“For any lock not voice-keyed,” Damon murmured. He kept his eye to the men at work and those standing guard down by the green niner entry, visible at this range — walked out carefully to the nearest corpse, hoping it was a corpse, and not someone dazed or shamming. He knelt, still watching the workers, felt through the pockets and came up with a card and additional papers. He pocketed them and went to the next, while Josh plundered others. Then nerves sent him scurrying back to cover, and Josh joined him at once. They moved further up the dock.
“Blue seal is open,” he said, as that arch came down off horizon. He entertained a wild, momentary hope of hiding, getting to blue sector when the traffic in the corridors returned to normal, getting up to blue one and asking questions at gunpoint. It was fantasy. They were not going to live that long. He did not reckon they would.
“Damon.”
He looked, followed the direction Josh indicated, up through the gantry lines to the first berth in green: green light. A ship was in approach, whether Mazian’s or Union’s there was no telling. Com thundered out, echoing instructions in the emptiness. The ship was closing with the docking cone, coming in fast. “Come on,” Josh hissed at him, pulling at his arm, insisting on a break for green nine.
“The G isn’t going,” he murmured, resisting Josh’s urging. “Don’t you see it’s a trick? Central’s got the corridors cleared for their own forces to move in them. Those ships wouldn’t dock with G completely unstable; no way they’d risk that with a big ship. Just a little flux to quell the riot. And it won’t stay cleared. If we run into those corridors we’ll be in the middle of it. No. Stay put.”
“ECS501,” he heard over the loudspeaker then, and his heart lifted.
“One of Mallory’s riders,” Josh muttered at his side. “Mallory. Union’s retreated.”
He looked at Josh, at the hate which burned in the angel’s haggard face… hope cancelled.
The minutes passed. The ship snugged in. The dock crew ran to secure the umbilicals, thrust the connections in. The access slammed into seal with a hiss audible across the empty distance. Machinery whined and slammed beyond it, the lock in function, and the dock-side crew started running.
A handful of men poured out of the obscuring periphery of the gantries, unarmored… two running across to the far side, to take up position with rifles leveled. There was the sound of others running, and com was on again, warning of Norway itself inbound.
“Get your head down,” Josh hissed, and Damon moved slowly, knelt by the brace of one of the movable tanks where Josh had taken closer cover, tried to see what was happening farther up, but there was a skein of umbilicals in the way. Mallory was using her own men for dock crews; but Jon Lukas must still be in command up in central, cooperating with Mazian, and in the pressure of Union attack, Mazian would choose efficiency over justice. Go out there, approach armed and nervous Company troops, raise a charge of murder and conspiracy while Jon Lukas physically held central and station, and Mazian had Union on his mind?
“I could go out there,” he said, unsure of his conclusions.
“They’d swallow you alive,” Josh said. “You’ve nothing to offer them.”
He looked at Josh’s face. Of the gentle man Adjustment had turned out… there was nothing left, but perhaps the pain. Set him at a comp board, Josh had said once, and he might remember comp; set him into war and he had other instincts. Josh’s thin hands clutched the gun between his knees, and his eyes were set on the arch of the dock, where Norway was moving in to dock. Hate. His face was pale and intense. He might do anything. Damon felt the butt of the pistol in his own right hand, shifted his grip on it, moved his forefinger onto the trigger. An Adjusted Unioner… whose Adjustment was coming undone, who hated, who might go on coming apart. It was a day for murders, when the dead out there were too many to count, when there were no rules left, no kinships, no friendships. War had come to Pell, and he had lived naive all his life. Josh was dangerous — had been trained to be dangerous — and nothing they had done to his mind had changed that.
Com announced arrival; there was the boom of contact. Josh swallowed visibly, eyes fixed. Damon reached with his left hand, caught Josh’s arm. “Don’t. Don’t do anything, hear me? You can’t reach her.”
“Don’t intend to,” Josh said without looking at him. “Only so you have as good sense.”
He let the gun to his side, finger slowly removed from the trigger, the taste of bile in his mouth. Norway was in solidly now, a second crashing of locks and joinings, a seal hissing into union.
Troops boiled out onto the dock, formed up, with shouts of orders, took up positions relieving the rifle-bearing crewmen, armored figures, alike and implacable. And of a sudden there was another figure from high up the curve, a shout, and other troops came from the recess of the shops and offices along that stretch, from the bars and sleepovers, troops left behind, rejoining their comrades of the Fleet, carrying their wounded or dead with them. There was reunion, a wavering in the disciplined lines that took them in, embracings and cheers raised. Damon pressed as close to the concealing machinery as he could, and Josh shrank down beside him.
An officer bellowed orders and the troops started to move in order, from the docks toward the green nine entry, and while some held it with leveled rifles, some advanced within it.
Damon shifted back, farther and farther within the shadows, and Josh moved with him. Shouts reached them, the echoing bellow of a loudspeaker: Clear the corridor. Suddenly there were shouts and screams and firing. Damon leaned his head against the machinery and listened, eyes shut, once and twice felt Josh flinch at the now-familiar sounds and did not know whether he did also.
It’s dying, he thought with exhausted calm, felt tears leak from his eyes. He shivered finally. Call it what they would, Mazian had not won; there was no possibility that the outnumbered Company ships had beaten off Union for good. It was only a skirmish, decision postponed. There would be more such, until there was no more Fleet and no more Company, and what became of Pell would be in other hands. Jump had outmoded the great star stations. There were worlds now, and the order and priority of things had changed. The military had seen it. Only the Konstantins had not. His father had not, who had believed in a way neither Company nor Union, but Pell’s — that kept the world it circled in trust, that disdained precautions within itself, that valued trust above security, that tried to lie to itself and believe that Pell’s values could survive in such times.
There were those who could shift from side to side, play any politics going. Jon Lukas could do so; evidently had. If Mazian had sense to judge men, he would surely see what Jon Lukas was and reward him as he deserved. But Mazian did not need honest men, only men who would obey him, and impose Mazian’s kind of law.