stayed cleared. Those within a section when the troops sealed it were rounded
up, checked against the wanted lists, and given new id’s… most of them. Some
vanished, period. And the new card system hit the market harder and harder, the
nearer it got. The value of cards and papers plummeted, for they would be valid
only until the changeover was complete, and people were already getting shy of
the old ones. Now and again an alarm went off, silent, somewhere in comp; and
troops would come to some establishment and start trace procedure on someone
they wanted… as if most of the people in unsecure sections were using their own
cards. But the troops asked questions and checked id’s when they were
roused—kept the areas open to their raids, kept the populace terrorized and
suspicious each of the other, and that served Mazian’s purpose.
It also gave them a livelihood. It was their stock-in-trade, his and Damon’s,
the purification of cards. It was their value within the system of the black
market. A buyer wanted to check the worth of a stolen card, a new purchaser
wanted to be sure that a card would not ring alarms in comp, someone wanted the
bank code number to get at assets… the bars and sleepovers in the docks did not
match up faces and id’s, not at all. And Damon had the access numbers to do it.
He had learned them too, so that they worked a partnership and neither of them
had to venture into the corridors on too regular a basis. They had it down to a
science… using the Downer tunnels and even crossing through the section
barriers—Bluetooth had shown them how—so that no single comp terminal would have
a series of inquiries. They had never triggered an alarm, even though some of
the cards had been dangerously hot. They were good; they had a trade—ironically
of Mazian’s creation—which fed and housed and hid them with all the protections
the market could offer its valuable operators. He had at the moment a pocketful
of cards, each of which he knew by value according to the level of clearance and
how much was in the credit account. Nothing in the latter, in most instances.
Families of missing persons had gotten wise very quickly, and station comp had
taken to honoring family requests that an account be frozen from access by a
particular number… so rumor ran, and it was probably true. Most cards now were
trouble. He had a few usable ones in the lot and a collection of code numbers.
Cards which had belonged to single persons or independent accounts were the only
ones still good.
But there were omens of more rapid change. It was his imagination, perhaps, but
the corridors on all levels of green seemed more crowded today. It might well be
so. All those who dared not submit to id and re-carding had crowded persistently
into smaller and smaller spaces… green and white remained open sectors, but he
personally had gotten nervous about white, not wanting to go into it longer than
he must… had heard no rumors himself, but there was something in the air,
something that reckoned another area was about to go under seal… and white was
likeliest.
Green was the section with the big concourses, and the fewest troublesome
bottlenecks where determined resistance could fight from room to room and hall
to hall—if it came to fighting. He rather imagined another end for them, that
when all the problems Mazian had on Pell were neatly herded into one last
section, they would simply blow it, vent the section with doors wide open, and
they would die without appeal and without a chance.
A few crazed souls had gotten pressure suits, the hottest item on the black
market, and hovered near them, armed and wild-eyed, hoping to survive against
all logic. Most of them simply expected to die. There was a desperate atmosphere
in all of green, while those who had finally reconciled themselves to capture
voluntarily moved into white. Green and white grew stranger and stranger, with
walls graffiti’d with bizarre slogans, some obscene, some religious, some
pathetic. We lived here, one said. That was all.