Between the regular traffic, another set of people lined the stairways. Some of them held out begging cups or empty hands. Most of them, though, only huddled on their blankets in the middle of their bundles of belongings. Beleraja didn’t want to stare, but she couldn’t help glancing down. Mostly they were normal human faces—all the shades of brown, beige, and pink, tight with embarrassment, worry, or embattled dignity. Here and there she saw tumors, drastically shortened arms, a twisted foot, or an enlarged head and sunken eyes. There she saw an old man trembling and trying to hide it under layers of coats. Here she saw a child let its head fall onto one side as if the child lacked the strength to hold it upright. A hunched, pale woman, probably the child’s mother, caught Beleraja staring and glowered at her, looking like she might spit if she hadn’t known it was forbidden.
Refugees. Beleraja’s family fleet patrolled the best jump points around Athena looking for the ships as they came in. But that meant covering hundreds of millions of kilometers of space, with only ten ships and a limited array of beacons and satellites. All the Called knew that Pandora was working on the cure to the Diversity Crisis, and many of them decided not to wait until that cure, whatever it was, came out to their ravaged worlds.
Beleraja had gotten Director Shontio to ram through a policy of giving temporary shelter to those refugees who could pay at least for their air and water. Much of her time was taken up in arranging with shipper families to take these refugees to whatever surviving worlds would have them. What surprised and frightened her was how few worlds would take anybody, even with their own populations on the brink of extinction. They feared importing yet more disease, many of them said. But some would not bring in anyone who would not convert to their way of life. They would die before they let in strangers.
And then there were those refugees who refused to go. Beleraja sighed as she reached the directorate level and cranked open its hatch. Even after all these years, Father Mihran’s description of the Called and its handmade problems rang in her head as all too true.
There were even rumors that some of the shipper families were taking large payments to outfit refugee ships and point them in the right direction. Beleraja and Director Shontio sent a fresh petition to the Council of Cities out with every ship, asking them to help quash the practice. When the replies came back, they always swore no such thing was happening, and that if it was, of course they’d stop it.
Even before today, Beleraja had stopped believing them.
The crowds remained thick all the way to the hub and the directorate offices. In Shontio’s favor, he had not tried to shove the problem away from himself personally. The directorate corridors were as filled as the stairways had been with staff, citizens, and the hallway people the long-term station residents called “airheads.”
Beleraja walked through the rings of administrative and security checks without challenge. The director’s door registered her presence and opened for her automatically. Shontio kept a standard office—fully wired desk, guest seat, refreshment case. A pot of variegated ivy stood on the corner of the desk, just about the only greenery on the station outside the farming levels.
Shontio sat behind his desk. The wall screens around him showed crowd control at a corridor juncture, a cafeteria full to overflowing, the line outside one of the medical bays. He swiveled his chair around as she entered and traced a command pattern on his desktop. The walls blanked, and Beleraja was grateful. She still felt emotionally overburdened from the refugee ship Menasha had walked her through, and from all the realizations that had come to her afterward.
“So…” Shontio ran one hand across his copper-colored scalp. The station fashion was to wear your hair short, even shaven. If Shontio allowed his hair to grow out, it would probably be a shaggy gray mane. His bright red, high-necked jacket was perpetually rumpled these days. Its gold trim was fraying and the buttons were dim. “Did the refugees pay Commander Menasha to bring them here?”
“Worse,” Beleraja said, throwing herself into one of Shontio’s guest chairs. “The Authority paid her to bring them here.”
Shontio stared at her for a moment while her words sank in. “Why?”
“To put pressure on Pandora,” she said simply. She was tired. Tired of the refugees and all their desperation, tired of the Council of Cities and its stupid maneuvering, tired of seeing her family, her husband, one month out of every twelve, and tired of watching the never-ending crises wear Shontio slowly down.
Shippers did not make friends easily outside their families. When you came to a place just once ever five local years, relationships became a constant reconciling of blurred memories with new realities. But her family had docked at Athena Station at least once every two local years the entire time she was growing up, so her friendship with Shontio had a rare continuity, and she prized it. It was one of the reasons she had taken the Pandoran contract in the first place.