Downbelow Station (58 page)

Damon felt his own way further, counting his turns and levels. No recklessness.
 
He had come close enough, trying to enter white. He had rung an alarm over in white. He had a sickly fear it might bring investigation into the tunnels, trouble on the Downers, on his mother, on all of them. He still felt the tremor in his knees, although he had not hesitated to shoot when he had to; had fired on an unarmored guard; might have killed him; had meant to.
 
That sickened him.

And he still hoped he had, that the alarm had not involved his name. That the witness was dead.

He was still shaking when he reached the access to the corridor outside Ngo’s.
 
He entered the narrow lock, tugged down his mask, used the security-cleared card he reserved only for extreme emergency. It opened without alarms. He hurried down the narrow, deserted hall, used a manual key to open the back door itself.
 
Ngo’s wife turned from the kitchen counter and stared at him, darted out into the main room. Damon let the door close behind him, opened the storeroom door to toss the breather mask in. He had forgotten it in his panic, brought it through with him. That was the measure of his wit. He went to the kitchen sink and washed his hands, his face, tried to wash the stink of blood and fear and memory off him.

“Damon.”

“Josh.” He turned a weary glance toward the door to the front room, dried his face on the towel hanging there. “Trouble.” He went past Josh into the front room, walked to the bar and leaned against it. “Bottle?” he asked of Ngo.
 
“You come in that door again…” Ngo hissed unhappily.

“Emergency,” Damon said. Josh caught his arm gently from the side.
 
“Never mind the drink for a moment,” Josh said. “Damon. Come over here. I want to talk to you.”

He came, back into the alcove which was their territory. Josh backed him into the corner, out of sight of the other patrons who ate in the place. There was the clink of plates in the kitchen, where Ngo’s wife had retreated, with her son. The room smelled of Ngo’s inevitable stew. “Listen,” Josh said when they had sat down, “I want you to come with me across the corridor. I’ve found a contact I think can help us.”

He heard it and still it took a moment to sink in. “Who have you been talking to? Who do you know?”

“Not me. Someone who recognized you. Who wants your help. I don’t know the whole story. A friend of yours. There’s an organization… stretches out among the Q folk and Pell. A number of people who know you might have the skill to help them.”

He tried to absorb it. “You know what a candle’s chance we have with a Q mob—against troops?—and why go to you? Why you, Josh? Maybe they’re afraid I’d recognize faces and know something. I don’t like this.” “Damon. How much time can we have? It’s a chance. Everything’s a risk at this point. Come with me. Please come with me.”

“They’re going to be checking all over white. I stumbled into an alarm over there… may have killed someone. They’re going to be stirred up, searching for someone using accesses…” “Then how much time can we have left to think it over? If we don’t—” He stopped, looked sharply about at Ngo’s wife, who brought them bowls of stew, setting them on the table. “We’re going somewhere. Keep it hot for us.” Dark eyes stared at them both. Quietly, as everything about the woman was quiet, she gathered up the bowls and took them to another table.
 
“Won’t take long to find out,” Josh said. “Damon. Please.”

“What are they talking of doing? Rushing central?”

“Causing trouble. Getting to the shuttle. Setting up resistance on Downbelow… a small number of us. Damon, it all relies on your knowledge. Your skill with comp, and your knowledge of the passages.”

“They have a pilot?”

“I think there’s someone who is, yes.”

He tried to gather his wits. Shook his head. “No.”

“What do you mean, no? You talked about a shuttle. You planned for it.” “Not to have another riot on the station. Not with more people killed, in a plan that’s never going to work…” “Come and talk to them. Come with me. Or don’t you trust me? Damon, how long can we wait on chances? You haven’t even heard it out.” He let go his breath. “I’ll come,” he said. “They’re going to start checking id’s in green soon enough, I’m afraid. I’ll talk to them. Maybe I know better ways. Quieter ones. How far is this place?”

“Mascari’s.”

“Across the corridor.”

“Yes. Come on.”

He came, out amongst the tables, past the bar.

“You,” Ngo said sharply as they passed. He stopped. “You don’t come back here if you bring trouble. You hear me? I helped you. I don’t want that kind of pay for it. You hear me?”

“I hear,” Damon said. There was no time to smooth it over. Josh waited by the front door. He walked out to join him, looked left and right and crossed the corridor with him into the noisier and darker interior of Mascari’s.
 
A man at the left of the entry rose and joined them. “This way,” the man said, and because Josh went without question, Damon swallowed his protests and went with them, to the far side of the room, which was so dark it was hard to avoid chairs.

A dim light burned in a curtained alcove. They went inside, he and Josh, but their guide vanished.

And in another moment a second man came in at their backs, young and scar-faced.
 
Damon did not know him. “They’re coming,” the young man said, and quickly the curtains moved again, admitted two more to the alcove.
 
“Kressich,” Damon muttered. The other was not familiar to him.

“You know Mr. Kressich?” the newcomer asked.

“Only by sight. Who are you?”

“Name’s Jessad… Mr. Konstantin, is it? The younger Konstantin?” Recognition of any kind made him nervous. He looked at Josh, finding discrepancies, bewildered. They were supposed to know him. This man should not be surprised.

“Damon,” Josh said, “this man is from Q. Let’s talk details. Sit down.” He did so, at the small table, uncertain and apprehensive as the others settled with him. A second time he looked at Josh. He trusted Josh. Trusted him with his life. Would hand him his life at the asking, having no better use for it. And Josh had lied to him. Everything he knew of the man insisted Josh was lying.
 
Are we under some threat? he wondered wildly, seeking some cause for this charade. “What kind of proposal are we talking about?” he asked, wishing only that he could get himself out of here, and get Josh out, and get it all straight.

“When Josh said that he had contacts,” Jessad said slowly, “I didn’t suspect who. You’re far better than I dared hope.”

“Am I?” He resisted the temptation to look again in Josh’s direction. “What precisely do you hope, Mr. Jessad from Q?”

“Josh didn’t tell you?”

“Josh said I’d want to talk to you.”

“About finding a way to get this station back into your hands?” He did not change expression in the least. “You think you have the means to do that.”

“I have men,” Kressich interjected. “Coledy does. We can raise a thousand men in five minutes.”

“You know what would happen then,” Damon said. “We’d have ourselves neck deep in troopers. Bodies in the corridors, if they didn’t vent us all.” “You know,” Jessad said quietly, “that the whole station is theirs. To do with as they please. Except for you, there’s no authority to speak for the old Pell.
 
Lukas… is done. He says only what Mazian hands him to read. Has guards about him everywhere. One choice is bodies in the corridors, true. The other is what they’ve given Lukas, isn’t it? They’d give you prepared speeches to read too.
 
They’d let you alternate with Lukas, or outright dispose of you. After all, they do have Lukas, and he takes orders… doesn’t he?”

“You put it neatly, Mr. Jessad.” And what about the shuttle? he thought, leaning back in his chair. He looked at Josh, who met his eyes with a troubled stare. He glanced back again. “What’s your proposal?”

“You get us access to central. We take care of the rest”

“It’ll never work,” Damon said. “We’ve got warships out there. You can’t hold them off by holding central. They’d blow us; don’t you count on that?” “I have means to make sure it works.”

“So let’s have it. Make your proposal, flat, and let me have the night to think about it.”

“Let you walk around knowing names and faces?”

“You know mine,” he reminded Jessad, and obtained a slight flicker of the eyes.

“Trust him,” Josh said. “It will work.”

Something crashed outside, even over the music. The curtains came inward, with Coledy, who landed atop the table with a hole burned in his forehead. Kressich sprang up shrieking in terror. Damon hurled himself back, hit the wall with Josh beside him, and Jessad clawed for a pocket. Shrieks punctuated the music outside, and armored troops with leveled rifles filled the doorway of the alcove.

“Stand still!” one ordered.

Jessad whipped out the gun. A rifle fired, and there was a burned smell as Jessad hit the floor, twitching. Damon stared at the troopers and the leveled rifles in dazed horror. Josh, at his side, did not move.
 
A trooper hauled another man in by the collar—Ngo, who flinched from Damon’s stare and looked apt to be sick.

“These the ones?” the trooper asked.

Ngo nodded. “Made me hide them out. Threatened me. Threatened my family. We want to go over to white. All of us.”

“Who’s this one?” The trooper nodded toward Kressich.

“Don’t know,” Ngo said. “Don’t know him. Don’t know these others.”

“Take them out,” the officer said. “Search them. Dead ones too.” It was over. A hundred thoughts poured through Damon’s mind… going for the gun in his pocket—running for it, as far as he could get before they shot him down.

And Josh… and his mother and his brother…

They laid hands on him, turned him against the wall and made him spread his limbs, him and Josh beside him, and Kressich. They searched his pockets and took the cards and the gun, which in itself was cause for a shooting on the spot They turned him about again, back to the wall, and looked at him more carefully.
 
“You’re Konstantin?”

He gave no answer. One hit him in the belly and doubled him, and he flung himself at the man shoulder-on and low, carried him and a chair over under the table. A boot slammed into his back and he was trampled in a fight which broke above him. He tore free of the man he had stunned, tried to claw his way to his feet by the table rim, and a shot burned past his shoulder, hit Kressich in the stomach.

A rifle clubbed him. His knees loosened, refusing to drive him to his feet; a second blow, on the arm stretched on the table. He went out, doubled as a boot slammed into him, stayed doubled against the blows until they knocked him half senseless. Then they hauled him up between two of them. “Josh,” he said dazedly.
 
“Josh!”

They had Josh up too, slumped between two of them, trying to shake him into life, and he managed to get his feet under him. His head rolled drunkenly. He was bleeding from the temple. For Kressich there was no use in urging; he was still moving, gut-shot and bleeding fast. They were leaving him.
 
Damon looked about as they were taken out into the main room. Ngo had fled or they had taken him. The patrons had fled. There was only a scattering of corpses, and a few troops standing about with rifles.
 
The troops hauled him and Josh outside, into the corridor. A few at Ngo’s stood outside to stare as they were marched along and Damon turned his face aside, shamed to be publicly paraded in his arrest.

He thought they would be taken to the ships across the docks. And then they turned the corner onto the docks and headed left, and he realized otherwise.
 
There was a bar the troops had taken for themselves, a headquarters, a place civs avoided.

Music, drugs, liquor—anything the civ sector had to offer—Damon stared numbly as they were hauled inside, into a lowering smoke and a thunder of music. A desk was there, incredibly enough, a concession to something official. The troops brought them to it and a man carrying a drink sat down and looked them over.
 
“Got ourselves something here,” said the leader of the group which had brought them in. “Fleet’s looking for these two. Konstantin, this one. And we’ve got ourselves a Unioner here. Adjusted man, the rumor says… but Pell did the Adjusting.”

“Unioner.” The sergeant at the desk looked past Damon, grinned unpleasantly at Josh. “And how did the likes of you get onto Pell? Got a good story, Union man?” Josh said nothing.

“I do,” a harsh voice said from the door, fit to shake the walls. “He’s Norway property.”

Laughter and conversation stopped, if not the music. The newcomers, armored as most in this place were not, came in with a brusqueness that startled the rest.
 
“Norway” someone muttered. “Get out of here, Norway bastards.”

“What’s your name?” the newcomer bellowed.

“Or you shoot all of us?” someone else said.

The short man with the loud voice punched the com button at his shoulder and spoke something the music drowned, turned and waved his hand at the dozen troopers with him, who fanned out. He looked then at the rest, a slow circuit of the room. “You’re none of you in fit condition to handle anything. Straighten up this den. Any of our people in here I’ll skin ’em. Is there?” “Try down the row,” someone shouted. “This is Australia territory. Norway’s got no call to be putting us on report.”

“Hand the prisoners over,” the short man said. No one moved. Rifles of the Norway troops leveled, and there were outcries of shock and rage from the Australia troopers. Damon stood with his vision hazing as two of the dozen moved in on him and Josh, as a rough grip seized his right arm and jerked him from the hand which held him, hauled him along toward the door. Josh came without struggling. He did. As long as they were together… it was the most they had left.

“Get them out,” the little man bellowed at his troops. They were pushed and hastened outside; two troopers stayed with their officer, in the bar. It was not until they were passing the niner corridor that other troops intercepted them, other Norway troopers.