Downbelow Station

There was deathly silence. No one moved.

“I’ll trust you’ll pass the news to the incoming watch before I get the chance to do it in person. My apologies, my personal apologies, for what is apparently construed by others as unfairness to the people under my command. Dismissed.”

Still no one moved. She turned on her heel, walked away toward the lift, for the main level and her own quarters.

“Vent ’em,” a voice muttered audibly in her wake. She stopped dead, with her back to them.

“Norway!” someone shouted; and another; “Signy!” In a moment the whole ship echoed.

She started walking again for the open lift, drew a deep breath of satisfaction for all the casual swing to her step. Vent him indeed, if even Conrad Mazian thought he could put his hand to Norway. She had started with the troops; Di Janz would have something to say to them too. What threatened Norway’s morale threatened lives, threatened the reflexes they had built up over years.

And her pride. That too. Her face was still burning as she strode into the lift and pushed the button. The shouts echoing in the corridors were salve for her pride, which was, she admitted to herself, as vast as Mazian’s. Follow orders indeed; but she had calculated the effect on the troops and on her crew; and no one gave her orders regarding what happened within Norway itself. Not even Mazian.

Chapter Two

i

The downer was with him again, a small brown shadow, not altogether unusual in the traffic in nine. Josh paused in the riot-scarred corridor, put his foot on a molding, pretended to adjust the top of his boot. The Downer touched his arm, wrinkled its nose in bending and peering up at his face. “Konstantin-man all right?”

“All right,” he said. It was the one called Bluetooth, who was on their heels almost daily, managing to carry messages to and from Damon’s mother. “We’ve got a good place to hide now. No more trouble. Damon’s safe and the man’s making no more trouble.”

The furred powerful hand sought his, forced an object into it. “You take Konstantin-man? She give, say need.”

The Downer slipped away in the traffic as quickly as he had come. Josh straightened, resisting the temptation to look about or to look at the metal object until he was some distance down the corridor. It turned out to be a brooch, metal that might be real gold. He pocketed it for the treasure it was to them, something salable on the market, something that needed no card, that would bribe someone unbribable by other means… like the owner of their current lodgings. Gold had uses other than jewelry: rare metals were worth lives — the going rate. And the day was coming when it would take greater and greater persuasion to keep Damon hidden. A woman of vast good sense, Damon’s mother. She had ears and eyes, in every Downer who flitted harmlessly through the corridors, and she knew their desperation — offered still a refuge that Damon would not take, because he above all did not want the Downer system subject to search.

The net was closing on them. The area of usable corridors grew less and less. A new system was being installed, new cards, and the sections the troops cleared stayed cleared. Those within a section when the troops sealed it were rounded up, checked against the wanted lists, and given new id’s… most of them. Some vanished, period. And the new card system hit the market harder and harder, the nearer it got. The value of cards and papers plummeted, for they would be valid only until the changeover was complete, and people were already getting shy of the old ones. Now and again an alarm went off, silent, somewhere in comp; and troops would come to some establishment and start trace procedure on someone they wanted… as if most of the people in unsecure sections were using their own cards. But the troops asked questions and checked id’s when they were roused — kept the areas open to their raids, kept the populace terrorized and suspicious each of the other, and that served Mazian’s purpose.

It also gave them a livelihood. It was their stock-in-trade, his and Damon’s, the purification of cards. It was their value within the system of the black market. A buyer wanted to check the worth of a stolen card, a new purchaser wanted to be sure that a card would not ring alarms in comp, someone wanted the bank code number to get at assets… the bars and sleepovers in the docks did not match up faces and id’s, not at all. And Damon had the access numbers to do it. He had learned them too, so that they worked a partnership and neither of them had to venture into the corridors on too regular a basis. They had it down to a science… using the Downer tu

But there were omens of more rapid change. It was his imagination, perhaps, but the corridors on all levels of green seemed more crowded today. It might well be so. All those who dared not submit to id and re-carding had crowded persistently into smaller and smaller spaces… green and white remained open sectors, but he personally had gotten nervous about white, not wanting to go into it longer than he must… had heard no rumors himself, but there was something in the air, something that reckoned another area was about to go under seal… and white was likeliest.

Green was the section with the big concourses, and the fewest troublesome bottlenecks where determined resistance could fight from room to room and hall to hall — if it came to fighting. He rather imagined another end for them, that when all the problems Mazian had on Pell were neatly herded into one last section, they would simply blow it, vent the section with doors wide open, and they would die without appeal and without a chance.

A few crazed souls had gotten pressure suits, the hottest item on the black market, and hovered near them, armed and wild-eyed, hoping to survive against all logic. Most of them simply expected to die. There was a desperate atmosphere in all of green, while those who had finally reconciled themselves to capture voluntarily moved into white. Green and white grew stranger and stranger, with walls graffiti’d with bizarre slogans, some obscene, some religious, some pathetic. We lived here, one said. That was all.

All but a very few lights in the corridors had been broken out, so that everything was twilight, and station no longer dimmed lights for mainday/alterday shifts; it would have become dangerously dark. There were some side corridors where all the lights were out, and no one went into those lairs unless he belonged there — or was dragged screaming into them. There were gangs, who fought each other for power. The weaker souls clung to them, paid them all their resources, not to be harmed, and perhaps to have the chance to harm others. Some of the gangs had started in Q. Some were Pell gangs which formed in defense and undertook other business ventures. He feared them indiscriminately, feared their unreasoning violence most of all. He had let his beard grow, let his hair grow, walked with a slouch and acquired as much dirt as possible, changed his face subtly with cosmetic… that commodity sold high on the market too. If there was any comedy in this grim place it was that most of these folk hereabouts were doing exactly the same thing, that the section was full of men and women who desperately did not want to be recognized, and who avoided each others’ eyes in a perpetual flinching as they walked the halls… some who swaggered and tried to threaten, unless troops were at hand… more who flitted like downcast ghosts, scurrying along in evident hope no one would set a hue and cry after them.