They missed home, missed family and that different, wider world; but they talked otherwise… had talked even of building a dome to themselves, in their spare time, in years to come, when homes could be built here, a hope which had been closer a year or so ago, when the Downbelow establishment had been quiet and easy, before Mallory and the others had come, before Q.
Now they simply figured how to survive at the level at which they were living. Moved population about under guard for fear of what that population might try to do. Opened new bases at the most primitive level, ill-prepared. Tried to care for the land and the Downers at once, and to pretend that nothing was amiss on station.
He finished the assignments, walked out and handed them to the dispatcher, Ernst, who was also accountant and comp man… they all did a multitude of jobs. He walked back again into his bedroom office, surveyed Miliko and her lapful of charts. “Want lunch?” he asked. He reckoned on going to the mill in the afternoon, hoped now for a quiet cup of coffee and first access to the microwave which was the dome’s other luxury of rank… time to sit and relax.
“I’m nearly done,” she said.
A bell rang, three sharp pulses, disarranging the day. The shuttle was coming in early; he had assumed it for the evening slot. He shook his head. “There’s still time for lunch,” he said.
The shuttle was down before they were done. Everyone in Operations had come to the same conclusion, and the dispatcher, Ernst, directed things between bites of sandwich. It was a hard day for everyone.
Emilio swallowed the last bite, drank the last of his coffee and gathered up his jacket. Miliko was putting hers on.
“Got us some more Q types,” Jim Ernst said from the dispatch desk; and a moment 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 alone, Bluetooth hanging back from him. He pushed men with rifles and had to push more than once, realizing all at once that he had no gun, that he was bare-handed and alone and that there were no witnesses but Downers and Q.
They gave ground. He snatched the boy from those who held him and the boy collapsed to the ground; he knelt down, feeling his own back naked, picked up the breather that lay there and got it over the boy’s face, pressed it there. Some of the Q folk tried to close in and one of Hale’s men fired at their feet.
“No more of that!” Emilio shouted. He stood up, shaking in every muscle, staring at the several score Q workers outside, at others still jammed by their own numbers within the dome. At ten armed men who had rifles leveled. He was shaking in every muscle, thinking of riot, of Miliko just over the hill, of having them close in on him. “Back up,” he yelled at Q. “Ease off!” And rounded on Bran Hale… young, sullen and insolent. “What happened here?”
“Tried to escape,” Hale said. “Mask fell off in the fight Tried to get a gun.”
“That’s a lie,” the Q folk shouted in a babble of variants, and tried to drown Hale’s voice.
“Truth,” Hale said. “They don’t want more refugees in their dome. A fight started and this troublemaker tried to bolt. We caught him.”
There was a chorus of protest from the Q folk. A woman in the fore was crying.
Emilio looked about him, having difficulty with his own breathing. At his feet the boy had seemed to come to, writhing and coughing. The Downers clustered together, dark eyes solemn.
“Bluetooth,” he said, “what happened?”
Bluetooth’s eyes shifted to Bran Hale’s man. No more than that
“Me eyes see,” said another voice. Satin strode through, braced herself with several bobs of distress. Her voice was high-pitched, brittle. “Hale push he friend, hard with gun, Bad push she.”