“This is Porey. Over.”
“Pass orders: destroy Downbelow base and execute all workers.”
“Yes, sir,” Porey said. Anger vibrated through his tone. “Done.”
Mallory, Mazian thought, a word which had become a curse, an obscenity.
Orders were not yet disseminated, plans not firm. They had to assume the worst
now and act on it. Disrupt the station’s controls. Get the troops off and run
for it… they had to have them. Ruin anything useful.
Sun. Earth. It had to be now.
And Mallory… if once they could get their hands on her…
viii
Pell central; 2400 hrs. md; 1200 a.
Jon Lukas turned from devastation on the screens to chaos on the boards, techs
scrambling frantically to relay calls to damage control and security.
“Sir,” one asked him, “sir, there’re troops trapped in blue, a sealed
compartment. They want to know when we can get to them. They want to know how
long.”
He froze. He had stopped having answers. The instructions did not come. There
were only the guards, who were always about him, Hale and his comrades who were
always with him, day and night, his personal and unshakable nightmare.
They had their rifles on the techs now. He turned, looked at Hale to appeal to
him to use the helmet com to contact the Fleet, to ask information, whether it
was attack or malfunction, or what had sent a Fleet carrier ripping over their
heads and three others on its tail. Of a sudden Hale and his men stopped, all at
the same time, listening to something only they could hear. And all at once they
turned, leveled rifles.
“No!” Jon screamed.
They fired.
ix
Downbelow main base; 2400 hrs. md.; 1200 a.; local night
There was little chance for sleep. They took it when they could, man and hisa,
crouched the one in Q dome and the other in the mud outside, sleeping as best
they might, shift by shift in their clothes, in the same mud-caked, stinking
blankets, what sleep they were allowed. The mills never stopped; and the work
went on day and night.
The flimsy doors of the lock slammed, one after the other, and Emilio lay stiff
and still, apprehension confirmed—a sound had wakened him. It was not time to
wake, surely it was not time. It seemed only minutes ago that he had lain down
to sleep. He heard the patter of rain overhead; heard a number of boots
crunching the gravel outside. There was no shuttle down; they roused both shifts
of them out only for loading.
“Up and out,” a trooper shouted.
He moved. He heard moans about him, the other men wakened, winced in the strong
light which swept over them. He rolled out of the cot, grimaced with the pain of
strained muscles and blistered feet onto which he pulled water-stiffened boots.
Fear worked in him, small things wrong, different from other nighttime rousings.
He fastened his clothing, put on his jacket, groped at his throat for the
breather mask which always hung there. Light hit his face again, drew groans of
misery from others. He walked for the door among others who were going; outside,
through the second door, up the wooden steps to the path. More lights in his
face. He flung his arm up to shield his eyes.
“Konstantin. Round up the Downers.”
He tried to see past the lights, eyes watering… on a second try made out shadows
beyond, others of their number brought up from the mills. Shuttle had to be
coming down. It must be. No need to panic.
“Get the Downers.”
“All of you out,” someone inside shouted; the doors opened then straight
through, deflating the dome crest as all others were herded out at gunpoint
A hand found his, childlike. He looked down. It was Bounder. The Downers were
up. All the other hisa had gathered, bewildered by the lights and the hard
voices invoking their name.
“All of them out now?” a trooper asked another. “We got them all,” the other
said.
The tone of it was wrong. Ominous. Details became strangely clear, like the
moment of a long fall, an accident, a time stretched thin… Rain and the lights,