Perhaps they would lose their awe of humans and drift their own ways. Perhaps not. The hisa were not the same as they had been when humans came.

Neither were humans, on Downbelow.

Chapter Four

Merchanter Hammer: deep space; 1900 hrs.

Vittorio poured a drink, his second since space around them had suddenly become filled with a battle-worn fleet. Things had not gone as they should. A silence had fallen over Hammer, the bitter silence of a crew who felt an enemy among them, a witness to their national humiliation. He met no eyes, offered no opinions… had only the desire to anesthetize himself with all due speed, so that he could not be blamed for any matters of policy. He did not want to give advice or opinions.

He was plainly a hostage; his father had set things up that way. And it occurred to him inevitably that his father might have double-crossed them all, that he might now be worse than a useless hostage… that he might be one whose card was due to be played.

My father hates me, he had tried to tell them; but they had strugged it off as irrelevant. They did not make the decisions. The man Jessad had done that. And where was Jessad now?

There was supposed to be some visitor on his way to the ship, some person of importance.

Jessad himself, to report failure, and to dispose of a useless bit of human baggage?

He had time to finish the second drink before the activity of the crew and eventual nudge at the hull reported a contact. There was a great deal of machinery slamming and the noise of the lift going into function, a crash as the cage synched with the rotation cylinder. Someone was coming up. He sat still with the glass before him and wished that he were a degree drunker than he was. The upward curve of the deck curtained the lift exit, beyond the bridge. He could not see what happened, only noted the absence of some of Hammer’s crew from their posts. He looked up in sudden dismay as he heard them coming round the other way, from his back, into the main room through crew quarters.

Blass of Hammer. Two crew. A number of military strangers and some not in uniform, behind them. Vittorio gathered himself shakily to his feet and stared at them. A gray-haired officer in rejuv, resplendent with silver and rank. And Dayin. Dayin Jacoby.

“Vittorio Lukas,” Blass identified him. “Captain Seb Azov, over the fleet; Mr. Jacoby of your own station; and Mr. Segust Ayres of Earth Company.”

“Security council,” that one corrected.

Azov sat down at the table, and the others found place on the benches round about. Vittorio settled again, his fingers numb on the table surface. He was surrounded by an alcoholic gulf that kept coming and going. He tried to sit naturally. They had come to see him… him… and there was no possible help he could be to them or to anyone.

“The operation has begun, Mr. Lukas,” Azov said. “We’ve eliminated two of Mazian’s ships. They won’t be easy to get out; they’re hanging close to station. We’ve sent for additional ships; but we’ve driven the merchanters out, all the long-haulers. The ones left are Pell short-haulers, serving as camouflage.”

“What do you want with me?” Vittorio asked.

“Mr. Lukas, you’re acquainted with the merchanters based out of station — you’ve run Lukas Company, at least to some extent — and you know the ships.”