Downbelow Station tau-3

by Caroline J. Cherryh

  Talley cast another look at his counsel. Shook his head, pleading.

  “You absolutely reject it?” Damon prodded him, vexed. All solutions and arrangements collapsed. “It’s not prison, you understand.”

  “My face — is known there. Mallory said — ”

  He lapsed into silence. Damon stared at him, marked the fevered anxiety, the sweat which stood on Talley’s face. “What did Mallory say?”

  “That if I made trouble — she’d transfer me to one of the other ships. I think I know what you’re doing: you think if there are Unionists with them they’d contact me if you put me over there in your quarantine. Is that it? But I wouldn’t live that long. There are people who know me by sight. Station officials. Police. They’re the kind who got places on those ships, aren’t they? And they’d know me. I’ll be dead in an hour if you do that. I heard what those ships were like.”

  “Mallory told you.”

  “Mallory told me.”

  “There are some, on the other hand,” Damon said bitterly, “who’d balk at boarding one of Mazian’s ships, stationers who’d swear an honest man’s survival wasn’t that likely. But I’d reckon you had a soft passage, didn’t you? Enough to eat and no worries about the air? The old spacer-stationer quarrel: leave the stationers to suffocate and keep her own deck spotless. But you rated differently. You got special treatment.”

  “It wasn’t all that pleasant, Mr. Konstantin.”

  “Not your choice either, was it?”

  “No,” the answer came hoarsely. Damon suddenly repented his baiting, nagged by suspicions, evil rumor of the Fleet. He was ashamed of the role in which he was cast. In which Pell was. War and prisoners of war. He wanted no part of it.

  “You refuse the solution we offer,” he said. “That’s your privilege. No one will force you. We don’t want to endanger your life, and that’s what it would be if things are what you say. So what do you do? I suppose you go on playing midge with the guards. It’s a very small confinement. Did they give you the tapes and player? You got that?”

  “I would like — ” The words came out like an upwelling of nausea. “I want to ask for Adjustment.”

  Jacoby looked down and shook his head. Damon sat still.

  “If I were Adjusted I could get out of here,” the prisoner said. “Eventually do something. It’s my own request. A prisoner always has the option to have that, doesn’t he?”

  “Your side uses that on prisoners,” Damon said. “We don’t.”

  “I ask for it You have me locked up like a criminal. If I’d killed someone, wouldn’t I have a right to it? If I’d stolen or — ”

  “I think you ought to have some psychiatric testing if you keep insisting on it.”

  “Don’t they test — when they process for Adjustment?”

  Damon looked at Jacoby.

  “He’s been increasingly depressed,” Jacoby said. “He’s asked me over and over to lodge that request with station, and I haven’t.”

  “We’ve never mandated Adjustment for a man who wasn’t convicted of a crime.”

  “Have you ever,” the prisoner asked, “had a man in here who wasn’t?”

  “Union uses it,” the supervisor said in a low voice, “without blinking. Those cells are small, Mr. Konstantin.”

  “A man doesn’t ask for a thing like that,” Damon said.

  “I ask,” Talley insisted. “I ask you. I want out of here.”

  “It would solve the problem,” Jacoby said.

  “I want to know why he wants it”

  “I want out!”

  Damon froze. Talley caught his breath, leaning against the table, and recovered his composure a little short of tears. Adjustment was not a punitive procedure, was never intended to be. It had double benefits… altered behavior for the violent and a little wiping of the slate for the troubled. It was the latter, he suspected, meeting Talley’s shadowed eyes. Suddenly he felt an overwelling pity for the man, who was sane, who seemed very, very sane. The station was in crisis. Events crowded in on them in which individuals could become lost, shoved aside. Cells in detention were urgently needed for real criminals, out of Q, which they had in abundance. There were worse fates than Adjustment. Being locked in a viewless eight-by-ten room for life was one.

  “Pull the commitment papers out of comp,” he told the supervisor, and the supervisor passed the order via com. Jacoby fretted visibly, shuffling papers and not looking at any of them. “What I’m going to do,” Damon said to Talley, feeling as if it were some shared bad dream, “is put the papers in your hands. And you can study all the printout of explanation that goes with them. If that’s still what you want tomorrow, we’ll accept them signed. I want you also to write us a release and request in your own words, stating that this was your idea and your choice, that you’re not claustrophobic or suffering from any other disability — ”

  “I was an armscomper,” Talley interjected scornfully. It was not the largest station on a ship.

  “ — or condition which would cause you unusual duress. Don’t you have kin, relatives, someone who would try to talk you out of this if they heard about it?”

  The eyes reacted to that, ever so slightly.

  “Do you have someone?” Damon asked, hoping he had found a handhold, some reason to apply against this, “Who?”

  “Dead,” Talley said.

  “If this request is in reaction to that — ”

  “A long time ago,” Talley said, cutting that off. Nothing more.

  An angel’s face. Humanity without flaw. Birth labs? The thought came to him unbidden. It had always been abhorrent to him, Union’s engineered soldiers. His own possible prejudice worried at him. “I haven’t read your file in full,” he admitted. “This has been handled at other levels. They thought they had this settled. It bounced back to me. You had family, Mr. Talley?”

  “Yes,” Talley said faintly, defiantly, making him ashamed of himself.

  “Born where?”

  “Cyteen.” The same small, flat voice, “I’ve given you all that. I had parents. I was born, Mr. Konstantin. Is that really pertinent?”

  “I’m sorry. I’m very sorry. I want you to understand this: it’s not final. You can change your mind, right up to the moment the treatment begins. All you have to say is stop, I don’t want this. But after it goes so far, you’re not competent. You understand… you’re no longer able. You’ve seen Adjusted men?”

  “They recover.”

  “They do recover. I’ll follow the case, Mr. Talley… Lt Talley… so much as I can. You see to it,” he said to the supervisor, “that any time he sends a message, at any stage of the process, it gets to me on an emergency basis, day or night You see that the attendants understand that too, down to the orderlies. I don’t think he’ll abuse the privilege.” He looked at Jacoby. “Are you satisfied about your client?”

  “It’s his right to do what he’s doing. I’m not pleased with it. But I’ll witness it. I’ll agree it solves things… maybe for the best.”

  The comp printout arrived. Damon handed the papers to Jacoby for scrutiny. Jacoby marked the lines for signature and passed the folder to Talley. Talley folded it to him like something precious.

  “Mr. Talley,” Damon said, rising, and on impulse offered his hand, against all the distaste he felt The young armscomper rose and took it, and the look of gratitude in his suddenly brimming eyes cancelled all certainties. “Is it possible,” Damon asked, “is it remotely possible that you have information you want wiped? That that’s why you’re doing this? I warn you it’s more likely to come out in the process than not. And we’re not interested in it, do you understand that? We have no military interests.”

  That was not it. He much doubted that it could be. This was no high officer, no one like himself, who knew comp signals, access codes, the sort of thing an enemy must not have. No one had discovered the like in this man… nothing of value, not here, not at Russell’s.

  “No,” Talley said. “I don’t
know anything.”

  Damon hesitated, still nagged by conscience, the feeling that Talley’s counsel, if no one else, ought to be protesting, doing something more vigorous, using all the delays of the law on Talley’s behalf. But that got him prison; got him… no hope. They were bringing Q outlaws into detention, far more dangerous; men who might know him, if Talley was right. Adjustment saved him, got him out of there; gave him the chance for a job, for freedom, a life. There was no one sane who would carry out revenge on someone after a mind-wipe. And the process was humane. It was always meant to be.

  “Talley… have you complaint against Mallory or the personnel of Norway?”

  “No.”

  “Your counsel is present. It would be put on record… if you wanted to make such a complaint.”

  “No.”

  So that trick would not work. No delaying it for investigation. Damon nodded, walked out of the room, feeling unclean. It was a manner of murder he was doing, an assistance in suicide. They had an abundance of those too, over in Q.

  iii

  Pell: sector orange nine: 5/20/52; 1900 hrs.

  Kressich winced at the crash of something down the hall, beyond the sealed door, tried not to show his terror. Something was burning, smoke reaching them through the ventilation system. That more frightened him, and the half hundred gathered with him in this section of hallway. Out on the docks the police and the rioters still fired at each other. The violence was subsiding. The few with him, the remainder of Russell’s own security police, a handful of elite stationers and a scattering of young people and old… they had held the hallway against the gangs.

  “We’re afire,” someone muttered, on the edge of hysteria.

  “Old rags or something,” he said; shut it up, he thought They did not need panic. In a major fire, station central would blow a section to put it out… death for all of them. They were not valuable to Pell. Some of them were out there shooting at Pell police with guns they had gotten off dead policemen. It had started with the knowledge that there was another convoy coming in, more ships, more desperate people to crowd into the little they had; had started with the simple word that this was about to happen… and a demand for faster processing of papers; then raids on barracks and gangs confiscating papers from those who did have them.

  Burn all records, the cry had gone out through quarantine, in the logic that, recordless, they would all be admitted. Those who would not yield up their papers were beaten and robbed of them; of anything else of value. Barracks were ransacked. Gangs of the ruffians who had forced Griffin and Hansford gained membership among the desperate, the young, the leaderless and the panicked.

  There was quiet for a time outside. The fans had stopped; the air began to go foul. Among those who had seen the worst of the voyage, there was panic, quietly contained; a good number were crying.

  Then the lights brightened and a cool draft came through the ducts. The door whipped open. Kressich got to his feet and looked into the faces of station police, and the barrels of leveled rifles. Some of his own band had knives, sections of pipe and furniture, whatever weapons they had improvised. He had nothing… held up frantic hands.

  “No,” he pleaded. No one moved, not the police, not his own. “Please. We weren’t in it. We only defended this section from them. None… none of these people were involved. They were the victims.”

  The police leader, face haggard with weariness and soot and blood, motioned with his rifle toward the wall. “You have to line up,” Kressich explained to his ill-assorted companions, who were not the sort to understand such procedures, except only the ex-police. “Drop whatever weapons you have.” They lined up, even the old and the sick, and the two small children.

  Kressich found himself shaking, while he was searched and after, left leaning against the corridor wall while the police muttered mysteriously among themselves. One seized him by the shoulder, faced him about. An officer with a slate walked from one to the other of them asking for id’s.

  “They were stolen,” Kressich said. “That’s how it started. The gangs were stealing papers and burning them.”

  “We know that,” the officer said. “Are you in charge? What’s your name and origin?”

  “Vassily Kressich, Russell’s.”

  “Others of you know him?”

  Several confirmed it. “He was a councillor on Russell’s Station,” said a young man. “I served there in security.”

  “Name.”

  The young man gave it. Nino Coledy. Kressich tried to recall him and could not. One by one the questions were repeated, cross-examination of identifications, mutual identifications, no more reliable than the word of those who gave them. A man with a camera came into the hallway and photographed them all standing against the wall. They stood in a chaos of com-chatter and discussion.

  “You can go,” the police leader said, and they began to file out; but when Kressich started to leave the officer caught his arm. “Vassily Kressich. I’ll be giving your name to headquarters.”

  He was not sure whether that was good or bad; anything was a hope. Anything was better than what existed here in Q, with the station stalling and unable to place them or clear them out.

  He walked out onto the dock itself, shaken by the sight of the wreckage that had been made here, with the dead still lying in their blood, piles of combustibles still smouldering, what furnishings and belongings had remained heaped up to burn. Station police were everywhere, armed with rifles, no light arms. He stayed on the docks, close to the police, afraid to go back into the corridors for fear of the terrorist gangs. It was impossible to hope the police had gotten them all. There were far too many.

  Eventually the station set up an emergency dispensary for food and drink near the section line, for the water had been shut down during the emergency, the kitchens vandalized, everything turned to weapons. Com had been vandalized; there was no way to report damage; and no repair crews were likely to want to come into the area.

  He sat on the bare dock and ate what they were given, in company with other small knots of refugees who had no more than he. People looked on each other in fear.

  “We aren’t getting out,” he heard repeatedly. “They’ll never clear us to leave now.”

  More than once he heard mutterings of a different sort, saw men he knew had been in the gangs of rioters, which had begun in his barracks, and no one reported them. No one dared. They were too many.

  Unionizers were among them. He became sure that these were the agitators. Such men might have most to fear in a tight check of papers. The war had reached Pell. It was among them, and they were as stationers had always been, neutral and empty-handed, treading carefully among those who meant murder… only now it was not stationers against warships, metal shell against metal shell; the danger was shoulder to shoulder with them, perhaps the young man with the hoarded sandwich, the young woman who sat and stared with hateful eyes.

  The convoy came in, without troops for escort. Dock crews under the protection of a small army of station police managed the unloading. Refugees were let through, processed as best could be with most of the housing wrecked, with the corridors become a jungle. The newcomers stood, baggage in hand, staring about them with terror in their eyes. They would be robbed by morning, Kressich reckoned, or worse. He heard people round about him simply crying softly, despairing.

  By morning there was yet another group of several hundred; and by now there was panic, for they were all hungry and thirsty and food arrived from main station very slowly.

  A man settled on the deck near him: Nino Coledy.

  There’s a dozen of us,“ Coledy said. ”Could sort some of this out; been talking to some of the gang survivors. We don’t give out names and they cooperate. We’ve got strong arms… could straighten this mess out, get people back into residences, so we can get some food and water in here.“

  “What, we?”

  Coledy’s face took on a grimace of earnestness. “You were a councillor. You stand up
front; you do the talking. We keep you there. Get these people fed. Get ourselves a soft place here. Station needs that. We can benefit by it.”

  Kressich considered it. It could also get them shot. He was too old for this. They wanted a figurehead. A police gang wanted a respectable figurehead. He was also afraid to tell them no.

  “You just do the talking out front,” Coledy said.

  “Yes,” he agreed, and then, setting his jaw with more firmness than Coledy might have expected of a tired old man: “You start rounding up your men and I’ll have a talk with the police.”

  He did so, approaching them gingerly. “There’s been an election,” he said. “I’m Vassily Kressich, councillor from red two, Russell’s Station. Some of our own police are among the refugees. We’re prepared to go into the corridors and establish order… without violence. We know faces. You don’t. If you’ll consult your own authorities and get it cleared, we can help.”

  They were not sure of that. There was hesitation even about calling in. Finally a police captain did so, and Kressich stood fretting. The captain nodded at last. “If it gets out of hand,” the captain said, “we won’t discriminate in firing. But we’re not going to tolerate any killing on your part, councillor Kressich; it’s not an open license.”

  “Have patience, sir,” Kressich said, and walked away, mortally tired and frightened. Coledy was there, with several others, waiting for him by the niner corridor access. In a few moments there were more drifting to them, less savory than the first. He feared them. He feared not to have them. He cared for nothing now, except to live; and to be atop the force and not under it. He watched them go, using terror to move the innocent, gathering the dangerous into their own ranks. He knew what he had done. It terrified him. He kept silent, because he would be caught in the second riot, part of it, if it happened. They would see to that.

  He assisted, used his dignity and his age and the fact that his face was known to some: shouted directions, began to have folk addressing him respectfully as councillor Kressich. He listened to their griefs and their fears and their angers until Coledy flung a guard about him to protect their precious figurehead.