The hookups were complete. The ramp went into place.
“Move!” Di bellowed. Dockers pelted behind the lines of troops; rifles were levelled. The hatch opened, a crash up the access tube.
A stench rolled out onto the chill of the dock. Inner hatches opened and a living wave surged out, trampling each other, falling. They screamed and shouted and rushed out like madmen, staggered as a burst of fire went over their heads.
“Hold it!” Di shouted. “Sit down where you are and put your hands on your heads.”
Some were sitting down already, out of weakness; others sank down and complied. A few seemed too dazed to understand, but came no farther. The wave had stopped. At Signy’s elbow Damon Konstantin breathed a curse and shook his head. No word of laws from him; sweat stood visibly on his akin. His station stared riot in the face… collapse of systems, Hansford’s death ten thousandfold. There were a hundred, maybe a hundred fifty living, crouched on the dock by the umbilical gantry. The ship’s stench spread. A pump labored, flushing air through Hansford’s systems under pressure. There were a thousand on that ship.
“We’re going to have to go in there,” Signy muttered, sick at the prospect. Di was moving the others one at a time, passing them under guns into a curtained area where they were to be stripped, searched, scrubbed, passed on to the desks or to the medics. Baggage there was none, not with this group, nor papers worth anything.
“Need a security team suited up for a contamination area,” she told young Konstantin. “And stretchers. Get us a disposal area prepared. We’re going to vent the dead; it’s all we can do. Have them ID’ed as best you can, fingerprints, photos, whatever. Every corpse passed out of here unidentified is future trouble for your security.”
Konstantin looked ill. That was well enough. So did some of her troops. She tried to ignore her own stomach.
A few more survivors had made their way to the opening of the access, very weak, almost unable to get down the ramp. A handful, a scant handful.
Lila was coming in, her approach begun in her crew’s panic, defying instructions and riders’ threats. She heard Graffs voice reporting it, activated her own mike. “Stall them off. Clip a vane off them if you have to. We’ve got our hands full. Get me a suit out here.”
They found seventy-eight more living, lying among the decomposing dead. The rest was cleanup, and no more threat. Signy passed decontamination, stripped off the suit, sat down on the bare dock and fought a heaving stomach. A civ aid worker chose a bad time to offer her a sandwich. She pushed it away, took the local herbal coffee and caught her breath in the last of the processing of Hansford’s living. The place stank now of antispetic fogging.
A carpet of bodies in the corridors, blood, dead. Hansford’s emergency seals had gone into place during a fire. Some of the dead had been cut in two. Some of the living had broken bones from being trampled in the panic. Urine. Vomit. Blood. Decay. They had had closed systems, had not had to breathe it. The Hansford survivors had had nothing at the last but the emergency oxygen, and that had possibly been a cause of murder. Most of the living had been sealed into areas where the air had held out less fouled than the badly ventilated storage holds where most of the refugees had been crammed.
“Message from the stationmaster,” com said into her ear, “requesting the captain’s presence in station offices at the earliest.”
“No,” she sent back shortly. They were bringing Hansford’s dead out; there was some manner of religious service, assembly-line fashion, some amenity for the dead before venting them. Caught in Downbelow’s gravity well, they would drift in that direction, eventually. She wondered vaguely whether bodies burned in falling: likely, she thought. She had not much to do with worlds. She was not sure whether anyone had ever cared to find out.
Lila’s folk were exiting in better order. They pushed and shoved at the first, but they stopped it when they saw the armed troops facing them. Konstantin intervened with useful service over the portable loudspeaker, talking to the terrified civs in stationers’ terms and throwing stationers’ logic in their faces, the threat of damage to fragile balances, the kind of drill and horror story they must have heard all their confined lives. Signy put herself on her feet again during the performance, still holding the coffee cup, watched with a calmer stomach as the procedures she had outlined began to function smoothly, those with papers to one area and those without to another, for photographing and ID by statement. The handsome lad from Legal Affairs proved to have other uses, a voice of ringing authority when it regarded disputed paper or confused station staff.
“ Griffin ’s moving up on docking,” Graffs voice advised her. “Station advises us they’re wanting back five hundred units of confiscated housing based on Hansford’s casualties.”
“Negative,” she said flatly. “My respects to station command, but out of the question. What’s the status on Griffin ?”
“Panicky. We’ve warned them.”
“How many others are coming apart?”
“It’s tense everywhere. Don’t trust it. They could bolt, any one of them. Maureen was one dead, coronary, another ill. I’m routing her in next. Stationmaster asks whether you’ll be available for conference in an hour. I pick up that the Company boys are making demands to get into this area.”
“Keep stalling.” She finished the coffee, walked along the lines in front of Griffin ’s dock, the whole operation moving down a berth, for there was nothing left at Hansford’s berth worth guarding. There was quiet from the processed refugees. They had the matter of locating their lodgings to occupy them, and the station’s secure environment to comfort them. A suited crew stood by to move Hansford out; they had only four berths at this dock. Signy measured with her eye the space the station had allotted them, five levels of two sections and the two docks. Crowded, but they would manage for a while. Barracks could solve some of it… temporarily. Things would get tighter. No luxuries, that was certain.
They were not the only refugees adrift; they were simply the first. And upon that knowledge she kept her mouth shut.
It was Dinah that broke the peace; a man caught with weapons in scan, a friend who turned ugly on his arrest: two dead, then, and sobbing, hysterical passengers afterward. Signy watched it, simply tired, shook her head and ordered the bodies vented with the rest, while Konstantin approached her with angry arguments. “Martial law,” she said, ending all discussion, and walk away.
Sita, Pearl , Little Bear, Winifred. They came in with agonizing slowness, unloaded refugees and property, and the processing inches its way along.
Signy left the dock then, went back aboard Norway and took a bath. She scrubbed three times all over before she began to feel that the smell and the sights had left her.
Station had entered alterday; complaints and demands had fallen silent at least for a few hours.
Or if there were any, Norway ’s alterday command fended them off her.
There was comfort for the night, company of sorts, a leave-taking. He was another item of salvage from Russell’s and Mariner… not for transport on the other ships. They would have torn him apart. He knew this, and appreciated matters. He had no taste for the crew either, and understood his situation.
“You’re getting off here,” she told him, staring at him, who lay beside her. The name did not matter. It confused itself in her memory with others, and sometimes she called him hy the wrong one, late, when she was half asleep. He showed no emotion at that statement, only blinked, indication that he had absorbed the fact. The face intrigued her: innocence, perhaps. Contrasts intrigued her. Beauty did. “You’re lucky,” she said. He reacted to that the same way, as he reacted to most things. He simply stared, vacant and beautiful; they had played with his mind on Russell’s. There was a sordidness in her sometimes, a need to deal wounds… limited murder, to blot out the greater ones. To deal little terrors, to forget the horror outside. She had sometime nights with Graff, with Di, with whoever took her fancy. She never showed this face to those she valued, to friends, to crew. Only sometimes there were voyages like this one, when her mood was black. It was a common disease, in the Fleet, in the sealed worlds of ships without discharge, among those in absolute power. “Do you care?” she asked; he did not, and that was, perhaps, his survival.