Downbelow Station

“No,” she said. “You were different.”

“You’d take anyone’s baby?” The thought troubled him. Some things he had never asked Elene because he thought he knew. And Elene had never talked that way. He began, belatedly, to revise all he thought he knew; to be hurt, and to fight that. She was Elene; that quantity he still believed in, trusted.

“Where else could we get them?” she asked, making strange, clear sense. “We love them, do you think not? They belong to the whole ship. Only now there aren’t any.” She could talk of that suddenly. He felt the tension ebb, a sigh against him. “They’re all gone.”

“You called Elt Quen your father; Tia James your mother. Was it that way?”

“He was. She knew.” And a moment later. “She left a station to go with him. Not many will.”

She had never asked him to. That thought had never clearly occurred to him. Ask a Konstantin to leave Pell… he asked himself if he would have, and felt a deep unease. I would have, he insisted. I might have. “It would be hard,” he admitted aloud. “It was hard for you.”

She nodded, a movement against his arm.

“Are you sorry, Elene?”

A small shake of her head.

“It’s late to talk about things like this,” he said. “I wish we had. I wish we’d known enough to talk to each other. So many things we didn’t know.”

“It bother you?”

He hugged her against him, kissed her through a veil of hair, brushed it aside. He thought for a moment of saying no, decided then to say nothing. “You’ve seen Pell. You realize I’ve never set foot on a ship bigger than a shuttle? Never been out from this station? Some things I don’t know how to look at, or even how to imagine the question. You understand me?”

“Some things I don’t know how to ask you either.”

“What would you ask for?”

“I just did.”

“I don’t know how to say yes or no. Elene, I don’t know if I could have left Pell. I love you, but I don’t know that I could have done that — after so short a time. And that bothers me. That bothers me, if it’s something in me that it never occurred to me… that I spent all my pla

“Easier for me to stay a time… than for a Konstantin to uproot himself from Pell; pausing’s easy, we do it all the time. Only losing Estelle I never pla

“How did I answer you?”

“By what it is that bothers you.”

That puzzled him. We do it all the time. That frightened him. But she talked more, lying against him, about more than things… deep feelings; the way childhood was for a merchanter; the first time she had set foot on a station, aged twelve and frightened by rude stationers who assumed any merchanter was fair game. How a cousin had died on Mariner years back, knifed in a stationer quarrel, not even comprehending a stationer’s jealousy that had killed him.

And an incredible thing… that in the loss of her ship, Elene’s pride had suffered; pride … the idea set him back, so that for some time he lay staring at the dark ceiling, thinking about it.

The name was diminished… a possession like the ship. Someone had diminished it and too anonymously to give her an enemy to get it back from. For a moment he thought of Mallory, the hard arrogance of an elite breed, the aristocracy of privilege. Sealed worlds and a law unto itself, where no one had property, and everyone had it: the ship and all who belonged to it. Merchanters who would spit in a dockmaster’s eye made grumbling retreat when a Mallory or a Quen ordered it. She felt grief at losing Estelle. That had to be. But shame too… that she had not been there when it mattered. That Pell had set her in the dockside offices where she could use that reputation the Quens had; but now there was nothing at her back, nothing but the reputation she had not been there to pay for. A dead name. A dead ship. Maybe she detected pity from other merchanters. That would be bitterest of all.

One thing she had asked of him. He had cheated her of it without discussing it. Without seeing.

“The first child,” he murmured, turning his head on the pillow to look at her, “goes by Quen. You hear me, Elene? Pell has Konstantins enough. My father may sulk; but he’ll understand. My mother will. I think it’s important it be that way.”

She began to cry, as she had never cried in his presence, not without resisting it. She put her arms about him and stayed there, till morning.

Chapter Ten

Viking hung in view, agleam in the light of an angry star. Mining, industry regarding metals and minerals… that was its support. Segust Ayres watched, from the vantage of the freighter’s bridge, the image on the screens.

And something was wrong. The bridge whispered with alarm passed from station to station, frowns on faces and troubled looks. Ayres glanced at his three companions. They had caught it too, stood uneasily, all of them trying to keep out of the way of procedures that had officers darting from this station to that to supervise.

Another ship was coming in with them. Ayres knew enough to interpret that. It moved up until it was visual on the screens, and ships were not supposed to ride that close, not at this distance from station; it was big, many-vaned.

“It’s in our lane,” delegate Marsh said.

The ship moved closer still to them, and the merchanter captain rose from his place, walked across to them. “We have trouble,” he said. “We’re being escorted in. I don’t recognize the ship that’s riding us. It’s military. Frankly, I don’t think we’re in Company space any more.”

“Are you going to break and run?” Ayres asked.

“No. You may order it, but we’re not about to do it. You don’t understand the way of things. It’s wide space. Sometimes ships get surprises. Something’s happened here. We’ve wandered into it. I’m sending a steady no-fire. We’ll go in peaceably. And if we’re lucky, they’ll let us go again.”

“You think Union is here.”

“There’s only them and us, sir.”

“And our situation?”

“Very uncomfortable, sir. But those are the chances yon took. I won’t give odds you people won’t be detained. No, sir. Sorry.”

Marsh started to protest. Ayres put out a hand. “No. I’d suggest we go have a drink in the main room and simply wait it out. We’ll talk about it.”

Guns made Ayres nervous. Marched by rifle-carrying juveniles across a dock much the same as Pell’s, crowded into a lift with them, these too-same young revolutionaries, he felt a certain shortness of breath and worried for his companions, who were still under guard near the ship’s berth. All the soldiers he had seen in crossing the Viking dock were of the same stamp, green coveralls for a uniform, a sea of green on that dockside, overwhelming the few civilians visible. Guns everywhere. And emptiness, along the upward curve of the docks beyond, deserted distances. There were not enough people. Far from the number of residents who had been at Pell, in spite of the fact that there were freighters docked all about Viking Station. Trapped, he surmised; merchanters perhaps dealt with courteously enough — the soldiers who had boarded their own ship had been coldly courteous — but it was a good bet that ship was not going to be leaving.

Not the ship that had brought them in, not any of the others out there.

The lift stopped on some upper level. “Out,” the young captain said, and ordered him left down the hall with a wave of the rifle barrel. The officer was no more than eighteen at most. Crop-headed, male and female, they all looked the same age. They spilled out before and after him, more guards than a man of his age and physical condition warranted. The corridor leading to windowed offices ahead of them was lined with more such, rifles all fixed at a precise attitude. All eighteen or thereabouts, all with close-clipped hair, all -