Downbelow Station

“Mallory,” she heard whispered from point to point of the room. “That’s Mallory.” In that tone, which was not love… nor was it disrespect.

“Show me about,” she said to Damon Konstantin.

He walked about the control center with her, quietly named the posts, the perso

“We’ve got several auxiliary sites,” he said, “trying to absorb and feed what you left us.”

“Q?” She saw the monitor on that section too, seething human mass battering at a sealed door. Smoke. Debris. “What do you do with them?”

“You didn’t give us that answer,” he replied. Few took that tone with her. It amused her.

She listened, looked about her at the grand complex, bank upon bank, boards with functions alien to those of a starship. This was commerce and the maintenance of a centuries-old orbit, cataloging of goods and manufacture, of internal and onworld populations, native and human… a colony, busy with mundane life. She surveyed it with a slow intake of breath, a sense of ownership. This was what they had fought to keep alive.

Com central came through suddenly, an a

Their world.

It only remained to put it in order.

Chapter Four

Morning was near, a red line on the horizon. Emilio stood in the open, breath paced evenly through the mask, wearing a heavy jacket against the perpetual chill of nights at this latitude and elevation. The lines moved in the dark, quietly, bowed figures hastening with loads like insects saving eggs from flood, outward, out of all the storage domes.

The human workers still slept, those in Q and those of the residents’ domes. Only a few staff helped in this. His eyes could spot them here and there about the landscape of low domes and hills, tall shadows among the others.

A small, panting figure scurried up to him, gasped a naked breath. “Yes? Yes, you send, Konstantin-man?”

“Bounder?”

“I Bounder.” The voice hissed around a grin. “Good ru

He touched a wiry, furred shoulder, felt a spidery arm twine with his. He took a folder paper from his pocket, gave it into the hisa’s callused hand. “Run, then,” he said. “Carry this to all human camps, let their eyes see, you understand? And tell all the hisa. Tell them all, from the river to the plain; tell them all send their ru

“Lukases come,” the hisa said. “Yes. Understand, Konstantin-man. I Bounder. I am wind. No one catches.”

“Go,” he said. “Run, Bounder.”

Hard arms hugged him, with that frightening easy strength of the hisa. The shadow left him into the dark, flitted, ran …

Word sped. It could not be recalled, not so easily.

He stood still, watched the other human figures on the hillside. He had given his staff orders and refused to confide in them, wishing to spare them responsibility. The storage domes were mostly empty now, all the supplies they had contained taken deep into the bush. Word sped along the river, by ways which had nothing to do with modern communications, nothing which listeners could monitor, word which sped with a hisa’s speed and would not be stopped at any order from the station or those who held it. Camp to camp, human and hisa, wherever hisa were in touch one with the other.

A thought struck him… that perhaps never before Man had the hisa had reason to talk to others of their kind in this way; that never to their knowledge was there war, never unity among the scattered tribes, but somehow knowledge of Man had gotten from one place to the other. And now humans sent a message through that strange network. He imagined it passing on riverbanks and in the brush, by chance meetings and by purpose, with whatever purpose moved the gentle, bewildered hisa.

And over all the area of contact, hisa would steal, who had no concept of theft; and leave their work, who had no concept of wages or of rebellion.

He felt cold, wrapped as he was in layers of clothing, well insulated against the chill breeze. He could not, like Bounder, run away. Being Konstantin and human, he stood waiting, while advancing dawn picked out the lines of burdened workers, while humans from the other domes began to stir out of sleep to discover the systematic pilferage of stores and equipment, while his staff stood by watching it happen. Lights went on under the transparent domes… workers came out, more and more of them, standing in shock.

A siren sounded. He looked skyward, saw only the last few stars as yet, but com had wind of something. And a presence disturbed the rocks near him, and a slim arm slipped around his waist. He hugged Miliko against him, cherishing the contact.

There was a call from across the slope; arms lifted, pointed up. The light of the descending ship was visible in the paling sky… sooner than they had wanted.

“Minx!” He called one of the hisa to him, and she came, a female with the white blaze of an old burn on her arm; came burdened as she was and panting. “Hide now,” he told her, and she ran back to the line, chattering to her fellows as she went.

“Where are they going?” Miliko asked. “Did they say?”

They know,“ he said. ”Only they know.“ He hugged her the tighter against the wind. ”And their coming back again — that depends on who does the asking.“

“If they take us away…”

“We do what we can. But there’ll be no outsiders giving them orders.”

The light of the ship brightened, intense. Not one of their shuttles, but something bigger and more ominous.

Military, Emilio reckoned; a carrier’s landing probe.

“Mr. Konstantin.” One of the workers came ru

“We were sent word that’s what it is. We don’t know what’s going on up there; indications are things are quiet. Keep it calm; pass the word… we keep our wits about us, ride events as they come. No one says anything about the missing supplies; no one mentions them, you understand? But we aren’t going to have the Fleet strip us down here and then go off to leave the station to starve; that’s what’s going on. You pass that word too. And you take your orders only from me and from Miliko, hear?”

“Sir,” the man breathed, and at his dismissal, ran off to carry the news.

“Better put it to Q,” Miliko said.

He nodded, started that way, from the hillside on which they stood. Over the hill a glow flared up, field lights on to guide the landing. He and Miliko walked the path over to Q, found Wei there. “Fleet’s up there,” Emilio said. And at the quick, panicked murmur: “We’re trying to keep food for station and ourselves; trying to stop a Fleet takeover down here. You saw nothing. You heard nothing. You’re deaf and blind, and you don’t have responsibility for anything; I do.”

There was murmuring, from the resident workers, from Q. He turned, he and Miliko, headed by the path from there to the landing site; a crowd of his own staff and resident workers formed about him… Q folk too; no one stopped them. They had no guards anymore, not here, not at the other camps; Q worked by posted schedules like other workers. It was not without its arguments, its difficulties; but they were less a threat than what descended on them all, which would make its demand for provisions for troop-laden carriers, and possibly demands for live bodies.

2

Seasonal variation in daylit hours and difference in rotational period from station (Earth) standard results in daily progressing time difference: station and world pass only rarely into relative synch.