Read Online Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh - Free Book Online Page A

flaws. The look was complete innocence. No thief, no brawler; but this man would kill… if such a man could kill… for politics. For duty, because he was Union and they were not. There was no hate involved. It was disturbing to hold the life or death of such a man in his hands. It gave him choices in turn, mirror-imaged choices—not for hate, but for duty, because he was not Union, and this man was.
    We’re at war, Damon thought miserably. Because he’s come here, the war has.
    An angel’s face.
    “No trouble to you, is he?” Damon asked the supervisor.
    “No.”
    “I’ve heard he’s a good midge player.”
    That got a flicker from both of them. There were illicit gamblings at the detention station, as in most slow posts during alterday. Damon offered a smile when the prisoner looked his way, the least shifting of the pale blue eyes… went sober again as the prisoner failed to react. “I’m Damon Konstantin, Mr. Talley, of the station legal office. You’ve given us no trouble and we appreciate that.   We’re not your enemies; we’d dock a Union fleet as readily as a Company ship—in principle; but you don’t leave stations neutral any longer, not from what we hear, so our attitude has to change along with that. We just can’t take chances having you loose. Repatriation… no. We’re given other instructions. Our own security. You understand that.”
    No response.
    “Your counsel’s made the point that you’re suffering in this close confinement and that the cells were never meant for long-term detention. That there are people walking loose in Q who are far more a threat to this station; that there’s a vast difference between a saboteur and an armscomper in uniform who had the bad luck to be picked up by the wrong side. But having said all that, he still doesn’t recommend your release except to Q. We have an arrangement worked out. We can fake an id that would protect you, and still let us keep track of you over there. I don’t like the idea, but it seems workable.” “What’s Q?” Talley asked, a soft, anxious voice, appealing to the supervisor and to his own counsel, the elder Jacoby, who sat at the end of the table. “What are you saying?”
    “Quarantine. The sealed section of the station we’ve set apart for our own refugees.”
    Talley’s eyes darted nervously from one to the other of them. “No. No. I don’t want to be put with them. I never asked him to set this up. I didn’t.” Damon frowned uncomfortably. “We’ve got another convoy coming in, Mr. Talley, another group of refugees. We have arrangements underway to mix you with them with faked papers. Get you out of here. It would still be a kind of confinement, but with wider walls, room to walk where you want, live life… as it’s lived in Q. That’s a good part of the station over there. Not regimented—open. No cells.   Mr. Jacoby’s right: you’re no more dangerous than some over there. Less, because we’d always know who you are.”
    Talley cast another look at his counsel. Shook his head, pleading.   “You absolutely reject it?” Damon prodded him, vexed. All solutions and arrangements collapsed. “It’s not prison, you understand.”
    “My face—is known there. Mallory said—”
    He lapsed into silence. Damon stared at him, marked the fevered anxiety, the sweat which stood on Talley’s face. “What did Mallory say?” “That if I made trouble—she’d transfer me to one of the other ships. I think I know what you’re doing: you think if there are Unionists with them they’d contact me if you put me over there in your quarantine. Is that it? But I wouldn’t live that long. There are people who know me by sight. Station officials. Police. They’re the kind who got places on those ships, aren’t they?   And they’d know me. I’ll be dead in an hour if you do that. I heard what those ships were like.”
    “Mallory told you.”
    “Mallory told me.”
    “There are some, on the other hand,”