Downbelow Station Read Online Free PDF Page A

anything… or if they do. I’ve got a com link with central.”
    There was a crash. Hansford made a bad dock, grated down the guidance cone and shuddered into place.
    “Get her hooked up and get out!” Di roared at the dock crews: no com for him.   Graff was ordering matters from Norway’s command. Hansford’s crew would stay sealed on their bridge, working debarcation by remote. “Tell them walk out,” she heard relayed from Graff. “Any rush at troops will be met with fire.” The hookups were complete. The ramp went into place.   “Move!” Di bellowed. Dockers pelted behind the lines of troops; rifles were levelled. The hatch opened, a crash up the access tube.   A stench rolled out onto the chill of the dock. Inner hatches opened and a living wave surged out, trampling each other, falling. They screamed and shouted and rushed out like madmen, staggered as a burst of fire went over their heads.   “Hold it!” Di shouted. “Sit down where you are and put your hands on your heads.”
    Some were sitting down already, out of weakness; others sank down and complied.
    A few seemed too dazed to understand, but came no farther. The wave had stopped.   At Signy’s elbow Damon Konstantin breathed a curse and shook his head. No word of laws from him; sweat stood visibly on his akin. His station stared riot in the face… collapse of systems, Hansford’s death ten thousandfold. There were a hundred, maybe a hundred fifty living, crouched on the dock by the umbilical gantry. The ship’s stench spread. A pump labored, flushing air through Hansford’s systems under pressure. There were a thousand on that ship.   “We’re going to have to go in there,” Signy muttered, sick at the prospect. Di was moving the others one at a time, passing them under guns into a curtained area where they were to be stripped, searched, scrubbed, passed on to the desks or to the medics. Baggage there was none, not with this group, nor papers worth anything.
    “Need a security team suited up for a contamination area,” she told young Konstantin. “And stretchers. Get us a disposal area prepared. We’re going to vent the dead; it’s all we can do. Have them ID’ed as best you can, fingerprints, photos, whatever. Every corpse passed out of here unidentified is future trouble for your security.”
    Konstantin looked ill. That was well enough. So did some of her troops. She tried to ignore her own stomach.
    A few more survivors had made their way to the opening of the access, very weak, almost unable to get down the ramp. A handful, a scant handful.   Lila was coming in, her approach begun in her crew’s panic, defying instructions and riders’ threats. She heard Graffs voice reporting it, activated her own mike. “Stall them off. Clip a vane off them if you have to. We’ve got our hands full. Get me a suit out here.”
    They found seventy-eight more living, lying among the decomposing dead. The rest was cleanup, and no more threat. Signy passed decontamination, stripped off the suit, sat down on the bare dock and fought a heaving stomach. A civ aid worker chose a bad time to offer her a sandwich. She pushed it away, took the local herbal coffee and caught her breath in the last of the processing of Hansford’s living. The place stank now of antispetic fogging.
    A carpet of bodies in the corridors, blood, dead. Hansford’s emergency seals had gone into place during a fire. Some of the dead had been cut in two. Some of the living had broken bones from being trampled in the panic. Urine. Vomit. Blood.   Decay. They had had closed systems, had not had to breathe it. The Hansford survivors had had nothing at the last but the emergency oxygen, and that had possibly been a cause of murder. Most of the living had been sealed into areas where the air had held out less fouled than the badly ventilated storage holds where most of the refugees had been crammed.
    “Message from the stationmaster,” com said into her ear, “requesting