The point didn’t need elaborating. Even though Caton had been brought from Earth as a child, he was considered a Kronian and he thought like one. It seemed patently obvious to him that if a society appointed leaders from among those who had demonstrated their greatest proficiencies to be in the application of brute force and deception, then that was how their affairs would be run. The nuisance being caused was certainly out of proportion to the numbers and not something that was needed at times like these, and some Kronians were for shutting the movement down forcibly if that was the Terran way. However, President Urzin and most of the Congress were adamant that suppression was not the Kronian way, and relied on the Kronian nature to prevail. If it wasn’t robust enough to meet the challenge without turning into that which it sought to supersede, then it probably wasn’t worth clinging to, they maintained.
Colonel Xelu went on, “As a precaution in case the need ever arises, the Security Arm is being trained in the capability for taking an expanded role in containing and countering the possible use of violence, sabotage, and suchlike to advance political aims. I trust I don’t have to elaborate? I regret the necessity, but it seems that prudence leaves us no choice.”
“Everyone regrets it, but it’s only common sense,” Norburn’s voice said on the circuit. “When you think you’re threatened, you prepare a defense. Look what happened right here. What kind of state would Kronia have been in by now without the LORIN stations?”
They had reached the bottom of a vertical section of wall. A doorway to one side opened into a large room that the flashlight beams showed to have fallen in at the far end beneath sloping floor sections pressed down from above under a mass of tangled metal. The space was somberly empty, covered everywhere in gray dust. “D-2 Level, Area 3,” Xelu commented. “Dormitory and living quarters. This was where you found one of the biggest groups of survivors.”
“Over twenty,” Caton answered dryly. The memories were starting to come back now. How the place had kept enough air for the time it took to tent the entrance and get down here was something he would never understand. They didn’t go through into the room now. Evidently what had brought the SA party here lay elsewhere. Xelu turned from the doorway and indicated a length of corridor leading in the opposite direction, partially blocked by the wall on one side having burst inward, and ending maybe ten yards farther on at a blockage of collapsed partitioning.
“You didn’t penetrate through any farther in that direction?” Xelu inquired.
Caton shook his head behind his helmet visor—although in the darkness it would be invisible. “The plan showed there were only sealed storage compartments that way. The access door through to them was closed, and we couldn’t pick up any readings of movement or identity transmissions. It seemed better to use the time we had to check other places.” He was beginning to wonder uncomfortably if the SA party had uncovered more bodies that they thought he should have found. But in times like that, these decisions had to be made. Xelu would understand that.
But Xelu said, “Let’s have a look, then,” and picking his way carefully through the wreckage ahead of them, he continued, “One of the things we’re doing is increasing our weapons stocks at various strategic locations. But to avoid attracting undue attention with sudden manufacturing requests, we’re trying to make as much use as possible of the stocks that were built up during the Emergency period.” He meant a time around twelve years prior to Athena, when there had been fear of the political tension that had existed between Kronia and Earth at that time leading to armed conflict. “Our records showed that there was a considerable inventory here that hadn’t been recovered. The reports sent back after the impact wrote them off as inaccessible and probably not worth the effort. But our needs have changed since then, and we were sent out to assess what would be involved in retrieving them. And what we found is this. . . .”