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 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.