Downbelow Station tau-3

by Caroline J. Cherryh

  Only here there were no merchanters to be pressed into duty as transport, and no carrier was going to let itself become a refugee ship. Could not. Had no room. It was no wonder that Mazian was not talking, was refusing to say anything about contingency plans which were, under numerous pretexts, already swinging into operation. A scenario constructed itself: station comp blown, for they had all the new comp keys; Downbelow base thrown into chaos by the elimination of the one man who was holding it together and the execution of all those gathered multitudes of humans and Downers so that Downers would never work for humans again; the station itself thrown into descending orbit; and themselves running for a jump point with a screen of short-haulers that could only serve as navigation hazards. Jump for the Hinder Stars, and in quick succession, for Sol itself -

  While Union had to decide whether to save itself a stationful of people and a base, and to battle the chaos on Downbelow which could starve the station out even with rescue… or to let Pell die and go for a strike unencumbered, having no base behind them closer than Viking… a vast, vast distance to Earth.

  Bastard, she hailed Mazian privately, with a glance under her brows. It was typical of Mazian that he worked moves ahead of the opposition and thought the unthinkable. He was the best. He always had been. She smiled at him when he fed them dry, precise orders about cataloging, and had the satisfaction of seeing the great Mazian for a moment lose the thread of his thought. He recovered it, went on, looked at her from time to time with perplexity and then with greater warmth.

  So now assuredly they were three who knew.

  “I’ll be frank with you,” she said to the men and women who assembled kneeling and standing in the lower deck suiting room, the only place on Norway she could get most of the troops assembled with an unobstructed view, jammed shoulder to shoulder as they were. “They’re not happy with us. Mazian himself isn’t happy with the way I’ve run this ship. Seems none of you is on the List. Seems none of us is involved with the market. Seems other crews are upset with you and me, and there are rumors flying about tampering with the list, about a deliberate tipoff due to some black market rivalry between Norway and other ships… Quiet! So I’m given orders, from the top. You get liberties, on the same schedule and on the same terms as other troops; you get duty on their schedule too. I’m not going to comment, except to compliment you on doing an excellent job; and to tell you two more things: I felt complimented on behalf of this whole ship that there was not a Norway name involved in that blue section mess; second… I ask you to avoid argument with other units, whatever rumors are passed and however you’re provoked. Apparently there is some hard feeling, for which I take personal responsibility. Apparently… well, leave that unsaid. Questions?”

  There was deathly silence. No one moved.

  “I’ll trust you’ll pass the news to the incoming watch before I get the chance to do it in person. My apologies, my personal apologies, for what is apparently construed by others as unfairness to the people under my command. Dismissed.”

  Still no one moved. She turned on her heel, walked away toward the lift, for the main level and her own quarters.

  “Vent ’em,” a voice muttered audibly in her wake. She stopped dead, with her back to them.

  “Norway!” someone shouted; and another; “Signy!” In a moment the whole ship echoed.

  She started walking again for the open lift, drew a deep breath of satisfaction for all the casual swing to her step. Vent him indeed, if even Conrad Mazian thought he could put his hand to Norway. She had started with the troops; Di Janz would have something to say to them too. What threatened Norway’s morale threatened lives, threatened the reflexes they had built up over years.

  And her pride. That too. Her face was still burning as she strode into the lift and pushed the button. The shouts echoing in the corridors were salve for her pride, which was, she admitted to herself, as vast as Mazian’s. Follow orders indeed; but she had calculated the effect on the troops and on her crew; and no one gave her orders regarding what happened within Norway itself. Not even Mazian.

  Chapter Two

  i

  Pell: sector green nine; 1/6/53

  The downer was with him again, a small brown shadow, not altogether unusual in the traffic in nine. Josh paused in the riot-scarred corridor, put his foot on a molding, pretended to adjust the top of his boot. The Downer touched his arm, wrinkled its nose in bending and peering up at his face. “Konstantin-man all right?”

  “All right,” he said. It was the one called Bluetooth, who was on their heels almost daily, managing to carry messages to and from Damon’s mother. “We’ve got a good place to hide now. No more trouble. Damon’s safe and the man’s making no more trouble.”

  The furred powerful hand sought his, forced an object into it. “You take Konstantin-man? She give, say need.”

  The Downer slipped away in the traffic as quickly as he had come. Josh straightened, resisting the temptation to look about or to look at the metal object until he was some distance down the corridor. It turned out to be a brooch, metal that might be real gold. He pocketed it for the treasure it was to them, something salable on the market, something that needed no card, that would bribe someone unbribable by other means… like the owner of their current lodgings. Gold had uses other than jewelry: rare metals were worth lives — the going rate. And the day was coming when it would take greater and greater persuasion to keep Damon hidden. A woman of vast good sense, Damon’s mother. She had ears and eyes, in every Downer who flitted harmlessly through the corridors, and she knew their desperation — offered still a refuge that Damon would not take, because he above all did not want the Downer system subject to search.

  The net was closing on them. The area of usable corridors grew less and less. A new system was being installed, new cards, and the sections the troops cleared stayed cleared. Those within a section when the troops sealed it were rounded up, checked against the wanted lists, and given new id’s… most of them. Some vanished, period. And the new card system hit the market harder and harder, the nearer it got. The value of cards and papers plummeted, for they would be valid only until the changeover was complete, and people were already getting shy of the old ones. Now and again an alarm went off, silent, somewhere in comp; and troops would come to some establishment and start trace procedure on someone they wanted… as if most of the people in unsecure sections were using their own cards. But the troops asked questions and checked id’s when they were roused — kept the areas open to their raids, kept the populace terrorized and suspicious each of the other, and that served Mazian’s purpose.

  It also gave them a livelihood. It was their stock-in-trade, his and Damon’s, the purification of cards. It was their value within the system of the black market. A buyer wanted to check the worth of a stolen card, a new purchaser wanted to be sure that a card would not ring alarms in comp, someone wanted the bank code number to get at assets… the bars and sleepovers in the docks did not match up faces and id’s, not at all. And Damon had the access numbers to do it. He had learned them too, so that they worked a partnership and neither of them had to venture into the corridors on too regular a basis. They had it down to a science… using the Downer tunnels and even crossing through the section barriers — Bluetooth had shown them how — so that no single comp terminal would have a series of inquiries. They had never triggered an alarm, even though some of the cards had been dangerously hot. They were good; they had a trade — ironically of Mazian’s creation — which fed and housed and hid them with all the protections the market could offer its valuable operators. He had at the moment a pocketful of cards, each of which he knew by value according to the level of clearance and how much was in the credit account. Nothing in the latter, in most instances. Families of missing persons had gotten wise very quickly, and station comp had taken to honoring family requests that an account be frozen from access by a particular number… so rumor ran, and it was probably true. Most cards now were trouble. He had a f
ew usable ones in the lot and a collection of code numbers. Cards which had belonged to single persons or independent accounts were the only ones still good.

  But there were omens of more rapid change. It was his imagination, perhaps, but the corridors on all levels of green seemed more crowded today. It might well be so. All those who dared not submit to id and re-carding had crowded persistently into smaller and smaller spaces… green and white remained open sectors, but he personally had gotten nervous about white, not wanting to go into it longer than he must… had heard no rumors himself, but there was something in the air, something that reckoned another area was about to go under seal… and white was likeliest.

  Green was the section with the big concourses, and the fewest troublesome bottlenecks where determined resistance could fight from room to room and hall to hall — if it came to fighting. He rather imagined another end for them, that when all the problems Mazian had on Pell were neatly herded into one last section, they would simply blow it, vent the section with doors wide open, and they would die without appeal and without a chance.

  A few crazed souls had gotten pressure suits, the hottest item on the black market, and hovered near them, armed and wild-eyed, hoping to survive against all logic. Most of them simply expected to die. There was a desperate atmosphere in all of green, while those who had finally reconciled themselves to capture voluntarily moved into white. Green and white grew stranger and stranger, with walls graffiti’d with bizarre slogans, some obscene, some religious, some pathetic. We lived here, one said. That was all.

  All but a very few lights in the corridors had been broken out, so that everything was twilight, and station no longer dimmed lights for mainday/alterday shifts; it would have become dangerously dark. There were some side corridors where all the lights were out, and no one went into those lairs unless he belonged there — or was dragged screaming into them. There were gangs, who fought each other for power. The weaker souls clung to them, paid them all their resources, not to be harmed, and perhaps to have the chance to harm others. Some of the gangs had started in Q. Some were Pell gangs which formed in defense and undertook other business ventures. He feared them indiscriminately, feared their unreasoning violence most of all. He had let his beard grow, let his hair grow, walked with a slouch and acquired as much dirt as possible, changed his face subtly with cosmetic… that commodity sold high on the market too. If there was any comedy in this grim place it was that most of these folk hereabouts were doing exactly the same thing, that the section was full of men and women who desperately did not want to be recognized, and who avoided each others’ eyes in a perpetual flinching as they walked the halls… some who swaggered and tried to threaten, unless troops were at hand… more who flitted like downcast ghosts, scurrying along in evident hope no one would set a hue and cry after them.

  Perhaps he had changed so much in appearance that no one did recognize him. No one had yet pointed a finger at him or at Damon in public. There was some loyalty left on Pell, perhaps — or their involvement with the market protected them, or others who knew them were just too frightened to start something. Some of the gangs were linked into the market.

  Occasional troopers walked in the halls, some back in nine two, no less common than Downers about their business. Green dock was still open as far as the end of white dock; and Africa and occasionally Atlantic or Pacific occupied the first two berths of green, while the other ships berthed in blue dock, and troops came and went freely through the personnel access beside the section seals on that end of green. Troops entered green and white on liberty or on duty, mingling with the condemned… and the condemned knowing that all they had to do to escape was to go up to those troops or to the cleared-area access doors and turn themselves in. Some did not believe that the Mazianni would decompress the section, simply because of that close and almost friendly association. Troopers shed their armor on liberty, walked about laughing and human, hung out in the bars… staked out a couple of establishments for themselves, it was true… but mingled in other bars, turned an occasional benevolent smile on the market.

  So much the easier to handle the victims until it came, Josh reckoned. They still had choices left, played the game with the troops, dodged and struggled… but all it took was a button pushed somewhere in central, no personal contact, no watching faces as they died. All clinical and distant.

  He and Damon planned, wild and futile schemes. Damon’s brother was rumored to be alive. They talked of stowing away on one of the shuttles, taking one over, getting to Downbelow and into the bush. They had as likely a chance of stealing a shuttle from armed troops as they did of walking to Downbelow, but the planning occupied their minds and gave them hope.

  And more realistic… they could try to pass the seals into the cleared sections, and chance the alarm-rigged access doors, regimented security, checkpoints at every corner and card use at every move… that was the way of life over there. Mallory’s doing. They had been checking it out. Too many men-with-guns, was Bluetooth’s warning. Cold they eyes.

  Cold indeed.

  And meanwhile there was the market and there was Ngo’s.

  He approached the bar along green nine, not by the tunnel ways which led to the corridor outside Ngo’s back door, for that was for emergencies and Ngo had no love for anyone using the back way without cause… wanted no one seen in the main room who had not come in by the front door and wanted no access alarms going off in comp. Ngo’s was a place where the market flourished, and as such it tried to be cleaner than most, one of almost a score of bars and entertainment concessions along green dock and the niner access which had once thrived in the traffic of merchanters… a line of sleepovers and vid theaters and lounges and restaurants and one anomalous chapel completing the row. Most of the bars were open; the theaters and the chapel and some of the sleepovers were burned out shells, but the bars functioned, most like Ngo’s, as restaurants as well, the channels through which station still fed the population, arid black-market food augmented what the station was willing to supply.

  He cast cautious glances one way and the other as he approached the front and ever-wide door of Ngo’s, not obvious looks around, but a rhythm of walking and looking as a man might who was simply making up his mind which bar he wanted.

  A face caught his eye, abruptly, heart-stoppingly. He delayed a half a beat and looked toward Mascari’s, across the corridor at the emptying of nine onto the docks. A tall man who had been standing there suddenly moved and darted within Mascari’s.

  Dark obscured his vision, a flash of memory so vivid he staggered and forgot all his pattern. He was vulnerable for that instant, panicked… turned for Ngo’s doorway blindly and went inside, into the dim light and pounding music and the smells of alcohol and food and the unwashed clientele.

  The old man himself was tending bar. Josh went to the counter and leaned there, asked for a bottle. Ngo gave it to him, no asking for his card. That all came later, in the back room. But his hand shook in taking the bottle, and Ngo’s quick hand caught his wrist. “Trouble?”

  “Close one,” he lied… and perhaps not a lie. “I got clear. Gang trouble. Don’t worry. No one tracked me. Nothing official.”

  “You better be sure.”

  “No problem. Nerves. It’s nerves.” He clutched the bottle and walked away toward the back, stopped a moment against the back doorway that led into the kitchen and waited to be sure his exit was not observed.

  One of the Mazianni, maybe. His heart still pounded from the encounter. Someone with Ngo’s under surveillance. No. His imagination. The Mazianni did not to need to be so subtle. He unstopped the bottle and drank from it, Downer wine, cheap tranquilizer. He took a second long drink and began to feel better. He experienced such flashes… not often. They were always bad. Anything could trigger it, usually some small and silly thing, a smell, a sound, a momentary wrong way of looking at a familiar thing or ordinary person… That it should have happened in public — that most disturbed him. It could have a
ttracted notice. Maybe it had. He resolved not to go out again today. Was not sure about tomorrow. He took a third drink and a last look over the patrons at the dozen tables, then slipped back into the kitchen, where Ngo’s wife and son were cooking up the orders. He paid them a casual glance, received sullen stares in return, and walked on through to the storeroom.

  He pushed the door open on manual. “Damon,” he said, and the curtain at the rear of the cabinets opened. Damon came out and sat down among the canisters they used for furniture, in the light of the batteried lamp they used to escape comp’s watchful economy and infallible memory. He came and sank down wearily, gave Damon the bottle and Damon took a drink. Unshaven, both of them, with the look of the unwashed, depressed crowds which collected down here.

  “You’re late,” Damon said. “You trying to give me ulcers?”

  He fished the cards out of his pocket, arranged them by memory, made quick notes with a grease pencil before he should forget. Damon gave him paper and he wrote the details for each one, and Damon did not talk to him the while.

  Then it was done, his memory spilled, and he laid the batch on top of the next canister and reached for the wine bottle. He drank and set it down. “Met Bluetooth. Said your mother’s fine. Give you this.” He drew the brooch from his pocket and watched as Damon took it into his hands with that melancholy look that told him it might have some meaning beyond the gold itself. Damon nodded glumly and pocketed it; he did not much speak of his family, living or dead, not in reminiscence.