discover the systematic pilferage of stores and equipment, while his staff stood
by watching it happen. Lights went on under the transparent domes… workers came
out, more and more of them, standing in shock.
A siren sounded. He looked skyward, saw only the last few stars as yet, but com
had wind of something. And a presence disturbed the rocks near him, and a slim
arm slipped around his waist. He hugged Miliko against him, cherishing the
contact.
There was a call from across the slope; arms lifted, pointed up. The light of
the descending ship was visible in the paling sky… sooner than they had wanted.
“Minx!” He called one of the hisa to him, and she came, a female with the white
blaze of an old burn on her arm; came burdened as she was and panting. “Hide
now,” he told her, and she ran back to the line, chattering to her fellows as
she went.
“Where are they going?” Miliko asked. “Did they say?”
They know,“ he said. ”Only they know.“ He hugged her the tighter against the
wind. ”And their coming back again—that depends on who does the asking.“
“If they take us away…”
“We do what we can. But there’ll be no outsiders giving them orders.”
The light of the ship brightened, intense. Not one of their shuttles, but
something bigger and more ominous.
Military, Emilio reckoned; a carrier’s landing probe.
“Mr. Konstantin.” One of the workers came running up, stopped with a bewildered
spreading of his hands. “Is it true? Is it true that Mazian’s up there?”
“We were sent word that’s what it is. We don’t know what’s going on up there;
indications are things are quiet. Keep it calm; pass the word… we keep our wits
about us, ride events as they come. No one says anything about the missing
supplies; no one mentions them, you understand? But we aren’t going to have the
Fleet strip us down here and then go off to leave the station to starve; that’s
what’s going on. You pass that word too. And you take your orders only from me
and from Miliko, hear?”
“Sir,” the man breathed, and at his dismissal, ran off to carry the news.
“Better put it to Q,” Miliko said.
He nodded, started that way, from the hillside on which they stood. Over the
hill a glow flared up, field lights on to guide the landing. He and Miliko
walked the path over to Q, found Wei there. “Fleet’s up there,” Emilio said. And
at the quick, panicked murmur: “We’re trying to keep food for station and
ourselves; trying to stop a Fleet takeover down here. You saw nothing. You heard
nothing. You’re deaf and blind, and you don’t have responsibility for anything;
I do.”
There was murmuring, from the resident workers, from Q. He turned, he and
Miliko, headed by the path from there to the landing site; a crowd of his own
staff and resident workers formed about him… Q folk too; no one stopped them.
They had no guards anymore, not here, not at the other camps; Q worked by posted
schedules like other workers. It was not without its arguments, its
difficulties; but they were less a threat than what descended on them all, which
would make its demand for provisions for troop-laden carriers, and possibly
demands for live bodies.
The ship came down in thunder, settled into the landing area and overfilled it,
and on the hillside they stopped their ears in its sound and turned their faces
from its reeking wind until the engines had shut down. It rested there in the
breaking day, foreign and ungainly, and bristling with war. The hatch opened,
lowered a jaw to the ground, and armored troops walked down onto the soil of the
world as they on their hillside stood still in a line of their own, armorless
and weaponless. The troops braced, aimed rifles. An officer came down the ramp
into the light, a dark-skinned man with a breathing mask only, no helmet.
“That’s Porey,” Miliko whispered. “That has to be Porey himself.”
He felt the burden on himself to go down and answer the posed threat, let go