Downbelow Station Read Online Free PDF

the captain’s presence in station offices at the earliest.”
    “No,” she sent back shortly. They were bringing Hansford’s dead out; there was some manner of religious service, assembly-line fashion, some amenity for the dead before venting them. Caught in Downbelow’s gravity well, they would drift in that direction, eventually. She wondered vaguely whether bodies burned in falling: likely, she thought. She had not much to do with worlds. She was not sure whether anyone had ever cared to find out.
    Lila’s folk were exiting in better order. They pushed and shoved at the first, but they stopped it when they saw the armed troops facing them. Konstantin intervened with useful service over the portable loudspeaker, talking to the terrified civs in stationers’ terms and throwing stationers’ logic in their faces, the threat of damage to fragile balances, the kind of drill and horror story they must have heard all their confined lives. Signy put herself on her feet again during the performance, still holding the coffee cup, watched with a calmer stomach as the procedures she had outlined began to function smoothly, those with papers to one area and those without to another, for photographing and ID by statement. The handsome lad from Legal Affairs proved to have other uses, a voice of ringing authority when it regarded disputed paper or confused station staff.
    “Griffin’s moving up on docking,” Graffs voice advised her. “Station advises us they’re wanting back five hundred units of confiscated housing based on Hansford’s casualties.”
    “Negative,” she said flatly. “My respects to station command, but out of the question. What’s the status on Griffin?”
    “Panicky. We’ve warned them.”
    “How many others are coming apart?”
    “It’s tense everywhere. Don’t trust it. They could bolt, any one of them.
    Maureen was one dead, coronary, another ill. I’m routing her in next.   Stationmaster asks whether you’ll be available for conference in an hour. I pick up that the Company boys are making demands to get into this area.” “Keep stalling.” She finished the coffee, walked along the lines in front of Griffin’s dock, the whole operation moving down a berth, for there was nothing left at Hansford’s berth worth guarding. There was quiet from the processed refugees. They had the matter of locating their lodgings to occupy them, and the station’s secure environment to comfort them. A suited crew stood by to move Hansford out; they had only four berths at this dock. Signy measured with her eye the space the station had allotted them, five levels of two sections and the two docks. Crowded, but they would manage for a while. Barracks could solve some of it… temporarily. Things would get tighter. No luxuries, that was certain.   They were not the only refugees adrift; they were simply the first. And upon that knowledge she kept her mouth shut.
    It was Dinah that broke the peace; a man caught with weapons in scan, a friend who turned ugly on his arrest: two dead, then, and sobbing, hysterical passengers afterward. Signy watched it, simply tired, shook her head and ordered the bodies vented with the rest, while Konstantin approached her with angry arguments. “Martial law,” she said, ending all discussion, and walk away.   Sita, Pearl, Little Bear, Winifred. They came in with agonizing slowness, unloaded refugees and property, and the processing inches its way along.   Signy left the dock then, went back aboard Norway and took a bath. She scrubbed three times all over before she began to feel that the smell and the sights had left her.
    Station had entered alterday; complaints and demands had fallen silent at least for a few hours.
    Or if there were any, Norway’s alterday command fended them off her.   There was comfort for the night, company of sorts, a leave-taking. He was another item of salvage from Russell’s and Mariner… not for transport on the other ships. They would