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  Downbelow Station

  ( The Alliance-Union Universe - 3 )

  Caroline J. Cherryh

  Caroline J. Cherryh

  Downbelow Station

  BOOK ONE

  Chapter One

  Earth and Outward: 2005-2352

  The stars, like all man’s other ventures, were an obvious impracticality, as rash and improbable an ambition as the first venture of man onto Earth’s own great oceans, or into the air, or into space. Sol Station had existed profitably for some years; there were the beginnings of mines, the manufacturies, the power installations in space which were beginning to pay. Earth took them for granted as quickly as it did all its other comforts. Missions from the station explored the system, a program far from public understanding, but it met no strong opposition, since it did not disturb the comfort of Earth.

  So quietly, very matter of factly, that first probe went out to the two nearest stars, unmanned, to gather data and return, a task in itself of considerable complexity. The launch from station drew some public interest, but years was a long time to wait for a result, and it passed out of media interest as quickly as it did out of the solar system. It drew a great deal more attention on its return, nostalgia on the part of those who recalled its launch more than a decade before, curiosity on the part of the young who had known little of its beginning and wondered what it was all about. It was a scientific success, bringing back data enough to keep the analysts busy for years… but there was no glib, slick way to explain the full meaning of its observations in layman’s terms. In public relations the mission was a failure; the public, seeking to understand on their own terms, looked for material benefit, treasure, riches, dramatic findings.

  What the probe had found was a star with reasonable possibilities for encouraging life; a belt of debris, including particles, planetoids, irregular chunks somewhat under planet size with interesting implications for systemic formation, and a planetary companion with its own system of debris and moons… a planet desolate, baked, forbidding. It was no Eden, no second Earth, no better than what existed in the sun’s own system, and it was a far journey to have gone to find that out. The press grappled with questions it could not easily grasp itself, sought after something to give the viewers, lost interest quickly. If anything, there were questions raised about cost, vague and desperate comparisons offered to Columbus, and the press hared off quickly onto a political crisis in the Mediterranean, much more comprehensible and far bloodier.

  The scientific establishment on Sol Station breathed a sigh of relief and with equal quiet caution invested a portion of its budget in a modest manned expedition, to voyage in what amounted to a traveling miniature of Sol Station itself, and to stay a time making observations in orbit about that world.

  And very quietly, to further imitate Sol Station, to test manufacturing techniques which had built Earth’s great second satellite… in stranger conditions. Sol Corporation supplied a generous grant, having a certain curiosity, a certain understanding of stations and what profits could be looked for from their development

  That was the beginning.

  The same principles which had made Sol Station practical made the first star-station viable. It needed a bare minimum of supply in biostuffs from Earth… mostly luxuries to make life more pleasant for the increasing number of techs and scientists and families stationed there. It mined; and as its own needs diminished, would send back the surplus of its ores… so the first link in the chain was made. No need, no need at all, that first colony had proven, that a star have a world friendly to humans, no need even for a moderate sun-type star… just the solar wind and the usual accompanying debris of metals and rock and ice. One station built, a station module could be hauled to the next star, whatever it was. Scientific bases, manufacture: bases from which the next hopeful star could be reached; and the next and the next and the next. Earth’s outward exploration developed in one narrow vector, one little fan which grew at its broader end.

  Sol Corporation, swollen beyond its original purpose and holding more stations than Sol itself, became what the star-stationers called it: the Earth Company. It wielded power… certainly over the stations which it directed long-distance, years removed in space; and power on Earth too, where its increasing supply of ores, medical items, and its possession of several patents were enormously profitable. Slow as the system was in starting, the steady arrival of goods and new ideas, however long ago launched, was profit for the Company and consequent power on Earth. The Company sent merchant carriers in greater and greater numbers: that was all it needed to do now. The crews which manned those ships on the long flights grew into an inward-turned and unique way of life, demanding nothing but improvement of equipment which they had come to think of as their own; station in turn supported station, each shifting Earth’s goods a step further on to its nearest neighbor, and the whole circular exchange ending up back on Sol Station where the bulk of it was drained off in high rates charged for biostuffs and such goods as only Earth produced.

  Those were the great good days for those who sold this wealth: fortunes rose and fell; governments did; corporations took on more and more power, and the Earth Company in its many guises reaped immense profits and moved the affairs of nations. It was an age of restlessness. Newly industrialized populations and the discontents of every nation set out on that long, long track in search of jobs, wealth, private dreams of freedom, the old lure of the New World, human patterns recapitulated across a new and wider ocean, to stranger lands.

  Sol Station became a stepping-off place, no longer exotic, but safe and known. The Earth Company flourished, drinking in the wealth of the star-stations, another comfort which those who received it began to take for granted.

  And the star-stations clung to the memory of that lively, diverse world which had sent them, Mother Earth in a new and emotion-fraught connotation, she who sent out precious stuffs to comfort them; comforts which in a desert universe reminded them there was at least one living mote. The Earth Company ships were the lifeline… and the Earth Company probes were the romance of their existence, the light, swift exploration ships which let them grow more selective about next steps. It was the age of the Great Circle, no circle at all, but the course which the Earth Company freighters ran in constant travel, the beginning and end of which was Mother Earth.

  Star after star after star… nine of them — until Pell, which proved to have a livable world, and life.

  That was the thing which cancelled all bets, upset the balance, forever.

  Pell’s Star, and Pell’s World, named for a probe captain who had located it — finding not alone a world, but indigenes, natives.

  It took a long time for word to travel the Great Circle back to Earth; less for word of the find to get to the nearer star-stations… and more than scientists came flocking to Pell’s World. Local station companies who knew the economics of the matter came rushing to the star, not to be left behind; population came, and two of the stations orbiting less interesting stars nearby were dangerously depleted, ultimately to collapse altogether. In the burst of growth and the upheaval of building a station at Pell, ambitious people were already casting eyes toward two farther stars, beyond Pell, calculating with cold foresight, for Pell was itself a source of Earthlike goods, luxuries — a potential disturbance in the directions of trade and supply.

  For Earth, as word rode in with arriving freighters… a frantic haste to ignore Pell. Alien life. It sent shock waves through the Company, touched off moral debates and policy debates in spite of the fact that the news was almost two decades old — as if they could set hand now to whatever decisions were being made out there in the Beyond. It was all out of control. Other life. It disrupted man�
�s dearly held ideas of cosmic reality. It raised philosophical and religious questions, presented realities some committed suicide rather than face. Cults sprang up. But, other arriving ships reported, the aliens of Pell’s World were not outstandingly intelligent, nor violent, built nothing, and looked more like lower primates than not, brown-furred and naked and with large, bewildered eyes.

  Ah, earthbound man sighed. The human-centered, Earth-centered universe in which Earth had always believed had been shaken, but quickly righted itself. The isolationists who opposed the Company gathered influence and numbers in reaction to the scare — and to a sudden and marked drop in trade.

  The Company was in chaos. It took long to send instructions, and Pell grew, out of the Company’s control. New stations unauthorized by the Earth Company sprang into existence at farther stars, stations called Mariner and Viking; and they spawned Russell’s and Esperance. By the time Company instructions arrived down the line, bidding now-stripped nearer stations take this and that action to stabilize trade, the orders were patent nonsense.

  In fact, a new pattern of trade had already developed. Pell had the necessary biostuffs. It was closer to most of the star-stations; and star-station companies which had once seen Earth as beloved Mother now saw new opportunities, and seized them. Still other stations formed. The Great Circle was broken. Some Earth Company ships kited off to trade with the New Beyond, and there was no way to stop them. Trade continued, never what it had been. The value of Earth’s goods fell, and consequently it cost Earth more and more to obtain the one-time bounty of the colonies.

  A second shock struck. Another world lay Beyond, discovered by an enterprising merchanter… Cyteen. Further stations developed — Fargone and Paradise and Wyatt’s, and the Great Circle stretched farther still.

  The Earth Company took a new decision: a payback program, a tax of goods, which would make up recent losses. They argued to the stations of the Community of Man, the Moral Debt, and the burden of gratitude.

  Some stations and merchanters paid the tax. Some refused it, particularly those stations beyond Pell, and Cyteen. The Company, they maintained, had had no part in their development and had no claim on them. There was a system of papers and visas instituted, and inspections called for, bitterly resented by the merchants, who viewed their ships as their own.

  More, the probes were pulled back, tacit statement that the Company was putting an official damper on further growth of the Beyond. They were armed, the swift exploration ships, which they had always been, venturing as they did into the unknown; but now they were used in a new way, to visit stations and pull them into line. That was bitterest of all, that the crews of the probe ships, who had been the heroes of the Beyond, became the Company enforcers.

  Merchanters armed in retaliation, freighters never built for combat, incapable of tight turns. But there were skirmishes between the converted probe ships and rebel merchanters, although most merchanters declared their reluctant consent to the tax. The rebels retreated to the outermost colonies, least convenient for enforcement.

  It became war without anyone calling it war… armed Company probes against the rebel merchanters, who served the farther stars, a circumstance possible because there was Cyteen, and even Pell was not indispensible.

  So the line was drawn. The Great Circle resumed, exclusive of the stars beyond Fargone, but never so profitable as it had been. Trade continued across the line after strange fashion, for tax-paying merchanters could go where they would, and rebel merchanters could not, but stamps could be faked, and were. The war was leisurely, a matter of shots fired when a rebel was clearly available as a target. The Company ships could not resurrect the stations immediately Earthward of Pell; they were no longer viable. The populations drifted to Pell and Russell’s and Mariner and Viking, and to Fargone and farther still.

  Ships were built, as stations had been, in the Beyond. The technology was there, and merchanters proliferated. Then jump arrived — a theory originated in the New Beyond, at Cyteen, quickly seized upon by shipbuilders at Mariner on the Company side of the line.

  And that was the third great blow to Earth. The old lightbound way of figuring was obsolete. Jump freighters skipped along in short transits into the between; but the time it took from star to star went from years to periods of months and days. Technology improved. Trade became a new kind of game and strategy in the long war changed… stations knit closer together.

  Suddenly, out of this, there was an organization among the rebels farthest Beyond. It started as a coalition of Fargone and its mines; it swept to Cyteen, gathered to itself Paradise and Wyatt’s, and reached for other stars and the merchanters who served them. There were rumors… of vast population increases going on for years unreported, technology once suggested on the Company side of the line, when the need was for men, for human lives to fill up the vast dark nothingness, to work and to build. Cyteen had been doing it. This organization, this Union , as it called itself, bred and multiplied geometrically, using installations already in operation, birth-labs. Union grew. It had, in the course of two decades, increased enormously in territory and in population density, it offered a single, unswerving ideology of growth and colonization, a focused direction to what had been a disorganized rebellion. It silenced dissent, mobilized, organized, pushed hard at the Company.

  And in final, outraged public demand for results in the deteriorating situation, the Earth Company back on Sol Station gave up the tax, diverted that fund to the building of a great Fleet, all jumpships, engines of destruction, Europe and America and all their deadly kindred.

  So was Union building, developing specialized warships, changing style as it changed technology. Rebel captains who had fought long years for their own reasons were charged with softness at the first excuse; ships were put into the hands of commanders with the right ideology, with more ruthlessness.

  Company successes grew harder. The great Fleet, outnumbered and with an immense territory to cover, did not bring an end to the war in a year or in five years. And Earth grew vexed with what had become an inglorious, exasperating conflict. Cut all the starships, the cry was now in the financing corporations. Pull back our ships and let the bastards starve.

  It was of course the Company Fleet which starved; Union did not, but Earth seemed incapable of understanding that, that it was no longer a question of fragile colonies in rebellion but of a forming power, well-fed, well-armed. The same myopic policies, the same tug-of-war between isolationists and Company which had alienated the colonies in the first place drew harder and harder lines as trade diminished; they lost the war not in the Beyond, but in the senate chambers and the boardrooms on Earth and Sol Station, going for mining within Earth’s own system, which was profitable, and devil take the exploratory missions in any direction at all, which were not.

  No matter that they had jump now and that the stars were near. Their minds were geared to the old problems and to their own problems and their own politics. Earth banned further emigration, seeing the flight of its best minds. It weltered in economic chaos, and the drain of Earth’s natural resources by the stations was an easy focus of discontent. No more war, they said; peace suddenly became good politics. The Company Fleet, deprived of funds in a war in which it was engaged on a wide front, obtained supplies where and as it could.

  At the end, they were patchwork, fifteen carriers out of the once proud fifty, cobbled together at the stations still open to them. Mazian’s Fleet, they called it, in the tradition of the Beyond, where ships were so few at first that enemies knew each other by name and reputation… a recognition less common now, but some names were known. Conrad Mazian of Europe was a name Union knew to its regret; and Tom Edger of Australia was another; and Mika Kreshov of Atlantic, and Signy Mallory of Norway ; and all the rest of the Company captains, down to those of the rider-ships. They still served Earth and the Company, with less and less love of either. None of this generation was Earthborn; they received few replacements, none from Earth, none from the
stations in their territory either, for the stations feared obsessively for their neutrality in the war. Merchanters were their source of skilled crew and of troops, most of them unwilling.

  The Beyond had once begun with the stars nearest Earth and now it started with Pell, for the oldest stations were shut down as Earthward trade phased out and the pre-jump style of trade passed forever. The Hinder Stars were all forgotten, unvisited.

  There were worlds beyond Pell, beyond Cyteen, and Union had them all now, real worlds, of the far-between stars which jump could reach; where Union used the birth labs still to expand populations, giving them workers and soldiers. Union wanted all the Beyond, to direct what would be the course of the future of man. Union had the Beyond, all but the thin arc of stations which Mazian’s Fleet still thanklessly held for Earth and the Company, because they had once been set to do that, because they saw nothing they could do but that. At their backs was only Pell… and the mothballed stations of the Hinder Stars. Remoter still, isolate… sat Earth, locked in its inner contemplations and its complex, fragmented politics.

  No trade of substance came out of Sol now, or to it. In the insanity which was the War, free merchanters plied Unionside and Company Stars alike, crossed the battle lines at will, although Union discouraged that traffic by subtle harassments, seeking to cut Company supply.

  Union expanded and the Company Fleet just held on, worldless but for Pell which fed them, and Earth which ignored them. On Unionside, stations were no longer built on the old scale. They were mere depots for worlds now, and probes sought still further stars. They were generations which had never seen Earth… humans to whom Europe and Atlantic were creatures of metal and terror, generations whose way of life was stars, infinities, unlimited growth, and time which looked to forever. Earth did not understand them.