Time Past (40 page)

I knew she meant if the Q’Chn get loose down here. She was scared, which shocked me a little. Even at the worst moments of the Seouras blockade Eleanor had simply grumbled and carried on as best she could. I bit back my complaints, slid into the trousers and off the bed. Knees wobbly.

Eleanor watched me get my balance, pull on the jacket, get my balance again. I had to sit down to shove my feet into boots.

“Can’t you give me something for this nausea?” I gritted my teeth against the reflux.

“Try this.” She handed me a small cup with a tiny dose of dark liquid.

“It smells revolting. It’s going to make me worse.”

“Drink it, or put up with feeling sick.”

It tasted even worse than it smelled.

“It’s based on a Garokian herb,” she said, handing me a towel to sputter into. “We’ve had some good results with it so far.”

I started to glare at her, but found that the nausea was already subsiding.

She handed me a comm link. “Halley, you’ll do something about this mess, won’t you?’

I opened my mouth to say something sarcastic about everyone being content with Stone as head of station when things were going right, then glanced down at her fingers, clenched on my arm with sufficient force to make new bruises. Her fingernails were bitten to the quick, the skin around them red and swollen.

I fastened the comm link around my wrist.

“We’ll manage,” I said.

How did I sound so convincing? That gap between what we think and what we say. The potential to dissemble. It had always frustrated Henoit. Perhaps that was the biggest difference between H’digh and human—they perceived the world as a dichotomy-less whole. No life-death, black-white paradoxes. No lies. Intrigue, yes, but no falsehoods to your face.

No falsehoods, like me telling Eleanor we’d cope. Why did I say that? Memories of the Seouras blockade taunted me—over the six months of the Seouras blockade 214 Con-Fleet and EarthFleet personnel, 136 registered residents, and approximately 270 illegal residents died. Not counting those who tried to get away when the Seouras first arrived, and whose bodies we couldn’t retrieve. At that time, Jocasta’s environmental systems were stretched by double our optimum population of thirty thousand plus five to ten thousand illegals.

The hospital corridors I walked along were full of maglev gurneys and trolleys, cleaning bots, nurses and technicians. Business as usual, although people’s faces were taut, their voices sharp.

The hospital door opened into the artificial sunlight of Gamma—artificial in that this level received a smaller amount of the sunlight directly reflected from the main mirrors. The throughways and residences here relied largely on secondary reflectors and luminescent panels.

I stepped into the throughway, and was immediately thrust aside as a line of people curved to avoid a pile-up between two huge trolleys, which should have been using the freight lanes at the edges of the ring. Two groups of blue-skinned Dir stood in the middle, arguing at the tops of their voices. They had all flicked their cloaks and bonnetlike headpieces inside-out to show two different guild colors, a declaration of war. The luggage from the trolleys fanned out across the throughway in a swathe of metal artwork, boxes, foodstuffs, rolls of cloth unraveling, and countless other wares.

The words “evacuate,” “New Council,” “spokes,” and “business” could be heard amid the shouted insults and the grumbles of the people trying to get past. All the humans had faces drawn with worry. Some of them were shoving those in front with unnecessary violence.

Fear hung in the air like the red banners that clung to the upturned Dir trolley and draped the upper story of the building across from the hospital. Red banners to welcome the Q’Chn. Or deflect their anger. Legend said that red was the only color the Q’Chn saw, and the residents of Jocasta were willing to back any possibility.

A single security guard tried to direct pedestrian traffic around the accident, persuade the Dir to shut up and get rid of the mess, and reroute any automated vehicles that might try to pass. The guard shifted from one side of the throughway to the other, hands waving and alarm shrilling in short bursts. I dodged most of the people and got as close to her as I could.

“Constable?” My voice was still croaky, but I could yell. “Have you sent for backup?”

She blinked at my face, then checked the rank stars. “Yes, ma’am. But I don’t think there’s anyone to spare.”

“I’m heading up to the main office now,” I said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

She nodded and turned back to the Dir. One of the boxes had split, and now small crablike animals were scattering from it. This disrupted the crowd’s otherwise orderly detour, and I left curses and squeals behind me.

The sounds around me were different from yesterday. Yesterday the station had hummed in a way I’d never known before—busy, profitable, peaceful. In the seven years since I first came, we had experienced varying degrees of siege, terror, occupation, and uneasy cease-fires, but never peace. Today things were back to “normal.” The background opsys noises formed a random pattern of cutouts, backups kicking in and small alarms as subsystems gave up the fight to stay active. Somewhere in the section a proximity alarm blared, set off probably by a faulty connection, or unauthorized access.

I felt sore, tired, and scared. This also was “normal.” I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry at that.

I wondered if the New Council captain, Venner, had known Henoit. I wondered why she came here with An Serat. Pretty obvious he used them to get
Farseer
back. Serat and the H’digh seemed close. Murdoch said he’d found Serat on a H’digh colony planet when he was looking for me and
Calypso II.

Why was Venner still here? Stone seemed to be trying to keep a calm facade, but we all knew how false that was. If the New Council stayed here, ConFleet would eventually return and attack them. The station would be caught in the cross fire. Why hadn’t An Serat taken
Farseer
and run, making a jump point to wherever he wanted to go? If that was indeed possible. He obviously hadn’t given Venner and the New Council their own jump drive, otherwise Venner wouldn’t be waiting around in a tactically suicidal situation.

I stopped at a public comm station and tried to look for Invidi and H’digh biosignals on the station-wide sensor net, but the interface informed me that I was not authorized to access that system. I groaned. Just tell me where An Serat is, will you?

Thirty

A
t the main Security office in Alpha the desk sergeant, Rick Banna, pointed upstairs when he saw me. A small, beak-nosed human with close-cropped gray hair and narrow eyes, Banna came with the first EarthFleet troops when Jocasta was only one and a half rings.

Now, his attention remained on the soundless complaints of a pair of Garokians gesticulating in front of him. I waited until the Garokians’ hands paused and then told him about the constable in Gamma ring who needed assistance.

The briefing room upstairs was crammed with maybe thirty people. Dull green Security uniforms, light blue EarthFleet uniforms, a smattering of dark blue ConFleet uniforms like my own. I slipped in the half-open door and leaned against the back wall, invisible behind two sturdy olive-clad backs.

Lieutenant Sasaki’s voice. “... remember, we have to stretch our resources in the best way we can. So be creative.”

I squinted between the constables and saw Murdoch take Sasaki’s place at the front of the room. A holographic map of the station glowed behind him, an immense tracery of differently colored threads, yellow for throughways, green for corridors, blue for vertical access including lifts and maintenance shafts. Red blips indicated the presence of Security staff. I noticed a number of them clustered at various locations within the lower levels of the spokes, but none in the center.

“Right, I’m going to recap and then we’ll be off.” Murdoch’s slow, measured tones held the room’s attention. “First, the Q’Chn.”

A few voices murmured something.

“I know,” continued Murdoch. “Saying it too loud makes me uncomfortable, too. But they’re not legends anymore, they’re real. And they’re here. So let’s get used to it and treat them like any other threat.”

“Preferably from a long way off,” said a voice, and people chuckled. The laughter skated along the edges of tension without defusing it.

“Yeah, if we can,” Murdoch said. “Basically, we leave ’em alone unless they attack us. You heard what Sergeant Kwon and Constable Singh said—the Q’Chn they have up there aren’t behaving like our history files tell us. They’re smaller, they react different, they seem to be taking orders from the New Council.” He nodded at someone in the crowd. “When I interviewed a couple of
Vengeful
’s crew in sickbay, they confirmed this—the Q’Chn are behaving less like killing machines and more like sentient beings.”

“Sir, is it true they can talk?” said a voice from the middle.

Murdoch shook his head. “We don’t know. The
Vengeful
reports say they can receive orders. We’ve only got one report of them speaking and that, with respect to Constable Pui, is impossible to substantiate. He might have just seen them gathering together. So don’t go trying to invite one of them down for a cuppa to discuss its problems.”

From the roar of laughter, that was a Security-wide “in” joke.

“So we’re leaving them alone,” Murdoch raised his voice slightly and the laughter subsided. “But we gotta be prepared for the shit to hit. We’re nearly finished evacuating the spokes and when that’s done, Sergeant Desai’s squad is going to work with Engineering and get the spokes sealed off and the uplifts restricted. And keep it restricted, people. No letting some small-time crap-seller back in to pick up its ancient grandma’s valuable heirloom.”

More knowledgeable laughter. I suspected something like that might have happened last time we sealed off the spokes.

“And within the rings, I want to be able to seal off sections if we can. Which means moving luggage and people if they’re in the way.”

“Buildings, too?” asked a voice.

“If they’re in a restricted area, yes,” said Murdoch. His gaze was level and serious. “Raze the bloody things so the containment walls can activate. We need to be able to restrict access. I’m not having one of the bastards flying around like last time.”

That wasn’t strictly true. The single Q’Chn we’d had on Jocasta before the end of the Seouras blockade had attacked and killed three humans in Delta ring, but it hadn’t flown—it had merely used its “wings” to glide from a second-story conduit ledge to the deck, slicing a couple of victims on the way.

“Sir, can’t they melt their way through bulkheads?” A young voice, trying to control its quaver.

“We don’t know,” said Murdoch. “Someone said that’s only possible in vacuum. Like when they attack a ship. It’s something I’m not keen to find out. But at least we can contain them for long enough to evacuate.”

I knew, he knew, the whole room knew, it wasn’t enough. We couldn’t evacuate the entire station in time, even if we had access to emergency transport and somewhere to go. Jocasta was too overcrowded.

“Parallel to that, normal patrols and every extra pair of feet we have should be out in the rings, making sure all residents know their escape routes and are ready. It’s important people are informed and that they
get their closest routes cleaned up themselves.
”

Murdoch paused, looked at the faces in front of him, then waved his hand back at the holo. “We can’t cover all this ourselves. Don’t even try. Make sure residents know if they don’t confirm their escape routes themselves, nobody’s going to do it for them. If they’re busy clearing the corridors and access doors, they’re going to be too busy to panic. I don’t need to tell you we must avoid that.”

“And if the Q’Chn do attack, sir?” A deeper voice.

Murdoch looked carefully around the room again. His gaze passed without seeing me.

“Depends if it’s an isolated incident or not. If one of them gets down in the rings, your main priority is to get people out of the area. Ordinary plasma or radiation-based weapons are ineffective against the Q’Chn.” He said the name deliberately, as though by using it he could dampen some of the menace. “The only time, and I repeat, the only time you fire anything at one of these things is to divert it from an attack on civilians.”

Silence. Security was here to protect the people of the station. But they hadn’t expected to have to place their lives between the residents and killer aliens.

“Sergeant Roads and myself are working on more effective diversionary measures. We’ll let you know as soon as we have preparations in place. Any questions?”

Nobody said anything.

“Dismissed. Get out there and do it.”

The room cleared rapidly. I waited until the last few people shuffled out the door, then joined Murdoch and Sasaki, who were looking at the holo with their backs to the rest of the room.

“What’s your diversionary measure?” I said.

Murdoch spun around. His face creased into an unguarded smile. “You’re okay.”

His evident pleasure made me feel more than okay. I grinned back. “Pretty much.”

“Nice to have you back,” said Sasaki. “Again,” she added with a smile.

Murdoch’s eyes narrowed and he looked at me more closely. “What happened?” He touched my cheek and I tilted my head away, embarrassed in front of Sasaki in case Henoit’s presence made me react to the touch, but there was nothing.

“I had coolant poisoning. Eleanor says the antidote or whatever has to start working before she can clean it up.” I’d glimpsed my face in a polished door surface on the way here and it looked as bruised as the rest of me—as though I’d been under five- or six-g acceleration.

“Shit,” he said, seemingly more irritated than concerned. “You really don’t know when to take it easy, do you?”

“This is hardly the time for head of...” My voice trailed away as I realized what I’d been about to say.

“Right. You’re not head of station now, so you don’t have to rush out and put yourself in danger. Sit tight for a while.”