Company Wars 01 – Downbelow Station

there is Downbelow. We are looking on it now.”

“Where is the human camp?” Bigfellow asked. “Where is old river?”

“The world is round like an egg, and some of it faces away from Sun; this makes

night on that side. Perhaps if you looked closely you might see old river; I

have thought so. But never the human camp. It is too small on the face of

Down-below.”

Bigfellow hugged himself and shivered.

But Satin walked among the tables, walked into the clear place, where great Sun

shone in his truth, overcoming the dark… terrible he was, orange like fire, and

filling all with his terror.

She thought of the dreaming human called Sun-her-friend, whose eyes were forever

warmed with that sight, and the hair lifted on her nape.

And she stretched wide her arms and turned, embracing all the Sun, and his far

kindred, lost in them, for she had come to the Place which she had journeyed to

find. She filled her eyes with the sight, as Sun looked at her, and she could

never be the same again, forever.

Chapter Four

« ^ »

Aboard Norway: null point, Union space; 9/10/52

Omicron Point

Norway was not the first to come flashing into the vicinity of that dark,

planet-sized piece of rock and ice, visible only as it occluded stars. Others

had preceded her to this sunless rendezvous. Omicron was a wanderer, a bit of

debris between stars, but its location was predictable and it provided mass

enough to home in on out of jump… a place as nowhere as it was possible to be, a

chance finding by Sung of Pacific long ago, used by the Fleet since then. It was

one of those bits that the sublight freighters had dreaded, which jumpships with

private business to conduct… cherished and kept secret

Sensors were picking up activity, multiple ship presence, transmissions out of

this forever-night. Computer talked to computer as they came in; and Signy

Mallory kept her eyes flickering from one to the other bit of telemetry,

fighting the hypnotism that so easily set in from jump and the necessary drugs.

She hurled Norway into realspace max, heading for those signals and out of the

jump range with the sense of something on her tail, trusted her crew’s accuracy

and aimed with the ship underway, the flickering few minutes of heart-in-throat

transit near C, where all they had was approximation.

She cut it back quickly, started dumping velocity, no comfortable process, and

the slightly speed-mad telemetry and slightly drug-mad human brain fought for

precise location; overestimate that dump and she could take Norway right into

that rock or into another ship.

“Clear, clear, all in now but Europe and Libya,” com reported.

No mean feat of navigation, to find Omicron so accurately, to come in within

middle scan, right in the jump range, after a start from near Russell’s, far

away. Fail their time, and they would have been in the jump range when something

else came in, and that was disaster. “Good job,” she sent to all stations,

looking at the reckoning Graff flashed to her center screen: “Two minutes off

mark but dead on distance; can’t cut it much closer at our starting range. Good

signals being received. Stand by.”

She took her pattern in relation to Omicron, checked through data; within the

half hour there was a signal from Libya, which had just come in. Europe came in

a quarter hour after that, from another plane.

That was the tale of them, then. They were in one place, at one time, which they

had not been since their earliest operations. Unlikely as it was Union would

come on them in strength here, they were still nervous.

Computer signal came in from Europe. They were given breathing space, to rest.

Signy leaned back, took the com plug from her ear, unharnessed and got up

finally while Graff moved to the post she had vacated. They were not at the

disadvantage of some: Norway was one of the mainday ships… her main command

staff on the schedule they were following now. Others, Atlantic, Africa, and

Libya, were alter-day, so that strike hours were never remotely predictable, so

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