in comfort You’re going to take our ships.”
“Mr. Kressich—”
“Work has been progressing,” said Jon Lukas. “Some of you may have clear papers.
I wouldn’t jeopardize them, sir.”
There was sudden silence from Kressich, an uncertain look, his face an
unwholesome color. His lips trembled and the tremor spread to his chin, his
hands locked upon each other.
Amazing, Angelo thought sourly, how easily it comes down to small concerns; and
how accurately he does it.
Congratulations, Jon.
Easy to deal with the refugees of Q. Offer all their leaders clear paper and
reason with them. Some had, in fact, proposed that.
“They’ve got blue three,” Damon muttered. Angelo followed his gaze to the
monitors, on which the flow of armored troops and their stationing along the
corridors had become a rapid, mechanical process.
“Mazian,” said Jon. “Mazian himself.”
Angelo stared at the silver-haired man in the lead, mentally counting off the
moments it would take that tide of soldiery to flow up the spiraling emergency
ramps to their level, to the doors of the council itself.
That long, he still held the station.
iv
Sector blue one; number 0475
The images changed. Lily fretted, sprang up and walked back and forth, a step
toward the buttons on the box, a step toward the dreamer, whose eyes were
troubled.
Finally she dared reach for the box, to change the dream.
“No,” the dreamer told her sharply, and she looked back and saw the pain… the
dark, lovely eyes in the pale face, the white, white sheets, all about her
light, save the eyes, which gazed on the sights in the halls. Lily came back to
her, interposed her body between dream and dreamer, smoothed the pillow.
“I turn you,” she offered.
“No.”
She stroked the brow, touched so, so gently. “Dal-tes-elan, love you, love you.”
They are troops,“ Sun-her-friend said, in that voice so still and calm that it
shed peace on others. ”Men-with-guns, Lily. It’s trouble. I don’t know what may
happen.“
“Dream them gone,” Lily pleaded.
“I have no power to do that, Lily. But see, there is no using the guns. No one
is hurt.”
Lily shivered, and stayed close. From time to time on the ever-changing walls
the face of Sun appeared, reassuring them, and stars danced, and the face of the
world shone for them like the crescent moon. And the line of men-in-shells grew,
filling all the ways of the station.
v
There was no resistance. Signy had not drawn her gun, although her hand was on
it. Neither had Mazian or Kreshov or Keu. Threat was for the troops, leveled
rifles with the safeties off. They had fired one warning burst on the docks,
nothing since. They moved quickly, giving no time for thought in those who met
them now, no hint that there was argument possible. And there were few who
lingered to meet them at all in these sections. Angelo Konstantin had given
orders, Signy reckoned—the only sensible course.
They changed levels, up a ramp at the end of the main hall. Boots rang in
complete vacancy; the sharp report of troops in their wake filing off to station
themselves at the appointed line-of-sight intervals sent up other echoes. They
passed from the emergency ramp to the area of station control; troops moved in
there too, under officers, lowered rifles, while other detachments headed down
the side halls to invade other offices: no shooting, not here. They kept moving
down the center corridors, passed from cold steel and plastics to the
sound-deadening matting, entered the hall of the bizarre wooden sculptures,
whose eyes looked no less shocked now than before.
And the human faces, the small group gathered in the anteroom of the council
chambers, were as round-eyed.
Troopers swept through, pushed at the ornate doors to open them. The leaved
doors swung to either side and two troopers braced like statues facing inward,
rifles leveled. The councillors inside, in a chamber far from filled, rose and
faced the guns as Signy and Mazian and the others walked through. There was
dignity in their posture, if not defiance.
“Captain Mazian,” said Angelo Konstantin, “can I offer you to sit and talk this