straight.
“When Josh said that he had contacts,” Jessad said slowly, “I didn’t suspect
who. You’re far better than I dared hope.”
“Am I?” He resisted the temptation to look again in Josh’s direction. “What
precisely do you hope, Mr. Jessad from Q?”
“Josh didn’t tell you?”
“Josh said I’d want to talk to you.”
“About finding a way to get this station back into your hands?”
He did not change expression in the least. “You think you have the means to do
that.”
“I have men,” Kressich interjected. “Coledy does. We can raise a thousand men in
five minutes.”
“You know what would happen then,” Damon said. “We’d have ourselves neck deep in
troopers. Bodies in the corridors, if they didn’t vent us all.”
“You know,” Jessad said quietly, “that the whole station is theirs. To do with
as they please. Except for you, there’s no authority to speak for the old Pell.
Lukas… is done. He says only what Mazian hands him to read. Has guards about him
everywhere. One choice is bodies in the corridors, true. The other is what
they’ve given Lukas, isn’t it? They’d give you prepared speeches to read too.
They’d let you alternate with Lukas, or outright dispose of you. After all, they
do have Lukas, and he takes orders… doesn’t he?”
“You put it neatly, Mr. Jessad.” And what about the shuttle? he thought, leaning
back in his chair. He looked at Josh, who met his eyes with a troubled stare. He
glanced back again. “What’s your proposal?”
“You get us access to central. We take care of the rest”
“It’ll never work,” Damon said. “We’ve got warships out there. You can’t hold
them off by holding central. They’d blow us; don’t you count on that?”
“I have means to make sure it works.”
“So let’s have it. Make your proposal, flat, and let me have the night to think
about it.”
“Let you walk around knowing names and faces?”
“You know mine,” he reminded Jessad, and obtained a slight flicker of the eyes.
“Trust him,” Josh said. “It will work.”
Something crashed outside, even over the music. The curtains came inward, with
Coledy, who landed atop the table with a hole burned in his forehead. Kressich
sprang up shrieking in terror. Damon hurled himself back, hit the wall with Josh
beside him, and Jessad clawed for a pocket. Shrieks punctuated the music
outside, and armored troops with leveled rifles filled the doorway of the
alcove.
“Stand still!” one ordered.
Jessad whipped out the gun. A rifle fired, and there was a burned smell as
Jessad hit the floor, twitching. Damon stared at the troopers and the leveled
rifles in dazed horror. Josh, at his side, did not move.
A trooper hauled another man in by the collar—Ngo, who flinched from Damon’s
stare and looked apt to be sick.
“These the ones?” the trooper asked.
Ngo nodded. “Made me hide them out. Threatened me. Threatened my family. We want
to go over to white. All of us.”
“Who’s this one?” The trooper nodded toward Kressich.
“Don’t know,” Ngo said. “Don’t know him. Don’t know these others.”
“Take them out,” the officer said. “Search them. Dead ones too.”
It was over. A hundred thoughts poured through Damon’s mind… going for the gun
in his pocket—running for it, as far as he could get before they shot him down.
And Josh… and his mother and his brother…
They laid hands on him, turned him against the wall and made him spread his
limbs, him and Josh beside him, and Kressich. They searched his pockets and took
the cards and the gun, which in itself was cause for a shooting on the spot
They turned him about again, back to the wall, and looked at him more carefully.
“You’re Konstantin?”
He gave no answer. One hit him in the belly and doubled him, and he flung
himself at the man shoulder-on and low, carried him and a chair over under the
table. A boot slammed into his back and he was trampled in a fight which broke
above him. He tore free of the man he had stunned, tried to claw his way to his
feet by the table rim, and a shot burned past his shoulder, hit Kressich in the