“Dead,” Ernst said. “Your father… riot on the station.”
“My mother and brother?”
“No word. No word on any other casualties. Military’s sending. Mazian’s Fleet.
Wants contact with us. Do I answer?”
Shaken, he drew in a breath, aware of silence in the nearest crowd, of people
staring up at him, of a handful of old Q residents on the truck itself looking
at him with eyes as solemn as the hisa images.
Someone else scrambled up onto the truckbed and waded through, flung an arm
about him. Miliko. He was grateful… shivered slightly with exhaustion and
delayed shock. He had anticipated it. It was only confirmation.
“No,” he said. “Don’t answer.” A murmur started in the crowd; he turned on it.
“No word on any other casualties,” he shouted, drowning that in a hurry. “Ernst,
tell them what you picked up.”
Ernst stood up, told them. He hugged Miliko against him. Miliko’s parents and
sister were up there, cousins, uncles and aunts. The Dees might survive or,
equally, they might die unnoted by the dispatches: there was more hope for the
Dees. They were not targets like the Konstantins.
The Fleet had seized control, imposed martial law, Q—Ernst hesitated and
doggedly continued, before all the uplifted faces below—Q had rioted and gotten
across the line, with widespread destruction and loss of life, stationers and Q
both.
One of the old Q residents was crying. Perhaps, Emilio acknowledged painfully,
perhaps they too had people for whom to worry.
He looked down on row after row of solemn faces, his own staff, workers, Q, a
scattering of hisa. No one moved now. No one said anything. There was only the
wind in the leaves overhead and the rush of the river beyond the trees.
“So they’re going to be here,” he said, trying to keep his voice steady,
“they’re going to be back here wanting us to grow crops for them and work the
mills and the wells; and Company and Union are going to fight back and forth,
but it’s not Pell anymore, not in their hands, when what we grow can be taken to
fill their holds. When our own Fleet comes down here and works us under guns…
what when Union comes after them? What when they want more work, and more, and
there’s no more say any of us has in what happens to Downbelow? Go back if you
like; work for Porey until Union gets here. But I’m going on.”
“Where, sir?” That was the boy—he had forgotten the name—the one Hale had
bullied the day of the mutiny. His mother was by him, in the circle of his arm.
It was not defiance, but a plain question.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Wherever the hisa can show us that’s safe, if
there is any such place. To live there. To dig in and live. Grow our crops for
ourselves.”
A murmur ran among them. Fear… was always at the back of things for those who
did not know Downbelow, fear of the land, of places where man was a minority.
Men who were unconcerned by hisa on-station grew afraid of them in the open
land, where men were dependent and hisa were not. A lost breather, a failure…
they died of such things on Downbelow. The cemetery back at main base had grown
as the camp did.
“No hisa,” he said again, “ever harmed a human. And that despite things we’ve
done, despite that we’re the aliens here.” He climbed down from the truck, hit
the yielding ruts of the road, lifted his hands for Miliko, knowing she at least
was with him. She jumped down, and questioned nothing. “We can set you up in the
camp back there,” he said. “Do that much for you at least, those of you that
want to take your chances with Porey. Get the compressors running for you.”
“Mr. Konstantin.”
He looked up. It was one of the oldest women, from the truckbed.
“Mr. Konstantin, I’m too old to work like that back there. I don’t want to stay
behind.”
“Lot of us going on,” a male voice said.
“Anyone going back?” one of the Q foremen asked. “We need to send one of the