later, loudly enough to carry through all the dome: “Two hundred of them.
They’ve got them jammed in that frigging hold like dried fish. Shuttle, what are
we supposed to do with them?”
The answer crackled back, garble and a few intelligible words. Emilio shook his
head in exasperation and walked over to lean above Jim Ernst. “Advise Q dome
they’re going to have to accept some crowding until we can make some more
transfers down the road.”
“Most of Q is home at lunch,” Ernst reminded him. As policy, they avoided
announcements when all of Q was gathered. They were inclined to irrational
hysteria. “Do it,” he told Ernst, and Ernst relayed the information.
Emilio pulled the breather up and started out, Miliko close behind him.
The biggest shuttle had come down, disgorging the few items of supply they had
requested from station. Most of the goods flowed in the other direction,
canisters of Downbelow products waiting in the warehouse domes to be loaded and
taken up to feed Pell.
The first of the passengers came down the ramp as they reached the landing
circle beyond the hill, crushed-looking folk in coveralls, who had probably been
frightened to death in transfer, jammed into a cargo hold in greater number than
should have been… certainly in greater number than they needed on Downbelow all
at one moment. There were a few more prosperous-looking volunteers… losers in
the lottery process; they walked aside. But guards off the shuttle waited with
rifles to herd the Q assignees into a group. There were old people with them,
and a dozen young children at least, families and fragments of families if it
held to form, all such folk as did not survive well in station quarantine.
Humanitarian transfer. People like this took up space and used a compressor, and
by their classification could not be trusted near the lighter jobs, those tasks
involving critical machinery. They had to be assigned manual labor, such of it
as they could bear. And the children—at least there were none too young to work,
or too young to understand about wearing the breathers or how to change a
breather cylinder in a hurry.
“So many fragile ones,” Miliko said. “What does your father think we are down
here?”
He shrugged. “Better than Q Upabove, I suppose. Easier. I hope those new
compressors are in the load; and the plastic sheeting.”
“Bet they’re not,” Miliko said dourly.
There was a shrieking from over the hill toward base and the domes, Downer
screeches, not an uncommon thing; he looked over his shoulder and saw nothing,
and paid it no mind. The disembarking refugees had stopped at the sound. Staff
moved them on.
The shrieking kept up. That was not normal. He turned, and Miliko did. “Stay
here,” he said, “and keep a hand on matters.”
He started running up the path over the hill, dizzy at once with the breather’s
limitations. He crested the rise and the domes came into sight, and there was in
front of huge Q dome, what had the look of a fight, a ring of Downers enclosing
a human disturbance, more and more Q folk boiling out of the dome. He sucked air
and ran all out, and one of the Downers broke from the group below, came running
with all-out haste… Satin’s Bluetooth: he knew the fellow by the color of him,
which was uncommonly red-brown for an adult. “Lukas-man,” Bluetooth hissed,
falling in by him as he ran, bobbing and dancing in his anxiety. “Lukas-mans all
mad.”
That took no translation. He knew the game when he saw the guards there… Bran
Hale and crew, the field supervisors; there was a knot of shouting Q folk and
the guards had guns leveled. Hale and his men had gotten one youth away from the
group, ripped his breather off so that he was choking, would stop breathing if
it kept up. They held the fainting boy among them as hostage, a gun on him,
holding rifles on the others, and the Q folk and the Downers on the edges were
screaming.
“Stop that!” Emilio shouted. “Break it up!” No one regarded him, and he waded in