Free Downbelow Station by C. J. Cherryh Page A

walked out of the room, feeling unclean. It was a manner of murder he was doing, an assistance in suicide. They had an abundance of those too, over in Q.
    iii
    Pell: sector orange nine: 5/20/52; 1900 hrs.
    Kressich winced at the crash of something down the hall, beyond the sealed door, tried not to show his terror. Something was burning, smoke reaching them through the ventilation system. That more frightened him, and the half hundred gathered with him in this section of hallway. Out on the docks the police and the rioters still fired at each other. The violence was subsiding. The few with him, the remainder of Russell’s own security police, a handful of elite stationers and a scattering of young people and old… they had held the hallway against the gangs.   “We’re afire,” someone muttered, on the edge of hysteria.   “Old rags or something,” he said; shut it up, he thought They did not need panic. In a major fire, station central would blow a section to put it out… death for all of them. They were not valuable to Pell. Some of them were out there shooting at Pell police with guns they had gotten off dead policemen. It had started with the knowledge that there was another convoy coming in, more ships, more desperate people to crowd into the little they had; had started with the simple word that this was about to happen… and a demand for faster processing of papers; then raids on barracks and gangs confiscating papers from those who did have them.
    Burn all records, the cry had gone out through quarantine, in the logic that, recordless, they would all be admitted. Those who would not yield up their papers were beaten and robbed of them; of anything else of value. Barracks were ransacked. Gangs of the ruffians who had forced Griffin and Hansford gained membership among the desperate, the young, the leaderless and the panicked.   There was quiet for a time outside. The fans had stopped; the air began to go foul. Among those who had seen the worst of the voyage, there was panic, quietly contained; a good number were crying.
    Then the lights brightened and a cool draft came through the ducts. The door whipped open. Kressich got to his feet and looked into the faces of station police, and the barrels of leveled rifles. Some of his own band had knives, sections of pipe and furniture, whatever weapons they had improvised. He had nothing… held up frantic hands.
    “No,” he pleaded. No one moved, not the police, not his own. “Please. We weren’t in it. We only defended this section from them. None… none of these people were involved. They were the victims.”
    The police leader, face haggard with weariness and soot and blood, motioned with his rifle toward the wall. “You have to line up,” Kressich explained to his ill-assorted companions, who were not the sort to understand such procedures, except only the ex-police. “Drop whatever weapons you have.” They lined up, even the old and the sick, and the two small children.
    Kressich found himself shaking, while he was searched and after, left leaning against the corridor wall while the police muttered mysteriously among themselves. One seized him by the shoulder, faced him about. An officer with a slate walked from one to the other of them asking for id’s.   “They were stolen,” Kressich said. “That’s how it started. The gangs were stealing papers and burning them.”
    “We know that,” the officer said. “Are you in charge? What’s your name and origin?”
    “Vassily Kressich, Russell’s.”
    “Others of you know him?”
    Several confirmed it. “He was a councillor on Russell’s Station,” said a young man. “I served there in security.”
    “Name.”
    The young man gave it. Nino Coledy. Kressich tried to recall him and could not.   One by one the questions were repeated, cross-examination of identifications, mutual identifications, no more reliable than the word of those who gave them. A man with a camera came into the hallway