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  The newcomers were in origin Tamils, from low on the Indian subcontinent. Their eyelids had no sign of an epicanthal fold—

  And more particularly, they were as unlikely to be citizens of Nevasa as were those folk in the front of the compartment

  "Pardon?" said the man. His smile was broad and as humorless as that of a man dying in convulsions. "I am Parvashtisinga Sadek and—"

  "Go back where you came from, slant-eye!"

  "Hey, you can leave the wife. I might have a use for her!"

  "Save the oldest girl, too!"

  Very deliberately, Franz Streseman got up from his seat He stood in the aisle, facing the Grantholm party with his legs spread and his hands crossed behind his back in a formal at-ease posture. He said nothing, but he met the eyes of any who looked his way.

  He heard the Tamils slip into seats behind him. The children began to chatter, but their parents shushed them. When Franz was sure that the last of them was settled, he walked forward two places and sat down again himself.

  "Hey, we're coming into the station," noted one of the Grantholm women who was looking out a side window to avoid having to note Franz Streseman's presence. As she spoke, the car shuddered with the thump, thump, of airlocks. The monorail had passed into the vast protected doughnut of Port Northern, encircling the open area where the starships landed. In the sudden stillness of the atmosphere, Franz felt the faint whine of drive pods braking the train.

  Shapes and bright light fluttered past the compartment's windows. The images slowed to become platforms—empty to the right, packed with passengers for the return trip on the left of the train—as the monorail decelerated to a crawl. Thrust pulled Franz forward against his grip on the handrail. The Sadek children squealed again, and the infant began to cry.

  The car shifted with a loud clack as the superconducting magnets shut down and the monorail touched its support rail for the first rime. The right-hand wall slid up and recessed into the car's roof. Warm, dry air bathed the passengers. The monorail's quiver had been too slight to notice during the high-speed run, but Franz noticed the absence now that they had come to a halt

  Baggage consoles were spaced a meter apart along the back wall of the platform, with a uniformed attendant waiting near each trio of machines. Franz didn't run, but he was young and alone. He made it to a console a half-step ahead of one of the Grantholm couples. The woman muttered to her husband as other members of their party spread across the consoles to either side.

  Franz placed the ID chip he wore as a signet on his left little finger in the slot of the routing machine. The holographic display fluoresced in a random pattern, then reformed with the images of eight sealed, cubic-meter crates and four ordinary suitcases. The crates sat beneath a red mask; the suitcases were outlined in blue.

  Franz nodded and pressed the pad of his thumb to the cursor pulsing on the immaterial screen. An attendant, a woman with a dark complexion and indeterminate features, stepped over to him and slipped her own chip into the paired slot of the console.

  She smiled professionally. "So, Mr. Streseman," she said. "You identify this luggage as yours and request that it be loaded aboard the Empress of Earth?"

  "That is correct," Franz said in the formal response to authority which had been ingrained in him since birth.

  "Eight pieces of hold baggage, four pieces to accompany you in your cabin. Would you like to make any changes now? You won't be able to do so once the vessel is under way."

  "No," Franz said. "That is correct. I am returning to Grantholm for military service. I will not have need of the items in my hold baggage until, until I resume my education."

  The luggage itself was in the lower compartment of one of the cars of the monorail. Robot systems would transfer it to the starliner, but there were practical as well as legal reasons for requiring passengers to identify their own property immediately before boarding.

  "Say, you're from Grantholm?" asked the woman behind Franz.

  "And you authorize Port Northern and Trident Starlines to examine these cases in any fashion they choose, Mr. Streseman?"

  "That is correct."

  The attendant placed her own thumbprint on the cursor, clearing the display. She removed her ID chip. "The Empress of Earth is at Berth 8, Mr. Streseman," she said in a slightly warmer tone. "Follow the blue arrows around the concourse if you don't know the way . . . but I don't think you'll have any difficulty seeing the Empress."

  Franz turned from the console. The Grantholm woman pushed past him but her husband said," 'Scuse me, buddy, but 1 heard you say you're one of the boys going home to teach Nevasa a lesson. I'm Hans Dickbinder."

  He stuck out his hand. He was a black-haired man, a centimeter or two shorter than Franz but thick and soft-looking.

  Franz clicked his heels and dipped his head in crisp acknowledgement. He did not appear to notice the man's outstretched hand. "And I am Franz Streseman," he said.

  He strode off to the head of the monorail platform, from which slidewalks led around the concourse.

  * * *

  "Welcome to Trident Village," murmured a disembodied voice speaking Universal as Lieutenant Wanda Holly walked through the authorized personnel only doorway. The badges Trident Starlines issued to emigrants when they paid their fares responded to UHF interrogation with the wearer's birth language. The greeting could have been in any of a thousand tongues.

  If Holly's ID chip had not identified her as a Trident Starlines official, the voice would have added, "Please wait here until someone arrives to serve you." The intruder would wait, because both blast-proof anteroom doors sealed at the moment of unauthorized entry.

  The door to the operations room collapsed open as Wanda stepped toward it Danalesco, wearing coveralls with emigrant staff on the cuffs and supervisor in a red field on his shoulders, was alone in the room. He looked up from his console and called, "Yo, Wanda! Good to see you again. I thought you were done with us peons since you got your second stripe."

  Wanda Holly wore a gray, one-piece fatigue uniform with the double stripes of a senior lieutenant on the cuffs. The upper stripe was twice the width of the lower, indicating that she was on the Staff Side, passenger matters, rather than Ship Side, navigation and control. On public occasions, Staff officers wore gleaming white, while the Ship officers were in dark blue which was less likely to focus the attention of a passenger.

  Around the Trident Starlines badge on her shoulder was the name of Wanda's vessel in script: Empress of Earth.

  "How's it going, Danny?" she said. Her voice was pleasant, but she was checking the systems board as she spoke. A dozen segments were in the amber, about par for the course; but three were redlined, and she couldn't have hidden her frown if she'd wanted to.

  "Cholera," Danalesco said apologetically. "Stage One passed them. We've sealed the affected dorm and the one on each side.

  "Blacklisted the labor supplier?" Wanda said. Only detachment prevented her voice from showing disapproval.

  "About three seconds after I sealed the dorms," the emigrant specialist replied. "Why don't you teach your grandmother to suck eggs, girl?"

  She smiled. "Sorry, Danny," she said. "I don't want a cholera outbreak . . . and I particularly don't want the client-side supervisor to refuse a shipment and leave me with four thousand runny assholes in Third Class till we get back to Earth."

  Wanda walked behind the console, shifting her viewpoint so that she could cover the panorama of Trident Village without interfering with the controls. It was Danalesco's unit, after all, though the decision as to whether or not to load a passenger or any number of passengers was made by the vessel's officers rather than members of the ground staff.

  "Forty-two hundred and five," said Danalesco. "No, I'm a liar—seven. Three births and a death,"

  Wanda looked over sharply again. Danalesco spread his hands. "Hey, healthy twenty-three-year-old male, blew out an embolism. Not contagious, girl. Ease off."

  She shrugged and forced another smile. "
This is the part that scares me, Danny. It's like loading sardines. If there's one bad fish here, four thousand are bad at the far end."

  "So send Kropatchek," the supervisor said with a chuckle. "This is the Third Officer's work, after all. And don't worry about the cholera. Your full load had processed through to the output side before that lot was admitted."

  "Kropatchek quit us this voyage," Wanda said as she eyed the screens. "He got an offer from Consolidated Voyagers and left us on Nevasa. He's to be First Officer on one of their combination packets on the Earth-Wellspring-Nevasa Triangle."

  Trident Village was a huge operation; more accurately, two large operations. Would-be emigrants arrived at the input side, either individually or in batches of up to a thousand delivered by a labor contractor. They were housed in barrack blocks one stage better than prison accommodations while they were bathed and examined, and the strictly-limited volume of their baggage was checked and sterilized.

  When the emigrants were cleared, they were marched by blocks—now called Loading Units on internal documentation—to the output side of Trident Village. Output side was the finest living and social environment that most of the emigrants had ever seen in their lives. It was vanishingly improbable that any of them would see its like again.

  On the output side, shops provided cheap, high-quality clothing, information on various destinations, and social events which integrated frightened individuals into groups with their own pride and ethic. Group identity would help the emigrants on their long voyage and ease their life on the world which received them.

  "Tsk, he'll be staging out of Port Southern," Danalesco said. "I could never do that. The facilities are all right, I suppose, but I'd have to root up my family and move from Metro Chicago. Is Kropatchek married?"

  "Yeah, but I don't think that's very high on his list of priorities," Wanda said drily. "Red thinks he's god's gift to women."

  The shops around the Trident Village concourse were closed. Fairy lights drifted from lamp standards, providing a friendly, private illumination for the group dance going on. Traditional patterns formed and rotated, while the aurora borealis rippled the sky overhead.

  "Chinese this time?" she asked. She was a pretty woman without being a stunner: of average height and a little too conscious of her weight to be comfortable about it. At the moment she was wearing her hair short and a color close to orange, but she would change back to her natural light brown before boarding the Empress on the outbound voyage.

  "That's right," agreed the supervisor. "Thirty-five hundred for Biscay, the rest to Hobilo." He cleared his throat. "You don't think Kropatchek is god's gift to women?"

  "Depends on the woman, I suppose," Wanda said. "I didn't notice that Red ever lacked for company."

  Trident Village was not solely a humanitarian gesture, though there might have been some of that also. Even the largest corporations are run by humans, and humans not infrequently have humane whims.

  There were business reasons for the solicitude as well. Most of the Third Class emigrants didn't pay their own fare: that was arranged by the recipient world, working through labor contractors. But, while the emigrants themselves were unlikely ever to make another interstellar journey, they did send letters back to family members and compatriots about the way they had been treated en route to their new life.

  Urban slums and back-country villages accounted for virtually the whole of labor emigration, splitting the total down the middle in an average year. Word-of-mouth was the only form of advertising which worked in either environment.

  Trident Starlines was willing to spend a little effort to encourage contractors to use its hulls because, though the fare per head was relatively low, four thousand Third Class passengers together paid the round-trip running costs of the Empress of Earth. Figures for smaller Trident Starlines vessels were in proportion. The First and Second Class fares became pure profit when steerage was full.

  "We're breaking in a new Third Officer this run," Wanda said. She opened an unoccupied console with her ID chip and began to run the medical profiles of the emigrants slated to embark on the Empress of Earth. She kept her finger on the scroll button, pausing the display only when someone spiked above the normal parameters. In each case that she checked, Wanda found that the individual was a member of a family group of four or more.

  The recipient worlds could afford to take a few grandparents. Besides, old folks were useful to watch the infants while all the younger adults in the community were working.

  "Well, I'm glad to have you back for one load, Wanda," Danalesco said in a mild, serious tone. "You're tough, but you ought to be. Some of the officers coming through, they act like Third was mud and me and my people were just janitors. That's not right."

  He nodded toward the village dance. From the edges of the concourse, Emigrant Staff officials watched helpfully. Danalesco's personnel wore light cotton garments like those of the emigrants, with only saucer hats and Trident Starlines badges to set them apart from those they directed.

  "They're people," Danalesco went on. "They oughta be treated like people, at least by us. When they get to Biscay or wherever, well, that's out of our hands."

  "Yeah, well, this lot looks pretty good," the woman said. "The way it always does when it's on your shift, Danny."

  "My pleasure," the supervisor replied, his tone underlining the truth of the words. "Know anything about the new guy? Somebody I've worked with in the past on other ships?"

  Wanda removed her chip to shut the console down. "I don't think so, Danny," she said. "His name's Colville, Randall Colville. He's been with Trident for twelve years, which is something, but this is his first run from an Earth homeport."

  Danalesco raised an eyebrow. "And they're putting him on the Empress?" he said.

  Wanda laughed. "There's planets out there besides Earth, Danny," she said. "He spent a year and a half as First Officer on the Princess Trader out of Learoyd and Mithgarth, so he's got experience."

  As Wanda opened her mouth to continue, her ear clip dinged a pure bell note. "Umph," she muttered, and attached the coil of hair-fine flex from the commo pod on her belt to a jack on the console. An artificial intelligence in Trident Starlines' central office clicked out orders in an emotionless female voice.

  Wanda released the flex and stepped back. "Duty calls," she told Danalesco. "Colville's arrived in the terminal, and I'm to check him aboard the Empress."

  "Good luck with him," the supervisor said.

  Wanda crooked a grin at Danalesco. "Whatever that means," she said.

  A passenger liner was taking off into the midnight sky. Its motors and those of the coupled tugs threw harsh shadows across the emigrants dancing on the concourse.

  * * *

  The terminal's top level was for crews and ground operations personnel alone. The floor was of a resilient, sound-deadening synthetic, practical but plain, save for the paths worn pale across it by decades of feet. There were elevators, slidewalks and communications booths, but Top Level had none of the frills and retail shops that packed the lower, passenger, concourses. x

  There was a great deal of open space, and there was an unmatched view of the Empress of Earth through the clear wall fronting the inner docks. Ran Colville walked along slowly, staring greedily at the vast bulk. He knew that he was attracting amused attention from the handful of uniformed personnel on the slidewalks, but he didn't particularly care.

  The Empress of Earth wasn't beautiful, exactly, but she was magnificent. This was Ran's first look at her, and he was more concerned with that than with the image he projected to strangers he'd never see again.

  Bulk freight was sometimes carried between the stars in nickel-iron asteroids, ballooned to colossal size by controlled fusion jets, but interstellar passenger liners were far and away the most massive constructions humans had ever designed to fly within an atmosphere. The Empress of Earth and the Brasil of Consolidated Voyagers, operating from Port Southern in Antarctica, were the largest of the st
arliners.

  Though Trident and Consolidated were fiercely competitive across a wide variety of routes, there was a tacit agreement at the top of the commercial pyramid: the Empress of Earth and the Brasil sailed the same nine-planet route from Earth to Tblisi, but on inverted schedules. When one of the superships left Earth, the other was lifting off from Tblisi on her return voyage.

  The Empress of Earth was a commercial venture, but she and her giant rival were also ships of state. The government of Federated Earth preferred not to interfere in the operations of private companies, but the greatest starliners in the known universe were representatives of Earth, like it or no. When the giant vessels were nearing completion three years before, quiet representations to the directors of Trident and Consolidated made it clear that the interests of humanity and civilization required that the ships be operated in tandem rather than in cut-throat competition. The government would see to those interests if the companies did not.

  The companies quickly announced complementary schedules for their flagships. The decision benefited all concerned. Neither line had a vessel that could comfortably pair with their giant to create a balanced flow of trade instead of a series of indigestible pulses. Few members of the public even considered that there might have been another possibility . . . .

  Wherever possible, the bureaucracy of Federated Earth worked on the principles of indirection and deniability. Nonetheless, the bureaucracy worked very well.

  The Empress of Earth was a huge cylinder lying on its side. She was supported by the full-length outriggers she deployed when counter-thrust and air resistance had scrubbed off enough velocity in the upper atmosphere. On a solid surface, the lower curve of the hull didn't touch the ground. The thin soil of Biscay left yellow streaks meters high on the metal. These were steamed off during each landing on Calicheman, where a lake absorbed the raw power of starliners landing without tugs.

  Teams pairing ground personnel with members of the ship's crew examined the docking bitts, the great hooks to which the tugs attached their cables. The motors of the Empress of Earth were powerful enough to lift the vessel at full load from a gravity well deeper than Earth's, but at that level of operation, the magnetic flux would be concentrated enough to sever the molecular bonds of bedrock. Normally, and always on Earth, tugs balanced a majority of the vessel's weight during lift-off and descent. The bitts which took that strain were tested by sonics and electrofluxing after each use—but they were also eyeballed by trained personnel who might notice corrosion or pitting before the hardware did. v