Company Wars 01 – Downbelow Station

The Beyond had once begun with the stars nearest Earth and now it started with

Pell, for the oldest stations were shut down as Earthward trade phased out and

the pre-jump style of trade passed forever. The Hinder Stars were all forgotten,

unvisited.

There were worlds beyond Pell, beyond Cyteen, and Union had them all now, real

worlds, of the far-between stars which jump could reach; where Union used the

birth labs still to expand populations, giving them workers and soldiers. Union

wanted all the Beyond, to direct what would be the course of the future of man.

Union had the Beyond, all but the thin arc of stations which Mazian’s Fleet

still thanklessly held for Earth and the Company, because they had once been set

to do that, because they saw nothing they could do but that. At their backs was

only Pell… and the mothballed stations of the Hinder Stars. Remoter still,

isolate… sat Earth, locked in its inner contemplations and its complex,

fragmented politics.

No trade of substance came out of Sol now, or to it. In the insanity which was

the War, free merchanters plied Unionside and Company Stars alike, crossed the

battle lines at will, although Union discouraged that traffic by subtle

harassments, seeking to cut Company supply.

Union expanded and the Company Fleet just held on, worldless but for Pell which

fed them, and Earth which ignored them. On Unionside, stations were no longer

built on the old scale. They were mere depots for worlds now, and probes sought

still further stars. They were generations which had never seen Earth… humans to

whom Europe and Atlantic were creatures of metal and terror, generations whose

way of life was stars, infinities, unlimited growth, and time which looked to

forever. Earth did not understand them.

But neither did the stations which remained with the Company or the free

merchanters who carried on that strange crosslines trade.

Chapter Two

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i

In Approach to Pell: 5/2/52

The convoy winked in, the carrier Norway first, and then the ten

freighters—more, as Norway loosed her four riders and the protective formation

spread itself wide in its approach to Pell’s Star.

Here was refuge, one secure place the war had never yet reached, but it was the

lapping of the tide. The worlds of the far Beyond were winning, and certainties

were changing, on both sides of the line.

On the bridge of the ECS 5, the jump-carrier Norway, there was rapid activity,

the four auxiliary command boards monitoring the riders, the long aisle of com

operations and that of scan and that of their own command. Norway was in

constant com link with the ten freighters, and the reports passed back and forth

on those channels were terse, ships’ operations only. Norway was too busy for

human disasters.

No ambushes. The station at Pell’s World received signal and gave reluctant

welcome. Relief whispered from post to post of the carrier, private, not carried

on intership com. Signy Mallory, Norway’s captain, relaxed muscles she had not

known were tense and ordered armscomp downgraded to standby.

She held command over this flock, third captain in seniority of the fifteen of

Mazian’s Fleet. She was forty-nine. The Beyonder Rebellion was far older than

that; and she had been freighter pilot, rider captain, the whole gamut, all in

the Earth Company’s service. Her face was still young. Her hair was silver gray.

The rejuv treatments which caused the gray kept the rest of her at somewhere

near biological thirty-six; and considering what she shepherded in and what it

portended, she felt aged beyond the forty-nine.

She leaned back in her cushion which looked over the upcurving, narrow aisles of

the bridge, punched in on her arm console to check operations, stared out over

the active stations and the screens which showed what vid picked up and what

scan had Safe. She lived by never quite believing such estimations.

And by adapting. They all did, all of them who fought this war. Norway was like

her crew, varied salvage: of Brazil and Italia and Wasp and jinxed Miriam B,

parts of her dating all the way back to the days of the freighter war. They took

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