to guide him elsewhere among the offices. “The other meeting has been canceled,”
he informed them. “We go back to my quarters. All my companions do.”
“We have our orders,” the foremost said, which was all they ever said. It would
be straightened out only when they reached the site of the 0800 meeting and
gathered the whole party, a new group of young guards then to guide them back,
long waiting in between while things were cleared through channels. This was
always the way of things, inefficiency meant to drive them mad.
His hand sweated on the leather of the folder he was given, the folder with the
documents signed by the government of Union. Pell, lost. A chance to recover at
least the Fleet and a proposal which might destroy it. He much feared that the
government of Union was planning further ahead than Earth imagined. The Long
View. Union had been born with it. Earth was only now acquiring it. He felt
transparent and vulnerable. We know you’re stalling, he imagined the thoughts
behind Azov’s broad, powerful face. We know you want to gain time; and why; and
for now it suits us too, a trifling agreement we and you will abrogate at
earliest convenience.
Union had swallowed all it meant to digest… for now.
They could not afford debate, could not raise deadly issues in a privacy they
probably did not have. Sign it and carry it home. What he had in his head was
the important matter. They had learned the Beyond; it was about them in the
person of soldiers with a single face and virtually a single mind; in the
defiance of Norway’s captain, the arrogance of the Konstantins, the merchanters
who ignored a war that had been going on all about them for generations…
attitudes Earth had never understood, that different powers rule out here,
different logic.
Generations which had shaken the dust of Earth from off their feet.
Getting home—by signing a meaningless paper Mazian would never heed, no more
than Mallory would come to heel for the asking—getting back alive was the
important thing, to make understood what he had seen. For that he would do the
necessary things, sign a lie and hope.
Chapter Three
« ^ »
i
Pell: stationmaster’s office, sector blue one; 9/9/52; 1100 hrs.
The daily ton of disasters extended even to regions beyond station. Angelo
Konstantin rested his head on his hand and studied the printout in front of him.
A seal blown on Centaur Mine, on Pell IV’s third moon… fourteen men killed.
Fourteen—he could not help the thought—skilled, cleared workers. They had
humanity rotting in its own filth the other side of Q line, and they had to lose
the like of these instead. Lack of supply, old parts, things which should have
been replaced being rigged to keep working. A quarter credit seal gave way and
fourteen men died in vacuum. He typed through a memo to locate workers among
Pell techs who could replace the lost ones; their own docks were going idle…
jammed with ships on main berths and auxiliaries, but very little moving in or
out… and the men were better out there in the mines where their expertise could
do some good.
Not all the transferred workers had necessary skills at what they were set to
do. A worker had been killed on Downbelow, crushed trying to direct a crawler
out of the mud where an inexperienced partner had driven it. Condolences had to
be added to those Emillio had already written to the family on-station.
There were two more murders known in Q, and a body had been found adrift in the
vicinity of the docks. Supposedly the victim had been vented alive. Q was
blamed. Security was trying to get id on the victim, but there was considerable
mutilation of the body.
There was a case of another kind, a lawsuit involving two longtime resident
families sharing quarters in alterday rotation. The original inhabitants accused
the newcomers of pilferage and conversion. Damon sent him the case as an example
of a growing problem. Some council action was going to have to be taken in
legislation to make responsibilities clear in such cases.