Downbelow Station tau-3

by Caroline J. Cherryh

  The whole dock was theirs, vast, upward-curving perspective, section arches curtained by ceiling as the station rim curve swept leftward toward gradual horizon; on the right a section seal was in use, stopping the eye there. The place was vacant of all but the dock crews and their gantries; and station security and the processing desks, and those were well back of Norway ’s area. There were no native workers, not here, not in this situation. Debris lay scattered across the wide dock, papers, bits of clothing, evidencing a hasty withdrawal. The dockside shops and offices were empty; the niner corridor midway of the dock showed likewise vacant and littered. Di Janz’s deep bellow echoed in the metal girders overhead as he ordered troops deployed about the area where Hansford was coming in.

  Pell dockers moved up. Signy watched and gnawed her lip nervously, glanced aside as a civ came up to her, youngish, darkly aquiline, bearing a tablet and looking like business in his neat blue suit. The plug she had in one ear kept advising her of Hansford’s status, a constant clamor of bad news. “What are you?” she asked

  “Damon Konstantin, captain, from Legal Affairs.”

  She spared a second look. A Konstantin. He could be that. Angelo had had two boys before his wife’s accident. “Legal Affairs,” she said with distaste.

  “I’m here if you need anything… or if they do. I’ve got a com link with central.”

  There was a crash. Hansford made a bad dock, grated down the guidance cone and shuddered into place.

  “Get her hooked up and get out!” Di roared at the dock crews: no com for him.

  Graff was ordering matters from Norway ’s command. Hansford’s crew would stay sealed on their bridge, working debarcation by remote. “Tell them walk out,” she heard relayed from Graff. “Any rush at troops will be met with fire.”

  The hookups were complete. The ramp went into place.

  “Move!” Di bellowed. Dockers pelted behind the lines of troops; rifles were levelled. The hatch opened, a crash up the access tube.

  A stench rolled out onto the chill of the dock. Inner hatches opened and a living wave surged out, trampling each other, falling. They screamed and shouted and rushed out like madmen, staggered as a burst of fire went over their heads.

  “Hold it!” Di shouted. “Sit down where you are and put your hands on your heads.”

  Some were sitting down already, out of weakness; others sank down and complied. A few seemed too dazed to understand, but came no farther. The wave had stopped. At Signy’s elbow Damon Konstantin breathed a curse and shook his head. No word of laws from him; sweat stood visibly on his akin. His station stared riot in the face… collapse of systems, Hansford’s death ten thousandfold. There were a hundred, maybe a hundred fifty living, crouched on the dock by the umbilical gantry. The ship’s stench spread. A pump labored, flushing air through Hansford’s systems under pressure. There were a thousand on that ship.

  “We’re going to have to go in there,” Signy muttered, sick at the prospect. Di was moving the others one at a time, passing them under guns into a curtained area where they were to be stripped, searched, scrubbed, passed on to the desks or to the medics. Baggage there was none, not with this group, nor papers worth anything.

  “Need a security team suited up for a contamination area,” she told young Konstantin. “And stretchers. Get us a disposal area prepared. We’re going to vent the dead; it’s all we can do. Have them ID’ed as best you can, fingerprints, photos, whatever. Every corpse passed out of here unidentified is future trouble for your security.”

  Konstantin looked ill. That was well enough. So did some of her troops. She tried to ignore her own stomach.

  A few more survivors had made their way to the opening of the access, very weak, almost unable to get down the ramp. A handful, a scant handful.

  Lila was coming in, her approach begun in her crew’s panic, defying instructions and riders’ threats. She heard Graffs voice reporting it, activated her own mike. “Stall them off. Clip a vane off them if you have to. We’ve got our hands full. Get me a suit out here.”

  They found seventy-eight more living, lying among the decomposing dead. The rest was cleanup, and no more threat. Signy passed decontamination, stripped off the suit, sat down on the bare dock and fought a heaving stomach. A civ aid worker chose a bad time to offer her a sandwich. She pushed it away, took the local herbal coffee and caught her breath in the last of the processing of Hansford’s living. The place stank now of antispetic fogging.

  A carpet of bodies in the corridors, blood, dead. Hansford’s emergency seals had gone into place during a fire. Some of the dead had been cut in two. Some of the living had broken bones from being trampled in the panic. Urine. Vomit. Blood. Decay. They had had closed systems, had not had to breathe it. The Hansford survivors had had nothing at the last but the emergency oxygen, and that had possibly been a cause of murder. Most of the living had been sealed into areas where the air had held out less fouled than the badly ventilated storage holds where most of the refugees had been crammed.

  “Message from the stationmaster,” com said into her ear, “requesting the captain’s presence in station offices at the earliest.”

  “No,” she sent back shortly. They were bringing Hansford’s dead out; there was some manner of religious service, assembly-line fashion, some amenity for the dead before venting them. Caught in Downbelow’s gravity well, they would drift in that direction, eventually. She wondered vaguely whether bodies burned in falling: likely, she thought. She had not much to do with worlds. She was not sure whether anyone had ever cared to find out.

  Lila’s folk were exiting in better order. They pushed and shoved at the first, but they stopped it when they saw the armed troops facing them. Konstantin intervened with useful service over the portable loudspeaker, talking to the terrified civs in stationers’ terms and throwing stationers’ logic in their faces, the threat of damage to fragile balances, the kind of drill and horror story they must have heard all their confined lives. Signy put herself on her feet again during the performance, still holding the coffee cup, watched with a calmer stomach as the procedures she had outlined began to function smoothly, those with papers to one area and those without to another, for photographing and ID by statement. The handsome lad from Legal Affairs proved to have other uses, a voice of ringing authority when it regarded disputed paper or confused station staff.

  “ Griffin ’s moving up on docking,” Graffs voice advised her. “Station advises us they’re wanting back five hundred units of confiscated housing based on Hansford’s casualties.”

  “Negative,” she said flatly. “My respects to station command, but out of the question. What’s the status on Griffin ?”

  “Panicky. We’ve warned them.”

  “How many others are coming apart?”

  “It’s tense everywhere. Don’t trust it. They could bolt, any one of them. Maureen was one dead, coronary, another ill. I’m routing her in next. Stationmaster asks whether you’ll be available for conference in an hour. I pick up that the Company boys are making demands to get into this area.”

  “Keep stalling.” She finished the coffee, walked along the lines in front of Griffin ’s dock, the whole operation moving down a berth, for there was nothing left at Hansford’s berth worth guarding. There was quiet from the processed refugees. They had the matter of locating their lodgings to occupy them, and the station’s secure environment to comfort them. A suited crew stood by to move Hansford out; they had only four berths at this dock. Signy measured with her eye the space the station had allotted them, five levels of two sections and the two docks. Crowded, but they would manage for a while. Barracks could solve some of it… temporarily. Things would get tighter. No luxuries, that was certain.

  They were not the only refugees adrift; they were simply the first. And upon that knowledge she kept her mouth shut.

  It was Dinah that broke the peace; a man caught with weapons in scan, a friend who turned ugly on his arrest: two dead, then, and sobbing, hysteric
al passengers afterward. Signy watched it, simply tired, shook her head and ordered the bodies vented with the rest, while Konstantin approached her with angry arguments. “Martial law,” she said, ending all discussion, and walk away.

  Sita, Pearl , Little Bear, Winifred. They came in with agonizing slowness, unloaded refugees and property, and the processing inches its way along.

  Signy left the dock then, went back aboard Norway and took a bath. She scrubbed three times all over before she began to feel that the smell and the sights had left her.

  Station had entered alterday; complaints and demands had fallen silent at least for a few hours.

  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.