Downbelow Station (27 page)

A day to get it all into comp; and the appointment was waiting.

« ^ »

Cyteen Station: Security area: 9/14/52

Ayres awoke, not sure what had wakened him in the quiet of their apartments.
 
Marsh had gotten back… the latest fright they had had, when he failed to rejoin them after recreation. Tension afflicted Ayres. He realized that for some time he had slept tense, for his shoulders hurt and his hands were clenched, and he lay still now with sweat gathered on his face, not sure what had caused it The war of nerves had not ceased. Azov had what he wanted, a message calling Mazian in. They quibbled now over some points of secondary agreements, for the future of Pell, which Jacoby professed to hand to Union. They had their recreation time, that much, but they were detained in conferences, harassed by petty tactics the same as before. It was as if all his appeal to Azov had only aggravated the situation, for Azov was not accessible for the last five days… gone, the lesser authorities insisted, and the difficulties raised for them now had the taint of malice.

Someone was astir outside. Soft footsteps. The door slid back unannounced.
 
Dias’s silhouette leaned into it. “Segust,” she said. “Come. You must come. It’s Marsh.”

He rose and reached for his robe, then followed Dias. Karl Bela was stirring him from his room likewise, next door to him. Marsh’s room was across the sitting room, next to Dias’s, and the door was open.

Marsh hung, gently turning, by his belt looped from a hook which had held a movable light. The face was horrible. Ayres froze an instant, then dragged back the chair which had slid on its track, climbed up, and tried to get the body down. They had no knife, had nothing with which they might cut the belt. It was imbedded in Marsh’s throat and he could not get it free and support the body at once. Bela and Dias tried to help, holding the knees, but that was no good.
 
“We’ve got to call security,” Dias said.

Ayres climbed down from the chair, hard-breathing, stared at them.
 
“I might have stopped him,” Dias said. “I was still awake. I heard the moving about, a great deal of noise. Then strange sounds. When they had stopped so suddenly and so long—I finally got up to see.”

Ayres shook his head, looked at Bela then stalked out to the sitting room and the com panel by the door, punched through a request to security. “One of us is dead,” he said. “Put me through to someone in charge.” “Request will be relayed,” the answer came back. “Security is on its way.” The contact went dead, no more informative than usual. Ayres sat down, head in hands, tried not to think of Marsh’s horrible corpse slowly spinning in the next compartment. It had been coming; he had feared worse, that Marsh would break down in his tormentors’ hands. A brave man after his own fashion, he had not broken. Ayres tried earnestly to believe that he had not.
 
Or guilt, perhaps? Remorse might have driven him to suicide.
 
Dias and Bela sat down nearby, waited with him, faces stark and somber, hair disordered from sleep. He tried to comb his own with his fingers.
 
Marsh’s eyes. He did not want to think of them. A long time passed. “What’s keeping them?” Bela wondered, and Ayres recovered sense enough to glance up harshly at Bela, reprimand for that show of humanity. It was the old war; it continued even in this, especially after this. “Maybe we should go back to bed,” Dias said. At other times, in other places, a mad suggestion. Here it was sanity. They needed their rest. A systematic effort was being made to deprive them of it. A little more and they would all be like Marsh.
 
“Probably they will be late,” he agreed aloud. “We might as well.” They quietly, as if it were the sanest thing in the world, retired to their separate rooms. Ayres took off his robe and hung it over the chair by his bed, reckoning anew that he was proud of his companions, who held up so well, and that he hated—hated Union. It was not his business to hate, only to get results.
 
Marsh at least was free. He wondered what Union did with their dead. Ground them up, perhaps, for fertilizer. That would be typical of such a society.
 
Economical. Poor Marsh.

It was guaranteed that Union would be perverse. He had no sooner settled into bed, reduced his mind to a level that excluded clear thought, closed his eyes in an attempt at sleep, than the outer door whisked open, the tread of booted feet sounded in the sitting room, his door was rudely pulled back and armed soldiers stood silhoutted against the light.

With studied calm, he rose to his feet

“Dress,” a soldier said.

He did so. There was no arguing with the mannequins.
 
“Ayres,” the soldier said, motioning with his rifle. They had been moved out of the apartment to one of the offices, he and Bela and Dias, made to sit for at least an hour on hard benches, waiting for someone of authority, who was promised them. Presumably security needed to examine the apartment in detail.
 
“Ayres,” the soldier said a second time, this time harshly, indicating that he should rise and follow.

He did so, leaving Dias and Bela with a touch of apprehension in the parting.
 
They would be bullied, he thought, perhaps even accused of Marsh’s murder. He was about to be, perhaps.

Another means of breaking their resistance, only, he thought. He might be in Marsh’s place; he was the one separated from the others.
 
He was taken out of the office, brought among a squad of soldiers in the outer corridor, hastened farther and farther from the offices, from all the ordinary places, taken down in a lift, marched along another hall. He did not protest. If he stopped, they would carry him; there was no arguing with these mentalities, and he was too old to submit to being dragged down a hall.
 
It was the docks… the docks, crowded with military, squad upon squad of armed troops, and ships loading. “No,” he said, forgetting all his policy, but a rifle barrel slammed against his shoulders, and moved him on, across the ugly utilitarian decking, up to the ramp and umbilical which linked some ship to the dock. Inside, then; the air was, if anything, colder than it was on the docks.
 
They passed three corridors, a lift, numerous doors. The door at the end was open and lighted, and they brought him in, into the steel and plastic of shipboard furnishings, sloping shapes, chairs of ambiguous design, fixed benches, decks of far more obvious curve than those of the station, everything cramped and angles strange. He staggered, unused to the footing, looked in surprise at the man seated at the table.

Dayin Jacoby rose from a chair to welcome him.

“What’s going on?” he asked of Jacoby.

“I really don’t know,” Jacoby told him, and it seemed the truth. “I was roused out last night and brought aboard. I’ve been waiting in this place half an hour.”

“Who’s in charge here?” Ayres demanded of the mannequins. “Inform him I want to speak with him.”

They did nothing, only stood, rifles braced all at the same drill angle. Ayres slowly sat down, as Jacoby did. He was frightened. Perhaps Jacoby himself was.
 
He lapsed into his long habit of silence, finding nothing to say to a traitor at any event. There was no polite conversation possible.
 
The ship moved, a crash echoing through the hull and the corridors and disturbing them from their calm. Soldiers reached for handholds as the moment of queasy null came on them. Freed of station’s grav, they had a moment yet to acquire their own, as ship’s systems took over. Clothes crawled unpleasantly, stomachs churned; they were convinced of imminent falling, and the falling when it came was a slow settling.

“We’ve left,” Jacoby muttered. “It’s come, then.”

Ayres said nothing, thinking in panic of Bela and Dias, left behind. Left.

A black-clad officer appeared in the doorway, and another behind him.

Azov.

“Dismissed,” Azov said to the mannequins, and they went out in silent order.

Ayres and Jacoby rose at once.

“What’s going on?” Ayres asked directly. “What is this?”

“Citizen Ayres,” said Azov, “we are on defensive maneuvers.”

“My companions—what about them?”

“They are in a most secure place, Mr. Ayres. You’ve provided us the message we desired; it may prove of use, and therefore you’re with us. Your quarters are adjoining, just down that corridor. Kindly confine yourself there.” “What’s happening?” he demanded, but the aide took him by the arm and escorted him to the door. He seized the frame and resisted, casting a look back at Azov.
 
“What’s happening?”

“We are preparing,” Azov said, “to deliver Mazian your message. And it seems fit for you to be at hand… if further questions are raised. The attack is coming; I make my guess where, and that it will be a major one. Mazian doesn’t give up stations for nothing; and we’re going, Mr. Ayres, to put ourselves where he has obliged us to stand… up the wager, as it were. He’s left us no choice, and he knows it; but of course, it’s earnestly to be hoped that he will regard the authority you have to recall him. Should you wish to prepare a second, even more forceful message, facilities will be provided you.”

“To be edited by your experts.”

Azov smiled tautly. “Do you want the Fleet intact? Frankly I doubt you can recover it. I don’t think Mazian will regard your message; but as he finds himself deprived of bases, you may yet have a humanitarian role to fill.” Ayres said nothing. He reckoned silence even now the wisest course. The aide took him by the arm and drew him back down the corridor, showed him into a barren compartment of plastic furniture, and locked the door.
 
He paced a time, what few paces the compartment allowed. In time he yielded to the weariness in his knees and sat down. He had managed badly, he thought Dias and Bela were… wherever they were—on a ship or still on the station, and what station they had been on he still did not know. Anything might happen. He sat shivering, suddenly realizing that they were lost, that soldiers and ships were aimed at Pell and Mazian… for Jacoby was brought along too.
 
Another—humanitarian—function. In his own stupidity he had played to stay alive, to get home. It looked less and less likely. They were about to lose it all.
 
“A peace has been concluded,” he had said in the simple statement he had permitted to be recorded, lacking essential codes. “Security council representative Segust Ayres by authority of the Earth Company and the security council requests the Fleet make contact for negotiation.” It was the worst of all times for major battle to be joined. Earth needed Mazian where he was, with all his ships, striking at random at Union, a nuisance, making it difficult for Union to extend its arm Earthward.
 
Mazian had gone mad… against Union’s vast extent, to launch the few ships he had, and to engage on a massive scale and lose. If the Fleet was wiped out, then Earth was suddenly out of the time he had come here to win. No Mazian, no Pell, and everything fell apart And might not a message of the sort he had framed provoke some rash action, or confound maneuvers already in progress, lessening the chance of Mazian’s success even further?

He rose, paced again the bowed floor of what looked to be his final prison. A second message then. An outrageous demand. If Union was as self-convinced as the mannequins, as humorlessly convinced of their purpose, they might let it pass if it fit their demands.

“Considering merger of Company interest with Union in trade agreements,” he composed in his head. “Negotiations far advanced; as earnest of good faith in negotiations, cease all military operations; cease fire and accept truce. Stand by for further instructions.”

Treachery… to drive Mazian into retreat, into the kind of scattered resistance Earth needed at this stage. It was the only hope.

« ^ »

i

In approach to Pell: 10/4/52; 1145 hrs.

Pell.

Norway moved as the Fleet moved, hurling their mass into realspace in synch. Com and scan flurried into action, searching for the mote which was giant Tibet, which had jumped in before them, advance guard, in this rout.
 
“Affirmative,” com sent to command with comforting swiftness. Tibet was where she was supposed to be, intact, probe untouched by any hostile activity. Ships were scattered about the system, commerce, quickly evaporating bluster from some self-claimed militia. Tibet had had one merchanter skip out in panic, and that was bad news. They needed no tale-bearers running to Union; but possibly that was the last place a merchanter wanted to head at the moment And a moment later confirmation snapped out from Europe, from the flagship’s operations: they were in safe space with no action probable.
 
“Getting com out of Pell itself now,” Graff relayed to her post at controls, still listening. “Sounds good.”

Signy reached across the board and keyed signal to the rider-captains, advising them. Fast to Norway’s hull, so many parasites, they did not kick loose. Com was receiving direct and frantic id’s from the militia ships scrambling out of their projected course as they came insystem dangerously fast, out of system plane.
 
The Fleet itself was more than nervous, running as they were in one body, probing their way into the last secure area they hoped to have left.
 
They were nine now. Chenel’s Libya was debris and vapor, and Keu’s India had lost two of its four riders.

They were in full retreat, had run from the debacle at Viking, seeking a place to draw breath. They all had scars; Norway had a vane trailing a cloud of metallic viscera, if they still had the vane at all after jump. There were dead aboard, three techs who had been in that section. They had not had time to vent them, not even to clean up the area, had run, saved the ship, the Fleet, such as remained of Company power. Signy’s boards still flashed with red lights. She passed the order to damage control to dispose of the corpses, whatever of them they could find.