Company Wars 01 – Downbelow Station

nature. He lay still and stared at the metal ceiling, in the near dark, and

survived, which he had done so far, middle-aged and alone and utterly empty.

Chapter Four

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Pell: 5/3/52

The tension set in at the beginning of mainday, the first numb stirrings-forth

by the refugees to the emergency kitchens set up on the dock, the first

tentative efforts of those with papers and those without to meet with station

representatives at the desks and to establish rights of residency, the first

awakening to the realities of quarantine.

“We should have pulled out last shift,” Graff said, reviewing dawn’s messages,

“while it was all still quiet.”

“Would now,” Signy said, “but we can’t risk Pell. If they can’t hold it down, we

have to. Call station council and tell them I’m ready to meet with them now.

I’ll go to them. It’s safer than bringing them out on the docks.”

“Take a shuttle round the rim,” Graff suggested, his broad face set in habitual

worry. “Don’t risk your neck out there with less than a full squad. They’re less

controlled now. All it takes is something to set them off.”

The proposal had merits. She considered how that timidity would look to Pell,

shook her head. She went back to her quarters and put on what passed for dress

uniform, the proper dark blue at least. When she went it was with Di Janz and a

guard of six armored troopers, and they walked right across the dock to the

quarantine checkpoint, a door and passage beside the huge intersection seals. No

one tried to approach her, although there were some who looked as if they might

want to try it, hesitating at the armed troops. She made the door unhindered and

was passed through, up the ramp and to another guarded door, then down into the

main part of the station.

After that it was as simple as taking a lift through the varied levels and into

the administrative section, blue upper corridor. It was a sudden change of

worlds, from the barren steel of the docks and the stripped quarantine area,

into a hall tightly controlled by station security, into a glass-walled foyer

with sound-deadening matting underfoot, where bizarre wooden sculptures met them

with the aspect of a cluster of amazed citizenry. Art. Signy blinked and stared,

bemused at this reminder of luxuries and civilization. Forgotten things, rumored

things. Leisure to make and create what had no function but itself, as man had

done, but himself. She had lived her whole life insulated from such things, only

knowing at a distance that civilization existed, and that rich stations

maintained luxury at their secret hearts.

Only they were not human faces which stared out from curious squat globes, among

wooden spires, but faces round-eyed and strange: Downbelow faces, patient work

in wood. Humans would have used plastics or metal.

There were indeed more than humans here: that fact was evident in the neat

braided matting, in the bright painting which marched in alien geometries and

overlays about the walls, more of the spires, more of the wooden globes with the

faces and huge eyes all about them, faces repeated in the carved furniture and

even in the doors, staring out from a gnarled and tiny detail, as if all those

eyes were to remind humans that Downbelow was always with them.

It affected them all. Di swore softly before they walked up to the last doors

and officious civs let them in, walked with them into the council hall.

Human faces stared at them this time, in six tiers of chairs on a side, an oval

table in the pit between, their expressions and those of the alien carvings

remarkably alike in that first impression.

The white-haired man at the end of the table stood up, made a gesture offering

them the room into which they had already come. Angelo Konstantin. Others

remained seated.

And beside the table were six chairs which were not part of the permanent

arrangement; and six, male and female, who were not, by their style of dress,

part of the station council or even of the Beyond.

Company men. Signy might have dismissed the troops to the outer chamber in

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