Visitor: A Foreigner Novel Read Online Free Page B

the early settlers. Geigi had had the benefit of advanced robotics design. His landers had had the ability to move and defend themselves on the ground, and to collect data in their immediate areas. They’d also scared hell out of the districts where they’d set up shop.
    Use
that
tech for dropping Reunioner baggage? Cut the timeframe in half with no special construction?
Hell,
yes.
    “Certainly sounds possible,” he said. Shipping and cargo were not, these days, his problem. He didn’t think about such things routinely. But, God—
    “Absolutely possible. We can carry passenger modules on every flight, and carry fragile cargo down in baggage, our object being to take
people
down, just people, no heirloom china, no wardrobe.”
    Relief hit, hard and welcome. Sometimes you had to shut down politics and talk to the engineers.
Every
flight reducing the political pressure up here. And Mospheira was about to bring another shuttle online, and start construction on a third. They
might
get to the long-promised flight a week. Currently, it was short of that. Considerably short, with mechanicals, and docking delays, and delays for inspection and maintenance.
    But did they truly dare restrict the flow of cargo? Two years of Murini’s shutdown of the space program had left them continually running to catch up. Everything, every plan had been thrown off course. Of course, bleeding away the jobless population of the station, the need for cargo going up would ease proportionally.
    How long
would
it take? The largest passenger module could handle fifty-one people in relative comfort. More, if packed tightly. Infants . . . God, babies. His felt the tension returning. Pregnant women. Infants. Women who had bred with abandon on the return flight, free at last, or so they believed, of the restrictions of the past ten years, and destined for peace and plenty. They’d extracted 4,043 individuals from Reunion. Released 4,149 to Alpha. How many were there now?
    He shut that thought down, concentrating on the purity of numbers. Figuring forty-three hundred total by the time the last flight . . . round figure: eighty-five flights.
    Eighty-five.
    “We’ll need
all
the shuttles . . .” Gin’s voice provided welcome relief from a sudden wave of panic.
    “The aiji has already agreed to allow the Reunioners to land on atevi shuttles.”
    “But not to settle in atevi territory.”
    “That, no.”
    “Settlement is going to be a hot issue on Mospheira,” Gin said. “The damned Heritage Party is going to squawk. Loudly. Lot of history there.”
    “Just what
is
the political temperature down there? I haven’t been able to ask the President his situation.
Can
he push this through?”
    “Mixed. He’s already claiming, in principle, that the Reunioners come under Mospheiran law, which makes them a Mospheiran responsibility and subject to Mospheiran decisions. There’ll be those who don’t like it, on both sides of the shuttle run, but no one down there,
no one,
is remotely interested in the Pilots’ Guild gaining an independent foothold anywhere in the system.”
    “No argument there . . . from anyone other than Braddock.”
    “The President plans to start the relocation process by decree, an emergency declaration. He’ll make it soon, let it play second to the headlines of the kyo visit, which is going to dominate the news every step of the way. I suggested, in my last communication with him, that we land Cajeiri’s three young
associates
first, along with their parents and relations, and not just to satisfy Tabini-aiji. This business with Tillington and Braddock is
going
to go public, no way not. Those kids are innocents, pawns in the affairs of three governments. They’re bright, they’re charming, and they’ll play well to the cameras. Getting them down first puts
their
faces instead of Braddock’son the Reunioner presence. It’ll remind Mospheirans they’re dealing with people needing a home, not Pilots’ Guild