Downbelow Station

And suddenly light blazed forth, a great burning disc spotted with dark, flaring with fires.

“Sun,” Old One intoned.

There was no brightness, no blue, only dark and stars and the terrible close fire. Satin trembled.

“There is dark,” Bluetooth objected. “How can there be night where Sun is?”

“All stars are kindred of great Sun,” said Old One. “This is a truth. The brightness is illusion. This is a truth. Great Sun shines in darkness and he is large, so large we are dust. He is terrible, and his fires frighten the dark. This is truth. Sky-sees-her, this is the true sky: this is your name. The stars are like great Sun, but far, far from us. This we have learned. See! The walls show us the Upabove itself, and the great ships, the outside of the docks. And there is Downbelow. We are looking on it now.”

“Where is the human camp?” Bigfellow asked. “Where is old river?”

“The world is round like an egg, and some of it faces away from Sun; this makes night on that side. Perhaps if you looked closely you might see old river; I have thought so. But never the human camp. It is too small on the face of Down-below.”

Bigfellow hugged himself and shivered.

But Satin walked among the tables, walked into the clear place, where great Sun shone in his truth, overcoming the dark… terrible he was, orange like fire, and filling all with his terror.

She thought of the dreaming human called Sun-her-friend, whose eyes were forever warmed with that sight, and the hair lifted on her nape.

And she stretched wide her arms and turned, embracing all the Sun, and his far kindred, lost in them, for she had come to the Place which she had journeyed to find. She filled her eyes with the sight, as Sun looked at her, and she could never be the same again, forever.

Chapter Four

Norway was not the first to come flashing into the vicinity of that dark, planet-sized piece of rock and ice, visible only as it occluded stars. Others had preceded her to this sunless rendezvous. Omicron was a wanderer, a bit of debris between stars, but its location was predictable and it provided mass enough to home in on out of jump… a place as nowhere as it was possible to be, a chance finding by Sung of Pacific long ago, used by the Fleet since then. It was one of those bits that the sublight freighters had dreaded, which jumpships with private business to conduct… cherished and kept secret

Sensors were picking up activity, multiple ship presence, transmissions out of this forever-night. Computer talked to computer as they came in; and Signy Mallory kept her eyes flickering from one to the other bit of telemetry, fighting the hypnotism that so easily set in from jump and the necessary drugs. She hurled Norway into realspace max, heading for those signals and out of the jump range with the sense of something on her tail, trusted her crew’s accuracy and aimed with the ship underway, the flickering few minutes of heart-in-throat transit near C, where all they had was approximation.

She cut it back quickly, started dumping velocity, no comfortable process, and the slightly speed-mad telemetry and slightly drug-mad human brain fought for precise location; overestimate that dump and she could take Norway right into that rock or into another ship.

“Clear, clear, all in now but Europe and Libya,” com reported.

No mean feat of navigation, to find Omicron so accurately, to come in within middle scan, right in the jump range, after a start from near Russell’s, far away. Fail their time, and they would have been in the jump range when something else came in, and that was disaster. “Good job,” she sent to all stations, looking at the reckoning Graff flashed to her center screen: “Two minutes off mark but dead on distance; can’t cut it much closer at our starting range. Good signals being received. Stand by.”

She took her pattern in relation to Omicron, checked through data; within the half hour there was a signal from Libya, which had just come in. Europe came in a quarter hour after that, from another plane.

That was the tale of them, then. They were in one place, at one time, which they had not been since their earliest operations. Unlikely as it was Union would come on them in strength here, they were still nervous.

Computer signal came in from Europe. They were given breathing space, to rest. Signy leaned back, took the com plug from her ear, unharnessed and got up finally while Graff moved to the post she had vacated. They were not at the disadvantage of some: Norway was one of the mainday ships… her main command staff on the schedule they were following now. Others, Atlantic, Africa, and Libya, were alter-day, so that strike hours were never remotely predictable, so that there were ships with their main crews available on either schedule. But they were all mainday now, a synchronization they had never undergone, and the alterday captains did the suffering, jump and reversed hours combined.

“Take over,” she bade Graff, wandered back through the aisle, touched a shoulder here and there, walked back to her own nook in the corridor… passed it by. She walked on back instead to crew quarters, looked in on them, alterday crew, most drugged senseless, to get their rest despite jump. A few, having an aversion to that procedure, were awake, sat in the crew mainroom looking better than they probably felt. “All stable.” she told them. “Everyone all right?”

They avowed so. They would drag out now, safe and peacefully. She left them to do that, took the lift down to the outershell and the troop quarters, walked the main corridor behind the suiting area, stopped in one barracks after another, where she interrupted knot after knot of men and women sitting and trading speculations on their prospects… guilty looks and startled ones, troopers springing to their feet in dismay to find themselves under her scrutiny, a frantic groping after bits of clothing, a hiding of this and that which might be disapproved; she did not, but the crew and troops had some quaint reticences. Some here too slept drugged, unconscious in their bunks; most did not… gambled, in many a compartment, while the ship shot her own dice with the Deep, while flesh and ship seemed to dissolve and the game continued on the other side of a far-stretched moment.

“Going to be a bit slow down here,” she would say in each case. “We’re in pattern and we’re all stable; at your ease down here, but keep yourselves within a minute’s prep for moving. No reason to think there’s a problem, but we take no chances.”

Di Janz intercepted her in the main corridor after the third such visit, nodded courtesy, walked with her through this private domain of his, seeming pleased in her presence among his command. Troops braced when Di walked with her, came to blank attention. Best, she thought, to pull the pretended inspection, just to let them know command had not forgotten them down here. What was coming was the kind of operation the troops dreaded, a multiple-ship strike, which raised the hazard of getting hit. And the troops had to ride it out blind, useless, jammed in the small safety the i