Yuri felt fidgety, anxious, as if he ought to be doing something. Acting more to use up nervous energy than because it needed doing, he stepped forward to the end of the PAT and started a hand check of the PAPs seal to the ship’s hull. Pointless, of course. There was hard vacuum on the other side of the seal. If there had been a leak, he would have known about it without having to run his hand around the edge of the seal.
Yuri heard a clang and a thud from inside the ship. That had to be the inner hatch sealing. They’d be coming out in a moment. But now that he had started it, he felt obliged to complete his pointless check of the pressure seal. He knelt by the end of the PAT and ran his hand along the seal below the base of the hatch.
A low click and a slight hissing noise were all the warning he had that the outer hatch was about to open. He straightened up suddenly, almost toppling over in the low gravity of the near-axis decks. He moved back a step or two from the hatch, feeling strangely embarrassed, as if he had almost been caught at something untoward.
He managed to come to a respectable version of parade rest just a fraction of a second too late. That much he knew the moment he caught the man’s eye. It plainly required an act of will on the man’s part not to dress Yuri down on the spot. Never had Yuri seen a man who so obviously did not belong in civilian clothes. The man might as well have had the words SENIOR OFFICER stamped across his forehead.
Yuri was suddenly very self-conscious, as if the man were subjecting him to parade-ground inspection. “Welcome to Solace Central Orbital Station,” he said to them, speaking a bit more slowly and carefully than he normally would. Accents might well have shifted a good deal over the last century. “I am Second Assistant Station Operations Supervisor Yuri Sparten.” Unsure of what gesture— a handshake, a salute, a kiss on both cheeks—they might think proper, he offered none.
“Thank you,” said the man. “I am Anton Koffield, and this is Norla Chandray. Our spacecraft is the lighter Cruzeiro do Sul, off the timeshaft freighter Dom Pedro IV.”
“Very nice to meet you,” said Chandray, smiling at him mechanically, an insincere expression that did not reflect her feelings, but was merely meant to reassure Yuri.
“I am delighted to meet you both,” he said, the words sounding awkward and insincere even to him. It seemed to him that Koffield was staring at him intently. He found himself fretting over whether his dark grey uniform was properly cleaned and pressed.
Yuri was suddenly acutely aware of his own youth, and felt embarrassed by it, as if it were a fault or handicap he had to overcome. He was dark-skinned, slender, long-boned. He liked to think he was capable of moving with remarkable grace, but knew how befuddled and clumsy he could be. Yuri had a long, angular face, and he practiced in the mirror to make sure his jaw was set, his eyes determined-looking. He kept his black hair trimmed so short that it looked from some angles as if he had shaved his skull.
But it was no time to worry about his own appearance. He was supposed to be evaluating the visitors. He forced himself to settle down. He decided to concentrate on Chandray for the moment, she being far less intimidating. She was as plainly civilian as Koffield was military. She was a rather nondescript sort, a little over thirty standard years or so, a kilo or two on the heavy side, pale-skinned and round-faced, with-dirty blond hair cut so short it barely fell flat.
“Thank you for meeting our ship,” Chandray said, and Yuri suddenly realized he had let the silence go on too long.
“It is my privilege to serve,” Yuri replied, offering the formal phrase with a very slight, very correct bow.
“Thank you,” Koffield said. “It is an honor to be so well received.”
Not quite the conventional response, but they hadn’t exactly had much chance to practice modern standards of etiquette. It would do. The two visitors both spoke with odd but perfectly understandable accents.
Chandray looked around the lock complex, and Yuri caught her wrinkling her nose and making a face. It was plain to see that the station’s air scrubbers weren’t doing a good enough job to meet with her approval. Koffield probably felt the same way, but there was no reading anything in that face. Well, if they thought the air up this way was a bit whiff, wait until they got down to Perimeter Level. Even Yuri thought Perimeter smelled like five thousand people who hadn’t bathed in far too long—and that was not far off the mark.
Both of the visitors had the slightly sallow, wan-looking appearance of people who had not yet quite recovered from a long time in cryosleep. Nor was the slightly lost look on the woman’s face all that unexpected. Yuri had seen the same expression on the faces of the abandoned and dispossessed who seemed to crowd in on every part of the station.
It was Koffield’s grim features, his face as hard as stone, that surprised Yuri. The man looked not like a refugee, but like a man prepared to do battle.
“If there is anything you wish,” Yuri said, “please do not hesitate to ask.”
“Thank you once again,” Koffield said. “And I trust you will forgive me if I take advantage of that gracious offer immediately. I don’t know what the proper title might be, but I—we—would like to meet with the station commander or director, or executive, as soon as possible. It is a matter of some urgency.” Koffield patted the handle of the large piece of luggage he had with him, and Yuri concluded that the contents of the case had something to do with the matter of urgency.
“No apologies required, sir. In fact, Station Commander Raenau asked to see you as soon as was convenient.” That was understating the case by quite a bit. Raenau had bluntly ordered that the crew of the Cruzeiro do Sul be brought before him at once, whether they liked it or not. But Sparten could see no harm in being a bit more diplomatic,’seeing how both sides wanted the same thing in any-’event. “If you would care to see him now, before being shown to your quarters, I’m sure I could arrange it.”
Koffield raised his eyebrows in surprise. “I must admit that I expected to spend quite some time arranging things. I’m delighted by the news, but I must admit I didn’t expect your commander to be quite so eager to see us. Might I ask if he gave you any reason?”
“No, sir, he did not.” Any more than you’ve given your reasons, Yuri thought. “But if you’ll allow me the chance to make a very brief call, we’ll go straight to his office, and then take you to your quarters, where you will be welcome as the commander’s guests.”
. It was a diplomatic way of saying they would not be expected to pay for lodging, and plainly Koffield got the message. “Excellent,” he said. “We look forward to your hospitality.”
The word hospitality gave Yuri pause. He considered for a moment, then decided now was as good a time as any for bad news. “Regarding that hospitality—I’m afraid it might not be up to our normal standards. In plain point of fact, we can’t offer much in the way of luxury. As you might or might not be aware, the station is rather overcrowded at the moment.”
“We didn’t know,” Koffield said dryly, “but we were beginning to suspect. The docking bays are remarkably full, and the ships in the bays do not appear to be in top-of-the-line-perfect repair.”
Top of the line? It took Yuri a moment to figure out what the outdated idiom meant. “Ah, yes,” he said. “Just so. But in any event, we can at least put you up.”
“If the station is that crowded, Mr. Sparten,” said the Chandray woman, “we could stay aboard our lighter.”
Yuri looked at the woman in surprise—and noted that Koffield did as well. No doubt what she had said was quite polite and proper wherever—and whenever—it was that she came from. But Yuri could think of half a dozen cultures off the top of his head where to so much as offer to forgo hospitality was a deadly insult. There were certainly communities on Solace itself where it would have been a ghastly mistake. No one with any experience of other cultures would have made such a gaffe. Clearly she was far less experienced than Koffield.
“I’m sure that Mr. Sparten’s offer was quite sincere, Second Officer Chandray,�
� Koffield said. “And I have no doubt we will find the stationside accommodations more comfortable and more convenient than anything we could arrange for ourselves aboard ship.”
Chandray reddened visibly. “Yes, yes, of course,” she said. “Please forgive me,” she said to Yuri. “If I have offended you, it was quite unintentional.”
“Not at all,” Yuri replied. He regarded the two of them thoughtfully for a moment. The brief exchange had told him a lot about these two strangers. One knew to be wary when approaching a new culture, and the other did not. It was the sort of thing that might be worth knowing, sometime down the road. “In any event, we do have accommodation for you, and the station commander is eager to see you. If you will both come with me, there’s a free-runner waiting for us.”
“A what?” Chandray asked.
“A free-runner. It’s a small open car that isn’t restricted to the transit-tube system, and can travel freely throughout the station. Could you come this way?”
“Certainly,” said Koffield.
“Just a second,” Chandray said. “I need to secure my outer hatches first.” She stepped to one side of the hatch opening and flipped open a panel on the outer hull of the Cruzeiro do Sul, revealing some sort of keypad. Either deliberately or by chance, she moved to put her body between Yuri and the panel, and did something he could not see with the controls. The outer hatch slid shut, and Yuri heard a deep, solid clunk, clunk, clunk from inside the hatch. At a guess, the Cruzeiro’s hatches had triple dead bolts that had just slammed to. “All right. Locks set, combinations scrambled, and keys out,” she said. “Let’s go.”
After the warning she had just received, it should have occurred to Chandray that locking her doors that completely, and that obviously, in front of your host, could be construed as one hell of an insult.
But then Chandray turned around and looked him right in the eye. No embarrassment there anymore, no apology. It was plain she knew exactly what she was doing. And, Yuri noticed, Koffield offered no objection this time, made no effort to smooth things over. Yuri smiled sadly to himself. He couldn’t blame them. They’d seen what the docking bays, and the ships in them, looked like. They might even have seen the Pilot’s Ease being jettisoned. They no doubt had guessed some, if not all, of what was going on aboard the station. Courtesy was one thing. Doing what you could to protect your only way out was quite another.
“This way,” Yuri said. Koffield picked up the oversize hard-sided satchel he had brought out of the ship, and Chandray shut the access panel and stood by him, ready to follow Yuri. He led them down the Personnel Access Tunnel to the Gamma Docking Bays’ airlock center, all three of them studiously ignoring everything that had just been revealed. He found himself wondering just how much else they would all need to ignore about each other.
Yuri gestured for his two guests to sit down in the rear bench seat of the free-runner. “You’ll see more facing forward,” he said. They got in, Koffield being very careful with his oversize case. Yuri got in himself and sat down in the front left-side swivel seat, facing forward. “Go to the Ring Park entrance to DeSilvo Tower, traveling via any convenient scenic route at observation speed,” he said. Lights on the car’s control panel came on, indicating that it had understood the instructions. A proposed route popped up on the main map display. “Route approved,” Yuri said, then spun about in his seat to face his guests as the car started itself up. It rolled out of the Gamma Bays’ airlock center, went down the vehicle-axis ramp, and took the side turning into the west-quad down-axis transit tube.
The transit tubes were utilitarian affairs, scruffy, win-dowless, dimly lit, and a little beat-up. The car turned on its headlight and interior lights as it rolled along the featureless tunnel.
“This is the scenic route?” Chandray asked.
Yuri laughed. “We’re not quite to the scenic part yet. We’ll come out of the transit tube soon, and you’ll see— well, what you’ll see. Quite frankly, even the scenic parts aren’t very scenic at the moment. As it happens, the scenic route is probably the fastest way there, this time of day. But there’s no sense hiding the situation from you. You might as well see us, warts and all.”
Chandray and Koffield looked at each other for a moment. They seemed interested in what he said, but not surprised. “Why aren’t the scenic parts scenic?” Chandray asked. She tried to make it into a casual question, but it was plain from the look on her face they had come to a subject of interest. Chandray would never get far in life if she had to rely on concealing her emotions.
But there was no sense trying to deny what they were going to see for themselves in a moment. Some things, you couldn’t even pretend to ignore. Yuri shrugged sadly. “The whole station is crawling with refugees, and we’ll probably see a lot of them. It was a lot worse not so long ago, but it’s still pretty bad. You’ll see.”
“We’d guessed something of the sort already,” Koffield replied. “We picked up a few transmissions about some sort of evacuation panic on our. way in. One is related to the other, I’d imagine.”
Yuri nodded. “A story got started and it wouldn’t die. A rumor about evacuating part of the population. Madam Kalzant—ah, Madam Neshobe Kalzant, the Planetary Executive, decided the only way to calm the situation down was to give everyone who wanted one a ride off-planet, demonstrate we could handle the traffic. I guess she figured that if she proved there wasn’t a shortage or a traffic cutoff, that would kill the panic. And it did, pretty much. Even if it was awful hard on us, the plan worked. The panic stopped, outgoing traffic tailed back down to normal—or below. Incoming traffic back toward Solace went way up. Inbound traffic probably won’t get back down to normal level for a while yet. But it looks like nearly everyone has decided to go back home to planetside.”
“ ‘Nearly’ everyone?” Koffield asked gently.
Yuri turned his hands up in a sign of helplessness. “We’re a transit facility, a cargo-transfer point. We’ve got a fair-sized population, but this is a working station, not a resort hab with lots of excess capacity. We didn’t have enough life-support service to handle everyone who came through.
“So we passed along as many people as we could to other stations and habitats, even to some of the domed colonies in the outer system. We were swamped getting them all processed through here. We’re still keeping pretty busy getting them back to Solace. But some of the refugees could only get this far. No money, no equipment, no off-planet skills. They got here on ships that shouldn’t ever have left the ground. Ships got here out of fuel, life support dead, propulsion out, some with nothing more than corpses aboard.”
The free-runner shifted to an off-ramp and rolled itself into the waiting car of a cargo lift. The elevator car shut its doors and started to descend the moment the free-runner came to a halt. For whatever reason, the first half of the ride down took place in silence. What was there about lifts and elevators, Yuri wondered, that so discouraged conversation? Of course, to be fair, a ride in an SCO Station cargo lift could be a disconcerting experience. As one moved farther away from the axis of the station, the apparent pull of gravity increased dramatically. They would move from about one-tenth to nearly one-half gee in just over a minute. Yuri never enjoyed it, even if the normal operating speed of the lifts was kept low to try and keep the transition from being worse.
In any event, the lull in conversation offered up the perfect chance for Yuri to call ahead. He might as well take advantage of it. He pulled his pocket phone out, keyed a link to the commander’s office, and put the device to his ear, so only he could hear the other side of the conversation.
“Answered by operations system, office, commander,” the Artlnt on the other end announced. “Instruction to caller: Confirm caller identity via voice check as Yuri Sparten.”
“Sparten confirming,” Yuri said.
“Voice match,” the Artlnt replied, then fell silent, waiting for Yuri to speak.
“Guests, two, from Cruzeiro do Sul arrived,” Yuri told the machine
. “En route with same to office, commander. ETA approx twenty minutes. Immediate meeting with commander agreed.”
“Confirmation is redundant. Confirmation noted and logged.”
Yuri nodded to himself, then shut off the phone and pocketed it without speaking further. No point in courtesy hellos and good-byes with machines. Especially when, as the Artlnt noted, the call was utterly redundant. But then, he had made the call for the benefit of his visitors, not the Artlnt. By calling in a confirmation, he had made the commander’s summons seem a bit more like a social invitation, rather than the peremptory order it was. Yuri spent a good part of his time on such smoothing-over maneuvers. Commander Raenau was not known for his skill at diplomacy.
Yuri glanced at the lift’s floor indicator and saw they were getting close. He looked back down and noticed a quizzical expression on Chandray’s face. “The way you were talking just now,” she said. “I take it you were talking to a robot or some sort of machine?”
“That’s right,” Yuri said. “But why does that strike you as odd? Surely you had talking machines a hundred years ago.”
“Oh yes, of course we do—we did,” Chandray replied. “It’s the syntax, the patterns of how you talked to it. It’s almost like a distinct dialect. Now that I think of it, the traffic-control system had the same sort of odd speech patterns.” She frowned thoughtfully, and then her eyes lit up. “Is that it?” she asked. “A distinct speech pattern when addressing machines?”
Maybe this Chandray woman wasn’t much for questions of etiquette, but she clearly was nobody’s fool. “Quite right,” he said. “Supposedly it was Founder DeSilvo’s own idea.”
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