THE old man went away. Dekker heard him or his partner moving about. He heard the shower going, over the fan and the pump noises in the pipes beside his head. The ship was stable. That was a feeling he had thought he would never have again. He had dimmed the lights, cut off everything he could and nursed it as far as he could til the ’cyclers went and the water fouled.
And here he was free of the stimsuit, light as a breeze and vulnerable to the chill and the lack of g. He was off his head, he knew that: he scared the people who had rescued him, he knew that too, and he tried not to do it, but they scared him. They talked about owning his ship. They might kill him, might just let him die and tell the company sorry, they hadn’t been able to help that.
Maybe they couldn’t. Maybe he shouldn’t care any longer. He was tired, he hurt, body and soul, and living took more work than he was sure he wanted to spend again on anything. He had no idea how long and how far a run was still in front of him getting home. He didn’t think he could stand being treated like this all the way. Everything smelled of disinfectant, and sometimes it was his ship and sometimes it was theirs.
But Cory never answered him wherever he was, and at times he knew she wouldn’t.
The old man drifted up into his sight again, put a straw in his mouth and told him to drink. He did. It tasted of copper. The old man asked him what had happened to his partner. Then he remembered—how could he have forgotten?—that she was out there and that ship was, he could see it coming—
“No!” he cried, and winced when it hit, he knew it was going to hit, the collision alert was screaming. He yelled into the mike, “My partner’s out there!” because it was the last thing he could think of to tell them.
“Your partner’s dead!” somebody yelled at him, and another voice, angry, yelled, “Shut up, dammit, Ben! You got no damn feelings, give the guy a chance. God!”
He was still alive and he did not understand how he had survived. He hauled himself to the radio, he held on against the spin as long as he had strength. “Cory,” he called on the suit-com frequency, over and over again, while the ship tumbled. Maybe she answered. His ears rang so he couldn’t hear the fans or the pumps. But he kept calling her name, so she would know he was alive and looking for her, that he’d get help to her somehow…
As soon as he could get the damned engines to fire.
Or as soon as he could get hold of Base and make that ship out there answer him…
Ben said, “We’re due salvage rights, whether he’s company or a freerunner, no legal difference. It’s right in the company rules, I’ll show you—”
Bird said, carefully, because he wanted Ben to understand him: “We’ll get compensated.”
“Maritime law since—”
“There’s the law and there’s what’s right, Ben.”
“Right is, we own that ship, Bird. He wasn’t in control of it, that’s what right says.”
Ben was short of breath. He was yelling. Bird said, calmly, sanely, “I’m trying to tell you, there’s a lot of complications here. Let’s just calm down. We’ve got weeks yet back to Base, plenty of time to figure this out, and we’ll talk about it. But we’re not getting any damn where if we don’t get our figures in and tell Mama to get us the hell home. Fast.”
“So how much are you going to spend on this guy?. A month’s worth of food? Medical supplies? We’re going to bust our ass and risk our rigging for this guy?”
Bird had no answer. He couldn’t think of one to cut this off.
“This is my money too, Bird. It’s my money you’re spending. Maybe you own this ship, maybe I’m just a part-share partner, but I have some say here.” Ben flung a gesture toward Dekker, aft. “That guy’s going to live or he’s going to die. In either case he’s going to do it before the month is up. Much as I want to be rid of him, there’s no need busting our tails—we have double mass to move, Bird, and hell if I’m dumping the sling—”
“All right, we’re not dumping the sling. Not ours, not his either, if we can avoid it.”
“And we’re not putting any hard push on the rigging. There’s no point in risking our necks. Or putting wear on the pins and the lines. We don’t call this a life-and-death. We can’t cut that much time off. And hell if I want to meet a rock the way this guy did.”
It made better sense than a lot else Ben had been saying. Bird took that for hopeful and nodded. “I’ll go with you on that. A hard push could do more harm than good for him, too.”
“Guy’s going to die anyway.”
“He’s not going to die,” Bird said. “For God’s sake, just shut up, he can hear you.”
“So if he doesn’t? A month gets him well, and we pull into station and he looks healthy and he says sure he was managing that ship just fine—”
“Just let it alone, Ben!”
“I’m going to get pictures.”
“Get your pictures.” Bird shook his head, wishing he could say no, wishing he had some way to reason with Ben, but if getting a vid record would make Ben happier, God, let him have the pictures. “We have the condition of that ship out there, we have the log records over there—”
“Charts—” Ben exclaimed, as if that was a new idea.
“We’re not touching that log. No way. That part of the law I know.”
“I’m not talking about that. Look—look, I got an idea.”
An idea was welcome. Bird watched doubtfully as Ben punched up the zone schema, pointed on the screen to the’driver ship and its fire-path to the Well, the same thing that scared them even to contemplate. “That’s got a medic. That’s got a friggin’ company captain in charge. We just ask Mama to boost us over there just across the line and they can take official possession.”
“Damn right they would. The company doesn’t run a charity.”
“It’s an Rl ship! They’re obligated to take him. They have no choice. The law says a ’driver is a Base: they can log us right there for a find if we bring it in, and this is a find, isn’t it? Same as a rock. We can turn it in, money in the bank, and we can apply to do some clean-up along with its tenders for the rest of our run—that’s damn good money. Sure money. And we got the best excuse going.”
“Ben, that’s a ’driver captain you’re talking about. They don’t have to do anything. You want him to tell us we’ve still got to turn around and take this guy in to Base, maybe clean to Rl, if he takes it in his head—he can do that. You want him to tell us he’ll hold Eighty-four Zebra for us—and then contest his fees in court when he shows up three years from now with one hell of a haulage charge? We got this run to pay for, we got serious questions to answer, because there’s a whole lot that’s not right about this, and I’m not taking my chances with any Court of Inquiry back at Base with all the evidence stuck out on a ’driver that for all we know isn’t coming in for three or four more years. If you want to talk law, now, let’s be practical!”
Ben’s mouth shut.
“A ’driver does any damn thing it wants to. Three years’ dockage charges, supposing they’re on the start of their run. Three years’ haulage. You want to try to pry a claim away from the company then? Not mentioning the cost of getting it there. We’re short as is. You want to hear them say ferry it back ourselves anyway? Twice the distance? Or get us drafted into its tender crew on a permanent basis? You know what they charge a freerunner for fuel?”
Ben looked very sober during all of this. Ben bit his lip. “So that’s out. You know, we could just sort of knock that fellow on the head. Solve everybody’s problem.”
Ben, who was scared to death of looking at a body.
“Yeah, sure,” Bird said.
And from aft: “What time is it? What’s the time?”
Ben glanced up. “Now what does he want?”
Bird checked his watch. “2310,” he shouted back.
“I want my watch.”
“God,” Ben muttered, shaking his head. “We have four weeks of this guy?”
“I want my watch!”
Ben yelled: “Shut up, dammit, you’re not keeping any appointments anyway!”
“Patience,” Bird said, but Ben shoved off in Dekker’s direction. Bird sailed after, arrived as Dekker said quietly,
“I need my watch.”
Ben said: “You don’t need your watch, you’re not going anywhere. It’s 23 damn 10 in my sleep, mister, you’re using our air and our fuel and our time already, so shut up.”
“Ben, just take it easy.”
“I’ll shut him up with a wrench.”
“Ben.”
“All right, all right, all right.” Ben took off again.
Dekker said, “I can’t see my watch.”
Bird floated over where he could read the time on Dekker’s watch. “2014. You’re about three hours slow.”
“No.”
“That’s what it says.”
“What day is it?”
“May 20.”
“You’re lying to me!”
“Bird,” Ben said ominously, and came drifting up again to reach for Dekker, but Bird grabbed him.
“I can’t take four weeks of that, Bird, I swear to you, this guy’s already on credit with me already.”
“Give me a little slack, will you? Shut it down. Shut it up. Hear me?”
“I’ve dealt with crazies,” Ben muttered. “I’ve seen enough of them.”
“Fine. Fine. We get this guy out of a tumble, he’s been whacked about the head, he’s a little shook, Ben, d’you think you wouldn’t be, if you’d been through what he has?”
Ben stared at him, jaw clamped, grievous offense in every line of his face.
Ben was in the middle of his night. That was so. Ben was tired and Ben had been spooked, and Ben didn’t understand weakness in anybody else.
Serious personality flaw, Bird thought. Dangerous personality flaw.
He watched Ben go back to his work without a word.
Good partner in some ways. Damned efficient. Good with rocks.
But different. Belter-born, for one thing, never talked about his relatives. Brought up by the corporation, for the corporation.
Talk to Ben about Shakespeare, Ben’d say, What shift does he work?
Say, I come from Colorado—Ben’d say, Is that a city?
But Ben didn’t really know what a city was. You couldn’t figure how Ben read that word.
Say, I went up to Denver for the weekend, and Ben’d look at you funny, because weekend was another thing that didn’t translate. Ben wouldn’t ask, either, because Ben didn’t really want to know: he couldn’t spend it and he wasn’t going there and never would and that was the limit of Ben’s interest.
Ask Ben about spectral analysis or the assay and provenance of a given chunk of rock and he’d do a thirty-minute monologue.
Damn weird values in Belt kids’ mindsets. Sometimes Bird wondered. Right now he didn’t want to know.
Right now he was thinking he might not want Ben with him next trip. Ben was a fine geologist, a reliable hold-her-steady kind of pilot, and honest in his own way.
But he had some scary dark spots too.
Maybe years could teach Ben what a city was. But God only knew if you could teach Ben how to live in one.
Bird was seriously pissed. Ben had that much figured, and that made him mad and it made him nervous. He approved of Bird, generally. Bird knew his business, Bird had spent thirty years in the Belt, doing things the hard way, and Ben had had it figured from the time he was 14 that you never got anywhere working for the company if you weren’t in the executive track or if you weren’t a senior pilot: he had never had the connections for the one and he hadn’t the reflexes for the other, so freerunning was the choice… where he was working only for himself and where what you knew made the difference.
He had come out of the Institute with a basic pilot’s license and the damn-all latest theory, had the numbers and the knowledge and everything it took. The company hadn’t been happy to see an Institute lad go off freerunning, instead of slaving in its offices or working numbers for some company miner, and most Institute brats wouldn’t have had the nerve to do what he’d done: skimp and save and live in the debtor barracks, and then bet every last dollar on a freerunner’s outfitting; most kids who went through the Institute didn’t have the discipline, didn’t refrain from the extra food and the entertainment and the posh quarters you could opt for. They didn’t even get out of the Institute undebted, thank God for mama’s insurance; and even granted they did all that, most wouldn’t have had the practical sense to know, if they did decide to go mining and not take a job key-pushing in some office, that the game was not to sign up with some shiny-new company pilot in corp-rab, who had perks out to here. Hell, no, the smart thing was to hunt the records for the old independent who had made ends meet for thirty years, lean times and otherwise.
Namely Morris Bird.
Freerunning was the only wide gamble left in the Belt—and freerunners, being from what they were, didn’t have the advantage of expert, up-to-date knowledge from the Institute—plus the Assay Office. But with Morrie Bird’s thirty years of running the Belt, his old charted pieces were bigger than you got nowadays, distributed all along the orbital track, and he got chart fees on those every month, the company didn’t argue with his requests to tag, and those old charted pieces kept coming round again, in the way of rocks that looped the sun fast and slow. Sometimes those twenty-four- and twelve-year-old pieces might have been perturbed, and if somebody tried to argue about the claim, your numbers had to be solid after all those years—besides which, to find the good chaff that might remain to be found, you had to have more than guesswork. That was the pitch he had to offer along with 20 k interest-free to finance some equipment Bird badly needed; that was why Bird should take a greenie for a numbers man in a time when experienced miners went begging: company training, the science and the math and the complete Belt charts that Assay got to see—and they had done damned well as a team—damned well, til they’d got one of those absolutely miserable draws Mama sometimes handed you—a sector where there just wasn’t much left to find but a handful of company-directed tags on some company-owned rocks.
So right now they were in a financial slump, Bird was under a strain, and Bird had odd touchy spots Ben never had been able to figure—all of which this Dekker had evidently hit on with his crazy behavior and his pretty-boy looks. Dekker was up there in their sleeping nook mumbling about losing his partner (damned careless of him!) and now Bird was mad at him, acting as if it was his fault the guy was alive and the find that might have been their big break turned out complicated.
Maybe, he thought, Bird did want that ship as much as he did, maybe Bird was equally upset that this fellow was alive, Bird having this ethic about helping people—Bird might well be confused about what he was feeling.
Dangerous attitude to spread around, Ben thought, this charity business—and unfair, when Bird even thought about forgoing that ship for somebody who owed him and not the other way around, at his own partner’s expense. It was a way for Bird to get had, and a man as free-handed as Bird was needed help from a partner with a lasting reason to keep him in one piece.
“Bird?” he called out from the workstation. “I got your prelim calc. No complications but that ’driver and our mass.”
Bird came over to him, Bird said he’d finish it up and call Mama. Bird touched him on the shoulder in a confusingly friendly way and said, “Get some sleep.”
Ben said, because he thought it might make Bird happier, “You. I’m wired.” At the bottom of his motives was the thought that a little time next to Dekker’s constant mumbling about Cory and his watch might make Bird a little less charitable to strangers.
But Bird said, “You. You’re the one needs it most.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means what it means. You’re tired. You’ve worked your ass off Get some rest.”
“I don’t think I’ll sleep right off. That guy makes me nervous. This whole situation makes me nervous.”
“Bad day. Hard day.”
He decided Bird was being sane again. He was relieved. “You know,” he said, “we might just ought to get a statement out of this guy. You know. Besides pictures. I’m going to get a tape of this whole damn What-time-is-it? routine, show what we got to cope with. Might just prove our case.”
Bird shook his head.
“Bird, for God’s sake.”
“Ben,” he said firmly.
Ben did not understand. He flatly did not understand.
“Just go easy on him,” Bird said.
“So what’s he to us?”
“A human being.”
“That’s no damn recommendation,” Ben muttered. But it was definitely a mistake to argue with Bird in his present mood: Bird owned the ship. Ben shook his head. “I’ll just get the pictures.”
“You don’t understand, do you?”
“Understand what?”
“What if it was you out there?”
“I wouldn’t be in that damn mess, Bird! You wouldn’t be.”
“You’re that sure.”
“I’m sure.”
“Ben, you mind my asking—what ever happened to your folks?”
“What’s that to do with it?”
“Did they ever make a mistake?”
“My mama wasn’t the pilot.—That ship’s not going to be book mass, with that tank rupture. Center of mass is going to be off, too. Need to do a test burn in a little while, all right? I don’t want to leave anything to guesswork.”
“Yeah. Fine. Nothing rough. Remember we have a passenger.”
Ben frowned at him, and kept his mouth shut.
Bird said, pulling closer, “I got to tell you, Ben, right up front, we’re not robbing this poor sod. He’s got enough troubles. Hear me? Don’t you even be thinking about it.”
“It’s not robbing. It’s perfectly legal. It’s your rights, Bird, same as he has his. The same as he’d take his, if things were the other way around. That’s the way the system is set up to work.”
“There’s rights, and there’s what is right.”
“He’s not your friend! He’s not even anybody’s friend you know. Bird, for God’s sake, you got a major break here. Breaks like this don’t just fall into your lap, and they’re nothing if you don’t make them work for you. That’s why there’s laws—to even it up so you can work with people the way they are, Bird, not the way you want them to be.”
“You still have to look in mirrors.”
“What’s mirrors to do with anything?”
“If we’re due anything, we’re due the expenses.”
“Expenses, hell! We’re due haulage, medical stuff, chemkit, and a fat salvage fee at minim, we’re due that whole damn ship, is what we’re due, Bird.”
“It won’t work.”
“Hell if it won’t work, Bird! I’ll show it to you in the code. You want me to show it to you in the code?”
Bird looked put out with him. Bird said, with a sigh, “I know the rules.”
Bird had him completely puzzled. He took a chance, asked: “Bird,—have I done something wrong?”
“No. Just give me warning on that burn. I’m going to shoot some antibiotics into our passenger, get him a little more comfortable.”
Ben said, vexed, figuring to argue it later, “Better keep a running tab on the stuff, if that’s the way you’re playing it.”
“There isn’t any damn tab, Ben! Quit thinking like a computer. The guy can have kidney and liver damage, he can have fractures, he can be concussed. You can calc a nice gentle burn while you’re at it. We’re not doing any sudden moves with him.”
“All right. Fine. Slow and easy.” Ben tapped the stylus at the keys, with temper boiling up in him as Bird left—downright hurt, when it came to it. He tapped it several times on the side of the board, shoved away from the toehold and caught up with Bird’s retreat. “Bird, dammit, what in hell have I done?”
Bird looked at him as if he were adding things in his head.
Maybe, Ben thought, maybe Bird just didn’t like to be argued with. Or maybe it was that pretty-boy face of Dekker’s. Dekker was a type he thoroughly detested, because for some people there didn’t need to be any sane reason to do them favors, didn’t matter they were dumb as shit or that they’d cut your throat for their advantage, people believed them because they looked good and they talked smooth. It suddenly dawned on him that Bird was acting soft-headed about this guy with no good reason; and he decided maybe Bird taking care of Dekker himself wasn’t a good idea at all. He said, quickly, quietly, “It’s the bank I’m worried about. And this guy’s intentions. He’s not in his right zone. He’s a long way from it. We don’t know him. Maybe he was thrown here, maybe he wasn’t. We don’t know what he is. He could be some drop-off from the rebels—”
“There aren’t any jackers, Ben. And he isn’t any rebel. What’s he going to spy on? A ship you can see from deep out with any decent optics? You’ve heard too many stories.”
“All right, all right, he’s one of the good guys. You want him tucked in safe and sound, you want a dose of broad-spectrum stuff and maybe some vitamins in him, I’ll take care of it. You set up the burn.”
“You’re already running on it.”
“I said I’ll take care of him!”
Ben kited off toward the med cabinet, and Bird’s first thought was, So maybe I talked some human sense into him. And then, cynically: Maybe at least he figures he’s precarious with me right now, and covering his ass is all he’s doing. You don’t change a man that fast.
Then he saw Ben fill a hypo and thought, God, he wouldn’t!
Bird kicked off from the touch strip and sailed up beside Ben. “I’ll do it.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
Bird snatched at the bottle. It floated free. It turned label-side toward him as he caught it and it was antibiotic Ben had been loading.
Ben scowled at him. “You’re acting crazy, Bird. You’re acting seriously crazy, you know that?”
“I’ll handle it,” Bird said. “Just wait on that burn a few minutes.”
Ben scowled at him, shoved off from the cabinet and sailed backward toward the workstation. Offended, Bird thought, with a twinge of irritation and of conscience at once—not sure what Ben really had intended. Ben had no patience or sympathy for Dekker or anyone else—so he’d thought.
Or was it just plain jealousy Ben was showing?
Ben belted back in at his keyboard. Ben was not looking at him, pointedly not looking at him.
Bird kicked off to the side, drifted up to Dekker—Dekker looked to be asleep, Bird hoped that was all. At least he’d given up asking what time it was. Bird popped him on the arm with the back of one hand.
Dekker waked with a start and an outcry.
“Polybact,” Bird said, showing him the needle. “You got any allergies?”
Dekker shook his head muzzily. Bird gave him the shot, snagged the Citrisal pack out of the pipes where air currents had sent it, uncapped the stem and put it in Dekker’s mouth.
Dekker took a sip or two. Turned his head. “That’s all.”
“We’re going to do a test burn. After that we’ll be doing a 140, going to catch a beam home. Has to be our Base, understand, unless we get other instructions. We’re out of R2.”
Dekker looked at him hazily. “No. No hospital. 79, 709, 12. That’s where we were. We had a find—big find. Big find. I’ll sign it to you. Just go there. Pick my partner up.”
“Your partner was outside when the accident happened?”
Dekker nodded.
“What happened? Catch a rock?” It happened. Usually to new crews.
Another nod. Dekker’s eyes were having trouble tracking. “Kilometer wide. Iron content.”
Freerunning miners didn’t find nickel-iron rocks that big. Rocks that big had been mapped by optics: those rocks all had long-standing numbers, they belonged to the company, and if they were rich, they got ’drivers assigned to them, they got chewed in pieces, and they streamed to the recovery zone at the Well by bucketloads. But Bird didn’t argue that point: Dekker didn’t seem highly reasonable at the moment, and he only said, “A whole k wide. You’re sure of that.”
“It’s the truth,” Dekker said. “We got a tag on it. Uncharted rock. You can have it, if you’ll go back there and find her.”
“Cory’s a her.”
“Cory. Yes.” He was going out again. “God, go back. Go back there, listen to me, anything you want…”
“You want another sip?” Bird asked, but Dekker was out again, gone. Bird shoved off and arrowed down to grab a handhold by Ben’s workstation, but Ben said:
“I’m already ahead of you. Man said 79, 709, 12? No signal in that direction but the ’driver.”
Nothing but the ’driver, Bird thought. God. “Hear any tag?”
Ben shook his head.
Bird bit his lip, wondering—
Wondering, dammit, how long that particular ’driver had been there. A while, damned sure. But Mama only told you what you needed. You could work out the rest from what you could gather with your own ears and your radar, but who wanted to?
Who, in a question about a company tag and a private claim,—wanted to?
Ben said in a low voice, “Do you suppose that fool tried to skim the company on a rock that size?”
Bird thought, I want out of here.
But what he argued to Ben was: “We just don’t ask. We don’t know anything and we sure as hell aren’t getting in their way. Whatever claim’s out there already has a ’driver attached.”
“Makes other claims kind of moot, doesn’t it?”
“Don’t even ask.”
Company prerogatives, secret company codes and direct accesses—company ships could talk back and forth at will; bet your life they could.
And count that that ’driver ship was armed—if you counted a kilometer-long mass driver as a lethal weapon, and Bird personally did. You didn’t want to argue right of way or ownership with a ’driver captain. They were ASTEX to the core and they were a breed—next to God.
Ben said, “Told you we should have left this guy on the other side of the lock. It’s still not too late.”
“Cut the jokes. It wasn’t funny the first time.”
“Bird, there’s a hell of a lot more than he’s telling. Big find, hell. They were skimming a company claim.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Well, that’s all I want to know. Suddenly I’m damn glad we haven’t been talking to that ’driver. I don’t like this, damn, I don’t.”
“I don’t know anything. You don’t know anything. We didn’t look at that log. Thank God. Let’s just get us out of here.”
“We could offer to give evidence.”
“We don’t know what we’re swearing to. We don’t know what happened.”
“We could look in that log.”
“Sure, a skimmer’s going to log his moves. What’s he going to write? ‘1025 and we just blew a chip off a 1 k rock’? If we touch that panel over there we’ll leave a record of that access, and maybe that’s not a good idea. Do I spell it out? Don’t be a fool.”
“I can fix that log. I think I can bypass that access record if you really want to know.”
“Don’t depend on it. ‘Think’ isn’t good enough. No. We don’t run that risk. Best claim we’ve got is that we haven’t seen those records and we don’t know a thing. We don’t have a problem if we just keep clean. No shady stuff. Nothing. Clean, Ben.”
“Knock that guy in the head,” Ben muttered. “Be sure there’s no questions. Then there’s no problem.”
God, he thought. Is that what they teach this generation?
The ship jolted.
Dekker yelled aloud, struggling to get free. Someone—a familiar voice now—shouted at him to shut up.
Another, gentler, said, “That was just getting in position, Dekker. Take it easy.”
He had another blank spot then, woke up with the nightmare feeling of increasing g, not knowing where it was going to stop, or what had started it. Something pressed into his back and he thought, God, we’re spinning—
“Cory!” he yelled.
“Shut up, dammit!”
“Dekker.” This came gently then, with a touch at his shoulder. A smell of something cooked. Freefall. He blinked and looked at the gray-haired man, who let a foil packet of something drift near his face.
“We’ve done our position,” the man said to him, he couldn’t remember the name, and then did. Bird. Bird was the good one. Bird was the one who didn’t want to kill him. “We’re going to catch our beam tomorrow and we’re going home. Seems Mama thinks we’re in no hurry or something, damn her. I’ll let you loose if you can keep awake.” Another pat on the shoulder. “You know you’ve been off your head a little.”
“What time is it?”
“Shush,” Bird said, “don’t go asking that.”
“I want to know—”
Bird put a hand on his mouth. “Don’t do that,” Bird said, looking him in the eyes. “Don’t do that, son. You don’t need to know. You really don’t need to know. Your partner’s just lost, that’s all. A long time ago. There’s nothing anybody can do for her.”
He didn’t want to believe that. He didn’t want to wake up again, but Bird caught the packet drifting in front of his face and held the tube to his mouth, insisting.
He took a little. It was warm, it was soup, it was salty as hell. He turned his head away, and Bird let it go, leaving a tiny planetesimal of soup cooling in the air, drifting away with the current. Bird brushed at it, caught it in his hand, wiped it on his sleeve.
Blood everywhere, shining dark drops…
Everything was stable. Clean and quiet. Nothing had ever gone wrong here. Nothing had ever been wrong. He kept his eyes open for fear of the dark behind them and tried another sip of what Bird was offering him, while the first was hitting his stomach with an effect he was not yet sure of.
Why am I here? he asked himself. What is this place? This isn’t my ship. What am I doing here?
Maybe he asked out loud. He didn’t keep track of things. “To Refinery Two,” Bird told him.
He shook his head. He got a breath and thought, Cory’s still in the ship, they’ve left Cory back in the ship—
He reminded himself, he could do it now with only a cold, strange calm: No, Cory’s dead—Not that he could remember. He kept telling himself that over and over, but he could not remember. She was still there. She was wondering what had happened to him. She was trusting him to do the right thing, the smart thing. She was waiting for him to pick her up…
The dark-headed one, the young one, Ben, rose into his vision, carrying a length of thin cable and a davies clip. Ben hung in front of his face and reached behind his neck with the cable.
“Hell!” he yelled, and used a knee, but Ben grabbed a handful of his coveralls and it missed its target.
Oh, shit, he thought then, looking Ben in the face. He thought Ben would kill him.
Bird said, from the other side, “Easy, son. It’s temporary. Hold still.”
He had thought Bird was all right. But Bird held him still and Ben got the cable around his neck. The clip clicked.
“There,” Ben said. “You can reach the necessaries… reach anything in this ship but the buttons. And you don’t really want those, do you?”
He stared eye to eye at Ben and wondered if Ben was waiting to kill him while Bird was asleep. He remembered hearing them talk. He wondered whether Ben was going to hit him right now.
“You understand me?” Ben asked.
He nodded, scared, and likewise clear-headed in a tight-focused, adrenaline-edged way. He stayed very still while Ben started untaping his left wrist from the pipe. He didn’t think either ahead or backward. It was just himself and Ben, and the old man saying, holding tightly to his shoulder, “I apologize. I sincerely apologize about this, son. But we can’t have you wandering around off your head. Ben’s not a bad guy. He really isn’t.”
He remembered what he’d overheard. He had thought Bird wanted to keep him alive, and now he wasn’t sure either one of them was sane.
Ben freed his left arm. Bird untied the right. Moving both at once hurt his chest, hurt his back, hurt everything so much his eyes teared.
Ben went away forward. Bird stayed behind, put a hand on his shoulder. “No difference between our config and yours, the standard rig, by what I saw. Anything you can reach, you can use. Wouldn’t use the spinner with that cable attached, understand, but you got g while you were tumbling, God knows probably more than enough. Your stimsuit’s clean, but you’d as glad be free of it a day or so, wouldn’t you? You’re probably sore as hell.—Right? Just don’t try to use the shower, cable won’t let it seal, we’ll have water everywhere. Anything else you got free run of. Copy that?”
“Yeah.”
Bird gathered up the trailing cable, put it in his hand, closed his fist on it. “When you’re moving about the cabin, do kind of keep a grip on that. We don’t want you hurt. Hear? Don’t want that cable to pull you up short. We’re not going to do a burn without we warn you, but all the same, you keep a hand to that. Hold on to it.”
Just too many things had happened to him. He could not figure what his situation was or what they wanted. He shoved off, drifted away from the bulkhead to get the packet of soup that had come adrift. Braking with his arm against a pipe was almost more than he could do. He let go the cable, confused, and banged his head.
Someone caught his foot and pulled, gently. It turned him as he came down and he saw Bird with a packet of soup in his own hands.
“There’s solid food,” Bird said, “when you can handle it. Use anything from the galley you need. You got pretty dehydrated.”
He hated all this past tense, implying a major piece of time he didn’t remember. From moment to moment he told himself Cory was gone, and every time he did that he felt a sense of panic. He brushed a touchpad with his foot, stopped, drank a sip and watched Bird sip from his own packet. He kept thinking, They’re lying to me, they’re not taking me home…
Finally he asked Bird, “What ’driver is it out there?”
“What about a ’driver?”
“You were talking about a ’driver. What ’driver were you talking about?”
Ben yelled up from below, “Don’t tell him a damn thing, Bird. He hasn’t earned it.”
He looked from Ben down at the workstation up to Bird, resting by the bulkhead.
“Ben’s excitable,” Bird said. “Just have your breakfast. Or supper, as may be.”
But Ben was drifting up to them. Ben braked with the shove of a hand against the conduits. “I’d like to know,” Ben said, “what you’ve got to pay for this trip. Eat our food, breathe our air, take up our time and our fuel. We’re aborting a run for you. We just got effin’ started and we’re headed back to Base, damn near zeroed on your account, mister. You got any assets to pay for this? Or just debts?”
“We have money,” he said, and then knew he shouldn’t have said that to these people. He said, desperately catching up the thread of his thought—he hoped he hadn’t lost anything between: “So what ’driver is it?”
Ben said, “How much money?”
“Ben,” Bird said.
“I want,” he said carefully, “I want you to call that ’driver and ask about my partner.”
“Ask what about your partner?” Ben asked.
“Ask if they—” He stuttered on the thought. He never stuttered, and still he could not get it out. “—if they p-picked her up.”
“So why should they? What were you doing here, poaching in another Refinery’s zone?”
“We w-weren’t.” Dammit. “It was.”
“What do you mean, ‘it was’?”
“Ben,” Bird said, and then, looking at him: “Forget he asked.”
He didn’t understand. He was so weak he couldn’t track what they were saying from moment to moment, and hostile questions, zero g and unaccustomed food were all one confusion of balance and orientation. There was a constant buzz in his head that rose and fell like the fan-sounds. From moment to moment he knew Cory was alive, and from moment to moment he thought about the time and wanted to check his watch to be sure.
But that was crazy. He began to know it was. The only hope Cory had now was that ’driver ship. Maybe it had picked her up. Maybe it had.
“He’s not telling the story he started with,” Ben said. “Man’s lying somewhere. A collision with a rock, he said. An explosion took one whole damn tank out. The other one’s got a bash you could park a skimmer in. You want to see the videotape, man? I can show you the tape.”
“Didn’t hit a rock,” he said, shaking his head. He had no idea where this was going. He had no idea what they were accusing him of, whether this was going on record or what they wanted from him.
“Why would it explode?”
“The ’driver clipped us.”
“Facing away from the Well? Whose Zone were you in?”
“Rl.”
“ ’Driver, hell. You ran it into a rock, didn’t you? Just plain ran it onto a rock.”
“No.”
“Ben,” Bird said, “take it easy. The guy’s confused.”
“ ‘Take it easy.’—Some people with trouble deserve it, you know.”
“We don’t know anything,” Bird said. “His memory isn’t going to be all that good, with what he’s been through.”
“Looks healthy enough. Looks damned well healthy enough on our air and our food. Looks like he’s making real good progress.”
Ben talked about claiming the ship, he recollected that—they were after the ship and they claimed they were taking him to R2, not home; now they were talking about other debts—
They talked as if they wanted to put him to work for them. He had heard about Nouri. It had happened before in the Belt. Guys with all sorts of kinks went out in ships… and when they were ready to come in to Base, they might not want to take the evidence with them.
God, he thought, and looked off toward nowhere. The only thing in the vicinity was that ’driver ship. If they had never reported finding Cory—
The instruments… something coming at him over the horizon—
Explosion like a fist hit them. G-force. He reached after the fire controls.
No power. Nothing…
Ben left him. Bird left him. He saw Bird talking with Ben, holding on to Ben’s arm, he couldn’t make out what they were saying.
Then Ben shouted, “We own that ship!” and Bird: “Just shut it down, Ben, shut it down, for God’s sake, Ben!”
They started arguing again, yelling at each other about money, about what they were spending on him, and Bird took his part, saying, over and over again, “It’s not your damn decision, Ben!”
He watched, turning so he could see, phasing in and out of clear awareness, the fan-sound going in his ears, the soup he had drunk lying queasy on his stomach. He was afraid at one point Ben was going to hit the old man, and that Ben was going to end up in control of the ship.
The argument broke up. He grayed out a while. He came to with something near him and looked into a cyclopic glass lens, a camera pointed at his face, Ben’s face behind it. That scared him. He stared back, wondering whether Ben had a real kink or whether Ben was just a hobbyist. He was afraid to object. He just stared back and tried not to throw up.
Then Ben cut the camera off and said,
“Got you, you son of a bitch,” and drifted off.
He thought, This guy’s crazy, he’s absolutely crazy… Ben wanted his ship. Ben wanted him dead. He had this cable around his neck, that Ben had put there. He was afraid to sleep after that, afraid Ben was going to do something stranger still, and adrenaline kept him focused for a while. But things started going away from him again, he was back in the dark with the tumbling and the pressure building in his head, and then he was back again with that lens in his face and Ben going crazier and crazier…
He had no idea how long those times were or whether he had dreamed the business with the camera. When he looked, Bird was sleeping in a makeshift net rigged down toward the bow, and Ben was back at the workstation keyboard as if he had never moved, never had done anything in the least odd. He watched Ben for a while, wondering if he had hallucinated, wondering if it was safe to move with Bird asleep, because he was beginning to feel an acute need of going down to the head, and he was scared to do anything that Ben might conceivably object to.
Finally he shoved off very slowly and drifted down feet first toward the shower/toilet.
Ben looked around at him. He touched the other wall and caught the shower door, and Ben seemed not to care.
Don’t use the shower, he remembered that—he kept the cable in his left hand the way Bird had said, but for a space he lost track of where he was again: then he was inside the shower where the toilet was, finishing his business. He thought for a panicked moment. They’re lying, this is our ship all along. It was even the same ribbed pattern on the green shower wall. He could feel it when he touched it, real as anything he knew. He thought: Cory can’t be dead, she isn’t dead, there isn’t any other ship—
But there was the cable snaking out the door, there was the clip that wouldn’t come off—he tried to brace himself with his feet and his shoulders while he worked, he pulled the clip cover back to squeeze the jaws with his bare fingers, but he could get no leverage on it and all the while Cory was out there with no way to get back—
He looked at his watch. It said 0638. It said, March 12. He thought, The damn watch is wrong, it can’t be March 12. I’m back where I started. Cory’s going to die. Oh, God—
The clip cover slipped and he pinched his finger, bit his lip against the pain and thought, I’ve got to get rid of this, got to get hold of the ship, get the radio—
He looked around him for leverage, anything that could double for a pliers and put a pinch on the jaws with the clip cover retracted. He tried the soap dispenser, pried the small panel up, worked himself around upside down with his foot braced against the wall, pulled the spring cover back from the jaws with the fingers of his left hand, and held the pressure point under the metal edge of the panel with the leverage of his right hand, pushing the panel edge down on the clip, hard as he could, trying not to let it slip—
CAME a thump from the shower, and Ben thought to himself: He’s been in there a long time. He slipped his seatbelt off, shoved off in that direction and snatched a handhold at the shower corner, catching a hazy image of Dekker upside down and crosswise in the stall.
What in hell? he wondered. He flung the door back—could make no sense at first of what Dekker was doing. Then he saw the bloody fingerprints on the locker door, the whole angle of Dekker’s neck and arm forcing the soap dispenser panel shut on the clip. Dekker let it go of a sudden, the panel banged, and Dekker came off the wall at him, grappling for a hold, trying, he realized in panic, to get the cable looped around his throat.
He yelled, flailed out and caught the cable, their tumble winding them both into the cable Dekker was trying to get around his neck, and in sheer panic he hit him, hauled up on the cable and kept hitting him, hard as he could.
“Ben!” Bird yelled. He half-heard it: he just kept pounding away, his fist gone numb, his breath so choked he had no idea whether he was snagged in the cable or not. Bird grabbed his arm, yelling, “You’re going to kill him!—Ben, dammit, stop!”
He realized then that Dekker was no longer fighting. Bird pried him out of his grip, Dekker floating loose and limp. Bird shook at him again, said, “God, have you lost your mind?”
Sympathy for a damned lunatic—no thanks for stopping Dekker from killing them. He was shaking from the scare Dekker had given him, he hurt from Dekker’s hitting him, and Bird took Dekker’s part.
“That sonuvabitch tried to pry the clip loose!” he said, and shook free of Bird’s grip, grabbed Dekker, hauled him up again where the pipes and conduits were, and fumbled the roll of tape out of his hip pocket. Dekker was still limp as he started wrapping his wrist to a cold-water pipe, but he hurried, afraid he would come to.
“Stop it!” Bird cried, and came up and shoved him away.
His hand hurt. Bird was taking the lunatic’s part. So he went down and got into stores and dispensed himself a beer: he didn’t speak to Bird, he didn’t trust himself to say anything at the moment. His jaw was sore. A tooth felt loose. His lip was cut. He had never had a fight in school and it had not been his idea to have one this late in his life, except a guy wanted to kill him. He yelled up at Bird, “Don’t you let that sonuvabitch loose! Don’t you do it, Bird!”
He took a gulp of beer, still shaking, his legs and arms jerking spasmodically, his breath so erratic he had trouble drinking. Not scared, mad, that was all. Damned mad. The guy tried to kill him and Bird shoved him off and started making sympathetic noises at the guy that had meant to do them both in. Bird owned the ship. Bird gave the orders. And Bird thought they could trust this sonuvabitch…
“Toss me up a cold pack,” Bird yelled down.
He did that: he opened up medical and sent it up to Bird and Bird didn’t even look at him.
Bird cut the penlight. At least Dekker’s pupils were the same size and they both reacted, which was about all he knew to look for. Dekker was bleeding from the nose in little droplets. He mopped the air with his handkerchief, to keep it out of the filters, wiped Dekker’s chin, then caught the cold pack and applied it to Dekker’s face and the back of his neck.
Dekker began to show signs of life, confused, struggling with the tape for a moment before he reached over with his free hand and started tearing at it. Bird grabbed that hand, restrained it, saying, so only Dekker could hear, “Easy, easy, just stay quiet, it’s all right. Just take it easy—you’re not doing any good that way. Cut it out, hear?”
Dekker was breathing hard, staring at him or through him, he had no idea. Dekker wanted loose, couldn’t fault him for that—couldn’t be sure he was sane, either; and God only knew what was going on with Ben. Dekker gave a jerk at the wrist he was holding.
“Uh-uh,” he said. “Just stay still. You leave that tape alone for a while. Hear? Just let it be.”
Dekker said, “Liar.”
“Yeah, right.” You went to sleep and things were halfway under control and you woke up with two guys trying to kill each other and it wasn’t highly likely to make sense. “You’re bleeding into our filters. Just stay still—damn!” as Dekker choked and sneezed beads of blood. He snagged them with the handkerchief, one-handed, pressed it against Dekker’s face. “I don’t know what you did, son. Did you do something to piss Ben off?”
Dekker only shook his head, denial, refusal, he had no idea. Dekker blew blood into the handkerchief, gasped a bubbly breath and mumbled, “Cory. Call Cory.”
“Not likely she’s answering.” He shoved Dekker’s hand at his face. “Hold that.” He snagged the ice-pack that was coming back after its impact with the wall, and gave Dekker that too. “Just keep the cold on it. If you’re going to bleed, bleed into the handkerchief, all right? Don’t blow at it. Just let it be.”
Dekker looked at him past the bloody handkerchief and the cold pack. Sane for a moment, maybe. Or just too miserable and too short of breath to be crazy for a while.
He collected himself and his headache and the remnant of his patience, shoved off and drifted down to Ben. Ben intended to keep his back to him, it seemed—so he turned, touched a cabinet and changed course. You got used to reading faces upside down or sideways. Ben’s was sour, upset, and Ben was trying not to notice being stared at—only drinking his beer and trying to be somewhere else.
“I got a problem,” he said. “Ben?”
“We both got a problem,” Ben said shortly, as if he was not going to say much else. But Ben said then: “The guy was trying to kill us. He damn near had that clip undone, with a panel edge for a pliers. What was he going to do then, huh, Bird? You reckon that?”
“God only. Just go easy. We got a long way back.”
“Go easy,” Ben scowled. “Listen, I saved and did without all my life to get that 20 k, you understand? Nobody ever handed me a break, nobody ever gave me a damn thing, and here we have the best break anybody could look for—”
“It doesn’t say we own that ship. It doesn’t.”
“God, Bird,—”
“We’ll be all right.” He could understand Ben’s panic, on that level: the 20 k was hard come by, all right, so was everything. “We won’t go under.”
“Go under! You’re old enough to know better, Bird. I put my whole life savings into this operation!”
“So have I,” he said shortly, and hauled himself down and turned so he could see Ben’s face rightwise up. “Thirty plus years’ worth. And listen to me: you don’t go hitting the guy again. He’s had enough knocks to the head.”
“So who is he? Who is he that you owe him a damn thing, Bird? Is there something about this guy I don’t know? Somewhere you’ve met this guy before?”
He looked at Ben with this feeling they were not communicating again: he listened to Ben’s single-minded craziness with the uncomfortable feeling he might yet have to take a wrench to his partner.
But just about the time he thought Ben might really blow, Ben gave this little wave of his hand and a shake of his head. “All right, all right, we’re going in, abort our run—forget it, forget I said anything.”
“What day is it?” Dekker asked from across the cabin. “Cory? Cory?”
“The 21st,” he told him. “May 21st.”
Ben raked his hand through his hair, rolled an anguished glance toward Bird. “I want rid of him. God only knows what happened to his partner. Or if there ever was a partner.”
“Cory?”
“Shut up!” Ben screamed at Dekker. “Just shut it up!”
Bird bit his lip and just kept it to himself. There were times you talked things over and there were times you didn’t, and Ben certainly didn’t act in any way to discuss things at the moment.
“Just get our confirm out of Base,” Bird said, and ventured a pat on Ben’s shoulder. “It’s all right, Ben. Hear?”
“Shut him up,” Ben begged him. “Just shut him up for a while.”
Dekker worked at the tape on his wrist, such as he could—his fingers were swollen, his ribs hurt, and he could not understand how he had gotten this way or whether he had done something to deserve being beaten and tied up like this—he flatly could not remember except the shower, the green ribbed shower, the watch—it was that day, something was going to happen to Cory—if it was that day… but Bird said May, not March.
January has thirty days. No, 31. February 28. March…
Thirty days hath September… April, March, and November…
“April, May, and November. Shut up!”
March 12. Thirty-one days. 21 less 12.
No, start in January. That’s 30, no, 31, and 28—or 29 if it’s leap year —is it leap year?
“It’s not a leap year!”
28 and 12—no, start again. Thirty days in January—
“It’s May efün’ 21st, Dekker!”
Reckoning backward—twenty-one days in May—
Couldn’t happen. Couldn’t be then—
“You reset my watch, damn you! You’re trying to drive me crazy!”
Bird came drifting up to him, put his hand on his shoulder, caught the cold pack that was drifting there and made him take it again. Bird said, quietly, on what previous subject he had no idea at all, “Time doesn’t matter now, son. Just take it easy. We’re about ready to catch our beam. You’ll hear the sail deploy in a bit.”
“Refinery Two,” he said. He remembered. He hoped he did. He hoped it wasn’t all to happen again.
“That’s right.” Another pat on his arm. Bird might be crazy as Ben, but he thought there was something decent in Bird. He let Bird tilt his head over and take a look at his eye, the right one, that was swelling and sore.
“Bird, do me a favor.”
“You’re short on favors right now, son. What?”
“Call my partner.”
“We’re doing all we can.”
He didn’t believe that. He especially didn’t believe it when Bird pulled another cable loop out of his pocket and grabbed his other wrist. He resisted that. He tried to shove Bird off, but when he exerted himself he kept graying out and losing his breath. “Let me go,” he asked Bird, quietly, so Ben wouldn’t hear. God, his ribs hurt. “Let me loose.”
“Can’t do that, son. Not today. Maybe not for a while. Ben says you’ve been bashing things.” The cable bit into his wrist and one clip snapped.
“Ben’s a liar!” No. He hadn’t meant to take that tack. He tried to amend it. A second clip snapped—woven steel cable looped around a pipe or something. He tried not to panic. He tried to be perfectly reasonable. “He’s right. I was off my head awhile. But I’m all right now. Tell him I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.”
“I’ll do that.” Bird squeezed his shoulder in a kindly way. “Nobody’s going to hurt you, son. Nobody means you any harm. We just got three people in a little ship and you’re a little confused. Try to keep it a little quiet. You’ll be all right.”
The oxygen felt short. He tried not to panic. He didn’t want them to tell him he was confused. “Bird,” he said, before Bird could get away. “There’s a’driver right where I came from. Isn’t there?”
“I wouldn’t know that, son. I don’t know for sure where you came from.”
“79, 709, 12.”
Bird nodded slowly. “All right. Yes. There is a’driver near there.”
He found his breath shorter and shorter. He said, calmly, sanely, because he finally found one solid thing they both agreed on. “All right. I want you to call it. Ask about my partner.”
“You sure you had a partner, son?”
Reality kept getting away from him. Time and space and what had happened did. He fixed on Bird’s gray-stubbled face as the only reference he had. “Just call the’driver. Just ask them if they picked up my partner. That’s all I ask.”
“Son… I honestly don’t know what you might have been doing out there in a’driver’s assigned territory. You understand me?”
He didn’t. He shook his head.
“How long have you been in the Belt, son?”
“Couple years.” He wasn’t sure of that number any longer either. He was sure of nothing in regard to time. He thought again—look at my watch—got to know—which direction to reckon.
“Free runner?”
“Yeah.”
“You ever make any money at mining?”
Ben asked those kinds of questions. “Maybe.”
“Haven’t ever done any skimming, have you?”
His heart jumped. He shook his head emphatically, wanting Bird to believe him. “No.” He couldn’t remember what conversation they were in, what they had just said, why Bird was asking him a thing like that.
Bird said, “We’re just damn close to that’driver’s fire-path, understand, and if we got one accident, we sure don’t need another, you read me?”
Things were dark awhile. Bird gave him more of the soup, told him it was breakfast and they were all right. He wanted to think so, but he didn’t believe it any longer. He heard voices near him. He thought he remembered Bird asking him questions after that. He wasn’t sure. He dreamed he answered, and that Bird let him loose awhile to get to the toilet. But maybe that was the other time.
From time to time he remembered the collision. His muscles jumped, and then he would realize that was long past and he was still alive. “What time is it?” he asked, and Bird caught him by the side of the jaw, made him focus eye to eye.
“Son, don’t cross Ben again. Don’t ask him the time. Don’t ask me. Your friend’s dead. She’s dead, you understand me?”
Bird’s grip hurt. Bird was angry and he didn’t know why.
“We got the confirm from Base,” Ben shouted up.
“Yeah,” Bird called back, and patted Dekker’s face. “Got a draft coming from that vent. I’ll get you a blanket, tuck you in—we’re about to catch the beam.”
“Yeah,” he said. He was confused again. He thought that Bird had said that would be some time yet. But he’d given up knowing where they were. He hung there, nowhere for a while, listening to Bird move around. He heard hydraulics working, heard that series of sounds that meant a sail deploying. He thought, So we’re going in. He didn’t really believe it. It wasn’t going to happen. It wasn’t possible any longer. He couldn’t come back from this. He just kept seeing the shower wall, the watch on his arm, perpetual loop, maybe because he was dead…
Bird came back with an armful of blankets and jammed one between his head and the pipes, one at the small of his back. “Don’t lose that,” Bird said, and took a bit of webbing and tied it around him and the blankets and the conduits, telling him he had to, it was for his safety, but he had stopped believing Bird. He thought about Sol Station. Mama coming home from work. Cory meeting him at Refinery One dock. Hi, there, she’d say. I’m Cory. And a person who’d been a lot of letters and a lot of postage would be flesh and blood…
If he could get to dockside, if they brought him that far, she’d be there… if he could get to the 12th he could get there again…
He’d run out on his mother, Cory had run away from hers. His mother just let him go. Cory’d sent those letters that would always be stacked up in her mail-file and waiting for her… He’d say, Don’t read them, but Cory would. Then she’d be down with a guilt attack for days, and go off by herself and spend hours at a rented comp writing some damn letter home—but he wouldn’t. There was a lot he should have said when he’d had the chance. But it was Cory that didn’t get any more chances, and that wasn’t fair.
“Stand by,” Bird yelled up at him. “Dekker? Hear me? We’re about to catch the beam. You all right up there?”
He thought he answered. He was thinking: We’re not going home. We’re not ever going home again. There’s going to be all these letters stacked up and waiting for Cory, and Cory won’t ever read them. They’ll just tell her mother… and she’ll kill me…
“Dekker! Dammit, pay attention!” Ben’s voice. “Answer!”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Dekker!”
He said it louder. The acceleration pressed his body against the blankets Bird had tucked between him and the pipes. The tape cut off circulation and his fingers on that hand went numb. He began to be dizzy: the ship was going unstable—all of it came back, the explosion and the ship tumbling, things flying loose—
“Cory!” he yelled; or maybe that was then. He had no more idea. Someone told him to shut up and he remembered that he had been rescued, but he had no idea where they were going or whether he was going to live.
Finally the pressure let up and he hung there with his head throbbing and the feeling slowly returning to his hands. Pressure in his sinuses and behind his eyes built to a blinding headache when he tried to wonder what was happening or where he was.
“What time is it?” he asked, but no one paid attention to him. He asked again, his voice cracking: “What time is it?” and Ben sailed up into his vision, grabbed him by the knee, grabbed him by his collar and hit him across the face.
“Shut up!” Ben yelled at him. He tried to use his knee and turn his face to protect himself. Ben hit him again and again, until Bird came in from below and pulled Ben off him, yelling at Ben to stop it. Bird said, “Go back to sleep, Ben.” And Ben yelled back: “How can I sleep with What time is it? What time is it, God, I’m going to strangle him before the hour’s out—I’m going to fuckin’ kill him!”
“Ben,” Bird said quietly, taking Ben by the shoulder. “Ben. Easy. All right.—Dekker… shut the hell up!”
After that, it could have been next day, next week, a few hours, he wasn’t sure. Ben came floating up to him, carefully took him by the collar and gathered it tight, and calmly said, right in his face, “It’s my watch now, hear me? We’re all alone. Do you hear me, Dekker?”
He nodded. He looked Ben in his close-set eyes and said yes again, in case Ben hadn’t understood him.
“You want to know what time it is, Dekker?”
He shook his head. He remembered that made Ben crazy. Ben wound his grip tighter, cutting off the blood to his head.
“If you ask the time just one damn more time I’m going to break your neck. You understand me, Dekker?”
He nodded. The edges of his vision were going. Ben went on looking at him with murder in his eyes.
He remembered—he was not sure—Ben taking pictures of him while he was unconscious. He thought, while Ben was shutting the blood away from his brain, This man is crazy. He’s crazy and I’m not that sure about Bird…
“Hear me?” Ben said.
He tried to say yes. Things got grayer. The ship was spinning. Ben let him go and went away. Then he gulped several lungfuls of air and started shivering. He wished Bird would wake up, he wished he knew where he was going now, and whether Cory would be waiting on the dock. They said Refinery Two, but that was like saying Mars or the Moon: places were different, and you didn’t know where you were going even if you knew the name.
The Belt was like that. It was always like that. The rules changed, the company tried to screw you, but Cory always did the figuring, Cory had had college, Cory knew the numbers, and he didn’t.
He wished they had never taken him off that ship. He wished they had never found him. Or maybe he was dreaming. He had no idea now what was real.
Dekker was off his head again, mumbling to himself, just under the noise of the pumps and the fans. Ben put a hand over that ear and tried to concentrate on the charts, feeding in info that was going to come in handy, because Big Mama didn’t like to tell freerunners anything except what she had to—but with a spare and illicit storage, an enterprising and close-mouthed freerunner could vastly improve on Mama’s charts, look at the sector she offered you, and tell which runs to take at any cost and which to lease out if you had any choice.
So you paid close attention while you were running, you listened to the sectors you were passing through blind and used your radar for what it was worth, on all the sectors around you while you ran on Belt Management’s set, (they swore) safe course out and home; and you filed every piece of information you could get your hands on, listening for the older tags, making charts of the new, figuring where good rocks might cluster, assembling the whole moving mass of particles around you, because when Jupiter swept the Belt on his twelve-year course, slowing rocks down, speeding rocks up, and now and again changing certain orbits by a million or so k or flinging certain rocks clear out of the Belt, those all-important numbers did change. It was Sol’s set of dice, but Jupiter did make the game interesting, and the freerunners with the best numbers and the best records were the freerunners that survived. Rocks hit each other now and again,’driver-tenders got careless, and now and again you might find an uncharted big bit of some old rock long since ground to bits and used, a chunk still running the old orbit path, give or take what rocks did to each other and what Jupiter did and what the occasional’driver did when it went firing loads through the Belt to the Well: not much to hit out here, but now and again, generally thanks to some’driver, they did, with shattering results. Sometimes, again, strange rocks just wandered through, old bits of comets, Oort Cloud detritus, God only: every rock had its path, they all danced with Sol, but some were distant partners—and with the mass they were hauling now, you just hoped to hell Mama liked you, and gave you solid numbers.
“We’re not real easy to stop,” he had said to Bird, among other things.
“We could brake,” Bird had said.
And he: “Yeah, yeah, and we’re carrying more mass than those cables are rated for.”
“Won’t happen,” Bird said.
Thinking like that infuriated him. The thought of the rigging failing, the thought of, at best, a walk outside for repairs, at worst, the whole sail failing beyond repair—Trinidad taking, at this heading, the long, long fall into the Well—made him crazy. He was already holding on to his temper with his fingernails and Bird came out with It won’t happen.
He had fantasies of killing Dekker.
Maybe Bird.
But that was as crazy as Dekker was. . He kept feeding in the information. He kept building and refining his portable record. He ignored Dekker as much as possible. Thing about null-g, you couldn’t get your finger to stay in your ear. Not easily. He thought about his earplugs, over in the cabinet, but those worked too well for his peace of mind.
He cast a glance askance at Bird sleeping so quiet in his net, where they had strung it between the galley and the number one workstation, Dekker being just too close to the spin cylinders. Dekker might have been crazy long before this—and Bird just might be soft enough to let the guy loose on his watch. That was all it took, let Dekker near a wrench or, God forbid, get his hands on something sharp.
All that blood in the ship, all those little red splatters on the suits—did a cut on the forehead bleed like that?
He had to have it agreed with Bird. They had to keep that guy confined—somehow, someway. They couldn’t sleep in nets for a month, they needed the spinners: and the idea of being blind and tucked in a spinner for six hours wondering what Dekker was doing on Bird’s watch already upset his stomach.
And, damn, he intended to keep every move logged, everything they did, everything this Dekker did, every spate of What time is it?
Dekker would get the time, all right. Logged on and logged off.
He’d get the expenses written down, too, exactly the way he knew how to do it in a record Management would accept—because Benjamin J. Pollard wasn’t letting an old man’s softheadedness rob them of a break like this. Hell. No.
REFINERY Two was only slightly prettier than a rock, but it did come welcome—that k-plus wide sooty ring that you only caught sight of on camera—and most to Bird’s knowledge were eager to see it, and did turn the optics on, long before it was regulation that you had to get visual contact. There she hung, magnified in the long lens, spinning with a manic vengeance, with her masts stuck up like spindles and her stationary mast surfaces bristling with knobby bits that were pushers and tenders, and shuttles from the Shepherds and such. A few, hardly more than ten or so at any one time, counting company rigs waiting crew change, were ships a lot like Trinidad, a whole lot like Trinidad, if you took plan B on your outfitting, and opted for green in the shower.
A lot of the fitting inside Refinery Two was a lot like Trinidad, too, except, one supposed, if you got down to corporate residence levels, and there was about the same chance of freerunners seeing that in person as getting a guided tour of the company bunker on Mimas.
Belters lived and Belters died and Refinery Two just rolled on, this big factory-hearted ring which was the only close to g-1 place miners and tenders in R2 zone ever got back to. She swallowed down what the Shepherds gathered in, she hiccuped methane and she shat ingots and beams and sheet and foam steel. She used her own plastics and textiles or she spat them at Mars, in this year when Jupiter was as convenient to that world as Sol Station was. But nobody knew what went to Mimas. Some said what was down there repaired itself and had more heart than any company exec—but that was rumor and you didn’t want to know. Some said it wasn’t really the ops center it was reputed to be, in case of something major going wrong at the Well: some said it was the ultimate bunker for the execs—but you didn’t say war in polite society either and you didn’t think too much about the big frame that sat out there aswarm with tenders and construction craft, a metal-spined monster that took rough shape here at the source of steel and plastics before it moved on to final rigging at Sol. You called what was going on out in the Beyond a job action or you called it a tax strike or you called it damned stupid, but if you were smart you didn’t discuss it or that ship out there and you didn’t even think about it where Mama might hear.
A-men.
“Well,” he sighed, “she’s still here. Kept the porch light on and the door open.”
Ben didn’t say, What’s a porch light? You never could get a rise out of him like that.
“Used to sit outside at night,” Bird said, “look up at the stars—you know what a shooting star is, Ben, lad?”
“No.” Ben’s tone said he was not at the moment interested to know. He was working approach, as close as his second-class license would let him. “I’m about ready to hand off. You got it?”
“Yeah.”
“Dockmaster advises they copy on the request for meds. They’re on their way.”
“Good on that.” He saw Ben furiously ticking away at the comp. “—I got your handoff. Take it easy.”
“Take it easy. We got meds and customs swarming in here, we have to have the records straight.”
“Everything’s in order. I checked it. You checked it.—You’re sure they copy on that mass.”
“Yeah. I made ’em say-again.” Ben was going through readout. No papers. Everything was dataflow. BM wanted forms, and it was all dataflow, not at all like the old days when if you fouled up some damn company form you got a chance to read it over slow and easy and say it right. Now in this paperless society the datalink grabbed stuff and shoved new blanks at you so fast you didn’t have time to be sure all your answers made sense.
“You got all that stuff,” Bird said. “And welcome to it. Damn, I hate forms.”
“No worry.”
Ben had a sure instinct for right answers. Ben swore it was a way of thinking. Ben input something and said, “Shit! Shut him up!”
He only then realized Dekker was talking, mumbling something in that low, constant drone of his. “I can’t half hear him, he’s all right.”
“I can hear him! I can damn well hear him—Where are we? Where are we? What time is it? I tell you—”
“Easy.”
“I’ve been easy. I’m going to kill him before we make dock, I swear I am.”
“No, you’re not. He’s being quiet. Just let him alone.”
“You’re losing your hearing. You can’t hear that?”
“Not that loud.”
“The guy’s crazy. Completely out of it. Only good thing in this business.”
“Ben… just—drop it, Ben. End-of-run nerves, that’s all. Just drop it, you mind?”
There was a cold silence after that, except the click of buttons. And Dekker’s voice, that was loud enough to hear now and again once you thought about it.
Long silence, except for ops, and approach control talking back and forth with them, walking them through special procedures.
“I’m sorry,” Ben said stiffly.
Maybe because they were closer to civilization now. And sanity.
“Where are we?” Dekker asked.
“God!” Ben cried, and leaned far back in his seat. He yelled up at Dekker: “It’s June 26th and we’re coming into Mars Base, don’t you remember? The president of the company’s going to be at the party!”
“Don’t do that,” Bird said. “Just leave the poor guy alone.”
“He’s alone, all right, he’s damn well alone. Another week and we’d be as schitz as he is.”
Another call from Base: “Two Twenty-nine Tango Trinidad, this is ASTEX Approach Control: tugs are on intercept. Stand by the secondary decel.”
“Approach Control, this is Two Twenty-nine Tango. We copy that decel. We’re go.” He shut down his mike, yelled: “Dekker! Stand by the decel, hear me?”
“Break his damn neck,” Ben muttered.
There was no time for debate. They had a beam taking aim. Approach Control advised them and fired; pressure hit the sail and bodies hit the restraints—they weren’t in optimum attitude thanks to that ship coupled to them, and it was a hard shove. Dekker yelled aloud—hurt, maybe: they had him padded in and tied down with everything soft they could find, but it was no substitute.
It went on and on. Eventually Dekker got quiet. Hope to hell that persistent nosebleed didn’t break loose again.
“Two Twenty-nine Tango Trinidad, this is ASTEX Approach Control: do a simple uncouple with that tow.”
“Approach Control, this is Two Twenty-nine Tango. We copy that uncouple. Fix at 29240 k to final at 1015 mps closing. O-mega.”
Bird uncapped the button, pushed it, the clamps released with a shock through the frame, and One’er Eighty-four Zebra went free—still right up against them, 29240 k to their rendezvous with the oncoming Refinery and they were going to ride with the tow awhile, until the outlying tugs could move in and pick it off their tail.
Ben muttered. “I got everything customs can ask on that ship. Got all the charges figured, too.”
“Just leave it, Ben.”
“I want that ship, Bird. I want that ship. God, we got the proof—I got all the proof they need—”
“Ben,—”
“Look, they do their official investigation. But this guy’s incompetent, he was incompetent when we boarded. What’s he going to do, ask ’em the time? The law’s on our side.” Ben was cheerful again. “We got it, Bird, we got it.”
“Let the guy alone,” he said. “Forget about that ship, dammit!”
“I’m not forgetting it. Hell if I’ll forget it. We’re filing on it. Or I am. You can take your pick, partner.”
“There’s such a thing as wanting things too much. You can’t ever afford to want things that much. It’s not healthy.”
“Healthy, hell. I’ll take care of us. All you have to do is sit back and watch me go, partner, I know the law.”
“There’s things other than law, Ben.—Just stow the charts, hear me?”
“I’m not stowing the charts.”
“We’re going to get searched, dammit, just put the damn things in the hole or friggin’ dump ’em, we can’t get ’em off this time—”
“Guys run ’em in all the time, customs doesn’t give a damn—just say they’re vidgames. They don’t even boot to check.”
“Ben, dammit!”
“I haven’t spent all this work to give up those charts. They’re going to go over us with a microscope, Bird,—”
“Thirty years nobody’s found that hideyhole, not customs and not the lease crews. Just drop ’em in. You think they’re going to go at us plate by plate over a rescue?”
“Two Twenty-nine Tango Trinidad, this is ASTEX Approach Control: tugs are 20 minutes 14 seconds, mark.”
“Approach Control, this is Two Twenty-nine Tango. We copy: 20 minutes 14 seconds. No problem, tow is clear. Proceeding on that instruction.”
Ben said, “You got an Attitude this trip. I don’t understand it, Bird, I swear I don’t understand it.”
“You know Shakespeare, Ben?”
“Haven’t met him.”
They were still speaking as they made dock. Barely.
“We got ’er,” Ben said.
Several significant breaths later Ben said, “I’m sorry, Bird.”
“Shakespeare’s a writer,” Bird said.
“One of those,” Ben said.
“Yeah.”
“You got him on tape?”
“There’s a tape. Hard going, though.”
“Physics?” Ben asked.
“Two Twenty-nine Tango Trinidad, this is ASTEX Dock Authority, check your pressure. Will you need a line?”
“We copy 800 mb, B dock. No line, we’re 796.”
“Trinidad, we copy 796. Medical units standing by on dockside. Stand by life systems sample.”
“Shit,” Ben groaned, “they’re going to stall us on a medical. They damn well better not find some bug aboard, I’ll skin him.”
“Won’t find any bug. Get our data up, will you?”
They were nose to the docking mast. Trinidad shuddered and resounded as the cradle locked. She hissed a little of her air at the sampler.
ASTEX said: “Welcome in, Trinidad. Good job. Stand by results on that sample.”
The dockside air went straight to the back of the throat and stung the sinuses, icy cold and smelling of volatiles. It tasted like ice water and oil and it cut through coats and gloves the way the clean and the cold finally cut through the stink Bird smelled in his sleep and imagined in the taste of his food. Time and again you got in from a run and the chronic sight of just one other human face, and when you looked at all the space around you and saw real live people and faces that weren’t that face—you got the sudden disconnected notion you were watching it all on vid, drifting there with only a tether and a hand-jet between you and a dizzy perspective down the mast—worse than EVAs in the deep belt, a lot dizzier. Dock monkeys kited about at all angles, checking readouts, taking samples, talking to empty air. Bird’s earpiece kept him informed about the meds inside the ship, the receipt of the manifest and customs forms at the appropriate offices—
“Morris Bird,” the earpiece said, thin voice riding over the banging and hammering of sound in the core. “This is officer Wills, Security. Understand you found a drifter.”
He hated being sneaked up on, hated the office-sitters that would blindside a man and made him look around to see where they were—or whether they were there and not a phonecall. He turned and saw three of them in ASTEX Security green, sailing his way down the hand-line.
“Yessir,” he said, before they got there. “Details have already gone to BM. Any problem?”
“Just a few questions,” Wills said. Before he got there.
YOU have any theories to explain what happened?” Wills asked. The cops hung face to face with him, all of them maintaining position with holds on the safety-lines, and you about needed the earpiece to hear at the moment over the thundering racket from a series of loads going down the spinning core. Bird, mindful of the Optex Wills was wearing, shrugged, shook his head and said, mostly honestly: “Could’ve caught a rock. Helluva bash on one side. On the other hand, the bash could’ve been secondary. Maybe he was working real close in and just didn’t see another one coming, dunno, really, dunno if it’s going to be easy to tell. We didn’t go outside, just got a look on vid. We did make a tape.”
“We’ll want that. Also your log. Did you remove anything from the wreck?”
“We took out the rescuee and the clothes he was wearing. Nothing else. We washed ’em and he’s still wearing ’em. He had his watch, and nothing in his pockets. He’s still wearing the watch. Anything else we left aboard, even his clothes and his Personals. You wouldn’t want to open up without a decon squad. It’s a real mess in that ship.”
“Any idea where the partner is?”
“Evidently she was outside when the accident happened. He kept trying to call her, kept trying when he was off his head, I guess he tried til he couldn’t think of anything else. They’re from Rl. Her name was Cory. That’s all we ever figured out. His life systems were near gone, ship was tumbling pretty bad. He’d taken a lot of knocks.” He hoped to hell that would cover Ben’s ass about the bruises. He felt dirty doing it, but he would have felt dirtier not to. “Kid was pretty sick from breathing that stuff, kept hallucinating about having to call his partner—evidently did everything he could to find her, sick as he was.” He tried to put Dekker in the best light he could, too, fair being fair. “When we got to him, I guess he just finally realized she was gone. Fever set in—he’s been off his head a lot, just keeps asking over and over for his partner, that’s all.”
“What would he say?”
“Just her name. Sometimes he’d yell Look out, like he was warning someone. Kid’s exhausted. Like when you give up and then the adrenaline runs out.”
“Yeah,” Wills said. “Didn’t happen to say why they were out of their zone?”
“He didn’t know they were out of their zone.”
“So he did say something else.”
“We had to explain we were taking him to R2. It upset him. He was lost, disoriented. The accident must’ve happened the other side of the line.”
Cops never told you a thing. Wills grunted, monkeyed along the lines toward the hatch as if he was going inside. The other officers followed. But one of the blue-suited meds was outbound, towing a stretcher with Dekker aboard, and the other meds were close behind. The cops stopped them at the lines just outside the hatch, delayed to look Dekker over, talk to the meds, evidently asked Dekker something: there was a lot of machinery noise on the dock—they must be loading or offloading—and he couldn’t hear what they said or what Dekker answered. They only let the meds take him away, and that course came past him.
They had wrapped Dekker up in blankets, had him strapped into the stretcher, and Dekker looked wasted and sick as hell. But his eyes were open, looking around. The meds brought the stretcher to a drifting stop and said, “You want to say goodbye?”
It was one of those faces that could haunt a man, Dekker’s lost, distracted expression—but Dekker seemed to track on him then.
“Bird,” he said faintly through the noise and the banging overhead. “Where’re they taking me?”
Dekker looked scared. Bird wanted it over with, wanted to forget Dekker and Dekker’s nightmares and the stink and the cold of that ship, not even caring right now if they got anything for their trouble but their refit paid. He sure didn’t want an ongoing attachment; but that question latched on to him and he found himself reaching out and putting a hand against Dekker’s shoulder. “Hospital. That’s all, son. You’re on R2 dock. You’ll be all right.”
Bird looked at the meds, then gave a shrug, wanting them to go, now, before Dekker got himself worked up to a scene. They started away.
“Bird?” Dekker said as they went. And called out louder, a voice that cut right to the nerves, even over the racket: “Bird?”
He exhaled a shaky breath and shook his head, wanting a go at the bar real bad right now.
Ben came out of the hatch with their Personals kits. The police stopped him and insisted on taking the kits one by one and turning them this way and that. They were asking Ben questions when he drifted up, and Ben was saying, in answer to those questions, “The guy was off his head. Didn’t know what he’d do next. Screaming out all the time. Thinking it was his ship he was on. We had to worry he’d go after controls or something.”
He scowled a warning at Ben, but not a plain one: there was the Optex Wills was making of every twitch they made. Ben was looking only at the officers. He said, to explain the scowl, “You’d be off your head too if you’d been banged around like that.”
“In the accident,” Wills said, fishing.
“Ship tumbling like that,” he said. “The wonder is he lived through it. Couldn’t have helped his partner. All he looked to have left was his emergency beeper, and when that tank blew, it didn’t go straight—you got this center of mass here, see, and you get this tank back here—”
You got too technical and the docksiders wanted another topic in a hurry.
Wills said, interrupting him, “Go into that with the Court of Inquiry. We’ll want to log those kits. Leave them with us and we’ll send them on to your residence. What’s your ID?”
“On the tag there.” Ben indicated his kit. “1347-283-689 is mine. Bird here’s 688-687-257. Ship’s open. Look all you like.”
“You can go now.”
You never got thanks out of a company cop either. Bird scowled, looked at Ben, and the two of them handed their way up lines toward the hand-line. A beep meant a boom was moving. Red light stained the walls. But the alarm was from the other end of the big conduit- and chute-centered tunnel that was the cargo mast. You could get dizzy if you looked at the core itself, if you let yourself just for a moment think about up and down or where you were. Bird focused on the inbound gripper-handle coming toward him, ignored the moving surface in the backfield of his vision—caught it and felt the first all-over stretch he’d had in months as it hauled him along. Ben had caught the one immediately behind him—he looked back to see.
“Customs,” he remarked to Ben, in a lull in the racket from the chutes. “I hope they’ve talked to the cops.”
“No trouble. We haven’t even got our Personals. Cops’ve got ’em. Cops have got everything. They gave me this receipt, see?” He used his free hand to tap his pocket. “Hell, we’re just little guys. What are we going to have? We’ll get a wave-through. You watch.”
“They’ll give us hell.”
“So don’t tell ’em it was out-zone. We reported it where the rules say. We got rights. Meanwhile we’re gone into a public contact area and there’s no use for them to check us, is there?”
“Rights,” he muttered. “We got whatever rights Mama decides to give us, is what we got.—What did you tell that cop about Dekker? Did you tell them he was crazy?”
“Hey, they don’t need my help to figure that. The meds belted him in good and tight when they took him away.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I said he wasn’t too clear where he was. They asked about the bruises, and I said he got loose, all right? I said he was after the controls and he’s crazy, besides which he fought us when we had to get him back and forth to the head.”
“That’s a couple of times, Ben, for God’s sake…”
“Hey. We got this guy tied to the plumbing, bruises all over him, all ages, what are we going to say, it was a month-long party out there?”
“Yeah,” he said, and shut up, because the chute was sucking another load down, and down here you could hear the hydraulics. His stomach was upset. It had been upset for the last week, when it had been clearer and clearer Dekker was not going to be able to support a thing they said, that Dekker was liable to say anything or claim they’d met eetees and seen God. This is it, Ben had said when Dekker had tried to get at the engine fire controls. They’d put Dekker to bed taped hand and foot: Dekker had screamed for an hour afterward, and Ben had gotten that on tape too.
He had wanted to erase that video. Dekker had enough troubles without that on permanent record with the company: Dekker could lose his license, lose his ship, lose everything he had, and he didn’t want to hand BM the evidence to set it up that way—but Ben had said it: Dekker wasn’t any saner than he had been. Dekker would have been dead in a few days if they hadn’t found him, and as much as they’d done to patch the kid together, he didn’t seem likely to need much of anything but a ticket back to the motherwell and a long, long time in rehab.
“Poor sod,” he said.
Ben said: “Good riddance.” And when he frowned at him: “Hell, Bird, I’ve seen schitzy behavior before, I’ve seen damn well enough of it.” There was profound bitterness behind that: he had no idea why, or what Ben was talking about, but Ben didn’t volunteer anything else. Ben was talking about the school, he decided, or the dorms where Ben had spent what other people called childhood. It didn’t matter now. The trip was over, Dekker was with the meds, the whole business was out of their hands, and Ben knew Shakespeare wasn’t a physicist. Good for him. They’d patch up their partnership and take their heavy time while somebody else leased Trinidad out—and paid them 15-and-20 plus repairs and refit: could do that all the time if they wanted, but you didn’t get rich on 15-and-20 while you were sitting on dockside spending most of it.
Got to give up sleeping and eating, he was accustomed to joke about it.
Ben would say, intense as he always was when you talked about money, We got to get us a break, is what.
They got off the line in customs, explained they didn’t have their Personals, the cops had them, no, they didn’t have any ore in their pockets and they didn’t have any illegal magmedia on them, all the records were on the ship, yes, they had contacted another ship out there, they’d hauled a guy in, they hadn’t taken anything off it, no, sir, yes, ma’am, they’d tell Medical if they got any rashes or developed any fevers or coughs, Medical had already told them that, yes, sir.
God, no, they didn’t volunteer to customs that it was an out-zone ship, yes, sir, they’d reported the contact, no, it was an instructed contact: the agents questions were strictly routine and the stress-detectors didn’t beep once.
Customs validated their datacards, logged them both as active in R2, and they went back to the hand-line for the lifts.
Ben said, conversationally, while they were each trailing by a gripper handle, Ben in front this time: “You can quit worrying about the charts. Got the card in my pocket.”
His heart went thump. “Dammit, Ben,—”
“Hell, it was all right.”
“I told you leave it!”
“Where the cops’d find it?”
“You could’ve said. God!”
“Hey. You’re a lousy liar. Was I going to burden your conscience? You passed the detectors—so did I, right?”
Ben could. Stress detectors depended on a conscience.
“You’re just too damn nervous, Bird.”
“You could’ve left ’em under that plate, dammit. You could’ve done what I told you to do—”
“You want to get caught, that’s the way to do it—conceal something on the cops. I didn’t conceal it. It was right in my pocket. God, Bird, everybody does it. If they wanted to clamp down, why do they let us have gamecards? Or vid? Why don’t they check that? I could code the whole thing onto a vidtape.”
“If too many people get too cocky, just watch them. Some nosy exec gets a notion, and you can walk right into it, Ben, you can’t talk your way out of everything.”
“Everything so far.”
“Hell,” he muttered. They were coming to the end of the hand-line, where you got three easy chances to grab a bar and dismount in good order instead of (embarrassment) shooting on down to the buffer-sacks that forcibly disengaged a passenger before the line took the turn.
Ben was first on the bar, swung over and pushed 8-deck on the lift panel before he caught up. “I’ll ride down with you.”
“So where else are you going?”
“Where do you think?”
“Shit, Ben.”
“Somebody will. Probably there’s a line of creditors on the ship. But we’ll at least get the 50/50. Damn right we will.”
“You’re bucking for back trouble, and you won’t get a damn thing. There’ll be a rule.”
“Young bones. I won’t stay long. And there’s no real choice, Bird, you have to file the day you get in. That’s the rule.”
“So file at the core office.”
“Trust those bastards? No do. Corp-deck’s it.”
“Out of your mind,” he muttered as the car arrived. They floated in, took a handhold. The car sealed, clanked and made its noisy, jerky interface with the rotating heart of the core, and started solidly off down the link. He didn’t argue any more with Ben. If Ben had the fortitude to go down a level past helldeck an hour after dock and stand in some line to file to claim the poor sod’s ship, he didn’t know what to do with him. He only sighed and stared glumly at the doors and the red-lit bar that showed them approaching another take-hold.
“Bird, you got to take better care of yourself. What have you got for your old age?”
“I’m in it, and I don’t plan to survive it.” The car clanked into the spoke, and they shot into it with the illusion of climbing, until they hit that queasy couple of seconds where distance from R2’s spin axis equaled out with the car’s momentum as far as the inner ear was concerned. Then the ear figured out where Down was, the car’s rolling floor found it a half-heartbeat later, and bones and muscles started realizing that the stimsuits you worked in, the spin cylinders you slept in and the pills you took like candy didn’t entirely make up for weeks of weightlessness. Knees would feel it; backs would. The red-lit bar that showed their distance from the core was shooting toward 8-deck.
Meg and Sal were on 6; he had found that out on their way in. He’d left a message for them on the ’board, and he planned on company tonight. That and a drink and a long, long bath. Maybe with Meg, if she answered her messages.
If she wasn’t otherwise engaged.
The car stopped. He got out, on legs that felt tired even under 8’s low g, muscles weary of fighting the stimsuit’s elastic and now with g to complicate matters. Ben got out too, and said, “Meet you at the ’Bow.”
Ben didn’t even slow down. He just punched the button to go on down as far as the core lift went, to 3.
Bird shook his head and headed off down 8-deck—damned if he was even going to call up his mail before he hit the bar at the Starbow. Mail would consist of a bank statement and a few notes from friends as to when they’d gone out and when they’d be back. His brother in Colorado wrote twice a year, postal rates out here being a week’s groceries and Sam not being rich. It wasn’t quite time for the biannual letter and outside of that there wasn’t mail to get excited about. So screw that. He just wanted a chance to get the weight off, get a drink, see a couple of familiar female faces if fate was kind, and never mind Ben’s wet dreams. Ships didn’t come without debts, probably multiple owners, not mentioning the bank, and the company would find some technicality to chew up any proceeds they could possibly make from the ship, til it was hardly worth the price of a good rock, plus expenses. Ben was going to work himself into a heart attack someday, if ulcers didn’t get him first.
The meds said, and the Institute taught you, some null-g effects got worse every time you went out: your bones resorbed, your kidneys picked up the calcium and made stones, and the body learned the response—snapped to it faster with practice, as it were, and Ben believed it. Science devised ways to trick gravity-evolved human systems, and you took your hormones, you spent your sleeptime in the spinner and you wore the damn stimsuit like a religion. Most of all you hoped you had good genes. They told gruesome tales of this old miner whose bones had all crumbled, and there was a guy down tending bar in helldeck who had so many plastic and metal parts he was always triggering the cops’ weapon scans. He didn’t intend to end up like that, nossir, he intended eventually to be sitting in a nice leasing office collecting 15-and-20 on two ships, free and clear of debt, and letting other poor sods get their parts replaced. He had no objection to Morrie Bird sitting in that office as vice president in charge of leases, for that matter: Bird had the people sense that could make it work, and Bird couldn’t last at mining forever: they’d already replaced both hips.
So Bird went off to the easy adjustment of 8-deck in blind trust that Mama would do the right thing and assay their take in the sling and record all the data they’d shot to the offices during their approach—while the one of them who’d worked for Mama for two years and knew the way Mama worked took the immediate trip down to 3-deck, and the frontage of the debtors’ barracks he’d once lived in. Oddity was endemic hereabouts—you could look down the strip now and spot a guy dressed head to foot in purple, but he wasn’t necessarily crazy—at least you could lay money he didn’t claim the company’d done this or that or ask you the time every five minutes.
God, he hated remembering this place. But he still kept an ultra-cheap locker there, with a change of clothes—
Because you had to dress if you were going to go call in debts, nothing rad or rab, just classic. Good sweater, good pants, casual coat. Real shoes. You had to look like solid credit to get what he was after. And his legs were in good enough shape, all things considered: he’d foreseen this, and taken his pills and worked out all the way back—burning off the desire to strangle Dekker, Bird had probably thought, regarding those unusually long sessions on the cycle and the bounce-pads.
But he could walk, at least. He could peel out of the coveralls and the stimsuit, shower in the public gym, dress himself in stationer style and go down past helldeck to 1, where he weighed Earth-normal, walking like an old man, it might be, but he’d taken a painkiller while they were coming in, and it was just a matter of taking it easy—going where Mama knew damned well a spacer directly back from a run wasn’t comfortable going—which was why so many tricky little company rules said you had to sign the forms in person, on the day you docked, at the core office if you wanted Mama to take her time—or in the main offices if you wanted Expedition. The inner decks being notoriously short of lawyers, a lot of spacers never even realized Expedition was possible.
You could put in a company-backed claim on salvage, for instance: go to the general office, file to have the company run procedures and wait it out; but that threw it into ASTEX administrative procedures, which ground exceedingly slow, and put it in the hands of ASTEX Legal Affairs, which usually found some t uncrossed or i undotted. Up there you could file a claim for expenses, but you only got that after Mama had adjudicated the property claims, unless you knew to file hardship along with it; and you could file for salvage, but you had to know the right words and be sure the clerk you got used them: half the low-level help at the core couldn’t spell, let alone help you with legalese.
Best of all, you could pay a call on an old classmate from the Institute, break the queue and get the precise by-the-book words on the application.
8-deck was transient and gray and lonely: you might see a handful of miners in from their runs, not to mention the beam-crews and the construction jocks and whoever else worked long stints in null; you saw the occasional Shepherds and ’driver crews, transiting to their own fancy facilities, and a noisy lot of refinery tenders and warehouse and factory workers and dock monkeys on rest-break (there were a lot of refinery operations on 8)—and sometimes, these days, some of the military in on leave—but you didn’t get anything like the flashy shops or the service you had down on helldeck. Here you kind of bounced along between floating and walking, being careful how fast you got going, being careful of walls and such—your brittle bones and your diminished muscles and your head all needed to renew acquaintances with up and down—slowly, if you were smart.
The public part of 8 was all automats, even the sleeperies—no enterprising station freeshop types behind the counters, even for the minim shifts that Health & Rehab would let a stationer work on 8. It was robot territory, just stick your card in a slot and you got a sleepery room or a sandwich or the swill that passed here for bourbon whiskey: but that was all right for a start, everything was cheaper than helldeck and your whole sense of taste was off, anyway, for the first bit you got used to refinery air.
You found no luxury here that didn’t come out of an automatic dispenser, unless you were working for the company—in which case you saw a whole other class of accommodations, the adverts said: they said a whole lot better came out of the vending machines behind those doors—but Bird had never seen it. ’Driver crew and Shepherds didn’t need the waystops that miners did—if they were up here they were slumming, on a 1-hour down from some business in the mast; but generally they went straight to helldeck, where big ship officers and tech crew had cushy little clubs and free booze, and Access with all sorts of perks on the company computers.
Adverts said you could get at least a sniff of those perks, even as a miner—if you let the company own your ship and provide your basics; but that meant the company could also decide when you were too old or you didn’t fit some profile, and then you were out, goodbye and good luck, while some green fool got your ship. God help you, too, if Mama decided you weren’t prime crew on that ship, and some company-assigned prime crew got shunted out to work tender-duty for three years at a ’driver site—which effectively dumped all the relief crews back at the Refinery onto the no-perks basics, to do time-share in a plastics factory. Work for the company and you could fill in your time swabbing tanks in the chemicals division til you got too old, and then they set you down on retirement-perks and let you sweep floors in some company plant to earn your extras.
Hell, no. Not this old miner.
But a lot of years he had been coming back to 8, and he’d seen changes—or maybe he had felt livelier once upon a time. 8 these days echoed to footsteps, not to music and voices. The bright posters had all gone years ago, the month the company had gone over to paperless records-keeping. The company favored gray paint or institution green, except for pipes that came wrapped with hazard yellow and black.
You used to get the unofficial bills here too, the pasteups that would appear overnight—saying things like TOWNEY LIES and FREE PRATT & MARKS—Mama hadn’t liked those in the best days, nossir, the bills that said things like EQUAL ACCESS and the take-one flyers that used to give you the news the company wouldn’t. They’d all gone. No paper.
You still found the old barred circle, you still found PEACE and FREE EMIGRATION scratched in restroom plastic, right alongside the stuff you could figure Neanderthals must’ve carved in Stone Age bathrooms—you found MINIM and RABRAD and SCREW THE CORP, along with other helpful suggestions in the toilets… far more frequent here than down on helldeck, he guessed because sanding down the panels in light g made a bitch of a lot of dust, and spray paint was as bad. Or maybe it was because Security didn’t come up here much and the ordinary maintenance crews were contributing to it too. So the crud and the slogans stayed in the bathrooms, not even covered by paint, while 8-deck got nastier and dirtier and showed its age like some miners he knew.
He was in a sour mood—maybe the cops, maybe Ben’s stupid chance-taking with the datacard, maybe just that he was tired of the shit and tired of feeding a company that was trying to blow itself to hell; and right now specifically because the cops had their Personals, which meant he was stuck in the stimsuit and his day-old coveralls until the cops turned his kit loose: damned if he was going to buy new knee and ankle wraps at vending machine prices.
But he did buy a bottle of aspirin, a cheap men’s personals pack, and a far too expensive bottle of cologne: the hips were gone, the ankles were going, the hair was gray and thinning, but the essentials still worked and he did have hopes. He walked into the bar in the front of the ambitiously named Starbow Hotel and, with his card in the slot at the desk, punched Double and Guests Permitted.
In the midst of which transaction somebody grabbed him from behind and swung him around, clean off his feet.
“Hey!” he yelled, as the turn brought him face to face with dusky-skinned Sal Aboujib, who grabbed him the same as the one behind—
That had to be Meg Kady.
He hugged Sal back in this bouncing unstable minim-g dance. He said, “Damn, you’re both fools!”
But he’d hoped with all his heart they’d got his message.
“Old friend of Marcie Hager’s,” Ben said at the counter, down in Records. “Is she in?”
The clerk looked over his shoulder, looked at him, looked at the line that stretched out the door, said, uncertainly: “She might be.”
“Thanks,” he said warmly, smiled, and on an adrenaline rush and a dogged determination not to show the pain, walked cheerfully past the counter, through clerk territory and on back to the hallway: men in good suits didn’t stand in that line. Ben Pollard didn’t. He walked as far as an office that said M. Hager, Technical Supervisor, wiped the sweat off his face, rapped on the door, opened it and leaned in the doorway.
“Hello there, beautiful.”
Marcie Hager looked up from the desk, looked nonplussed for an instant. Then: “Ben Pollard. God, I thought you’d shipped out to Mars or something.”
“Mind if I sit?”
She said, after a second’s consideration, “Of course not. Come on in. Coffee?—Are you all right? You’re white.”
“First day back. Came down from 8.—You’re looking good.”
“Last time I saw you, you were in Assay.” Marcie got up, poured two instant coffees. “White? Sugar?—Back from where?”
“White. Plain.—Assay for a while. Then I bought into a ship.”
Marcie’s brows went up. Estimation of his finance clearly did. So did her interest. “Social call?”
He grinned, sat down with the coffee, said, after a deliberately slow sip, “I ran into a piece of luck. I thought you might be able to help me.”
You went to the company school, you learned what bought what from whom: some were cheap and some cost more than a freerunner could possibly pay, but you always kept track of your old classmates and, on call, you did favors such as Marcie Hager was about to—because favors got you favors, and that, for one thing, meant he didn’t have to stand in that line.
“Yeah?” Marcie said, and sat down and sipped her own coffee. “Sounds interesting.”
Meaning Marcie thought somebody with a ship equity four years out of school just might be going somewhere even a Technical Super in Records might find useful—even if freerunning was as high-risk an investment as there was, it was disposable cash and high-interest returns in the short term; and it was capital that a Technical Super in Records, with all her Access perks, couldn’t lay hands on—
But not as if Marcie was going to ask cold cash for favors. In Marcie’s position, subject to company scrutiny, you never left a datatrail.
“Just a little expediting. A claim for salvage. I don’t want to be at the bottom of the list of creditors. This guy owes us, big.”
Marcie’s left eyebrow titled. “Like in—major salvage.”
“Ship salvage.” He leaned back, eased a very sore set of muscles in his back, took another slow sip of coffee. “Number’s One’er Eighty-four Zebra.”
“Mmmn. Not from this zone, Benjie. That’s a long procedures delay. Where in hell have you been?”
“Yeah, well,—but—” He turned on his nicest smile. Rule One: you didn’t deal in plain words. Rule Two: you were careful about cash. Rule Three: you didn’t ask favors of prigs—but Marcie certainly wasn’t that.
Marcie said, “Just so you know,” and turned on her terminal. Marcie’s kind might not trade in cash, but Marcie said, while she was idly tapping her way through a chain of accesses, “What ever happened to Angie Windham, you know?”
“Don’t know. But you know Theo Pangoulis went bust? He bet everything he had on that shop—could have told him nothing succeeds in that location.”
Marcie scowled. That wasn’t the kind of offering you gave: they were seriously negotiating now, and her fingers stopped moving.
He said, “On the other hand, I do hear from Harmon Phillips.”
“Do you?”
“You know he’s on Aby Torrey’s staff. Up in Personnel.”
“That’s interesting,” Marcie said. “—Have you got your numbers ready?”
It was swill, but there was g enough to keep it in the glass and you in your seat if you sat easy, and there was sure as hell good company—the two prettiest sights in the belt, Bird swore: Soheila Aboujib, a grin gleaming on her dark face, her ears and fingers aglitter with her reserve bank account, laughed, elbowed Meg in the ribs and said, “He’s been out there too long.”
“Let me tell you,” he said—and did, in the light traffic of the Starbow’s autobar: they were in a crowd of dockers and tender- and pusher-jocks. The piped music adjusted itself up, affording a little privacy to people at the back corner table.
“Yow,” Meg said, when she had the essentials. “So Ben’s down in Admin, is he?”
“If he didn’t break a leg,” he said. “I tell you, I’m worried about him. He’s been acting like a crazy man from the time we linked on with that ship.”
“I dunno.” Meg was what the young folk called rab, and the hairdo this time was what his generation called amazing, shaved bare up the sides, red as fire atop, a mass of curls trailing down her neck and all these bangles on her ears. With Meg you’d never know what you’d see—sometimes it was braids and sometimes that hair turned colors. Meg Kady, she was, Hungarian on one side, Sol Station Irish on the other, Meg said—but sometimes it was Scots; and once, overheard in a bar, she’d said it was Portuguese Martian. God only knew about Sal Aboujib, who had a coffee complexion and coffee-black eyes: with Sal it was braids today, a hundred of them, with metal clips, but you never knew—sometimes that hair changed styles and colors too.
Either one of them was too pretty for a gray-haired, brittle-boned old wreck—had to be his brains they were after picking, he was sure: get him drunk and ask him questions, buy a dinner and try to get specific coordinates out of glum, close-to-the-chest Ben—neither one of which had ever been too successful. But you never figured what made friends: you just took up with people, found out who you could trust, and if you found a good one you kept those contacts polished, that was all—never could remember how they’d taken up with him—well before Ben, back when he’d been working with various hire-ons, something to do with a mixed-up drink order (he’d been far gone and so had they) and a game of pitch-the-penny in quarter g with a crowd of equally soused tender-jocks.
Never could remember who’d finally gotten the bill.
“From over the line?” Meg asked, regarding the strayed ship, and he said, “One’er number. Clean-talking kid, real young, maybe twenty, twenty-two. Partner’s dead out there. Tank blew. His partner was outside.”
“Brut bad luck,” Sal said with a shake of her braids. A little grimace. Then: “You seriously got rights on that ship?”
“Ben thinks so. Thinks so enough to risk his knees. He’s been working out for weeks. I figured he was going to pull this, but I did think he’d at least check in first.”
Meg said: “Want us to track him? We’ve been scuzzing along on 6, in no hurry, figuring on a friend showing up—could’ve done 3 two days ago. We can go down…”
“He’ll get back. If he doesn’t I’ll call the hospital.”
“You two feuding?”
“Ben gets a little over-anxious.”
“Yeah, well. That’s Ben.—But if it worked, if you did get salvage—can you just take the ship?”
“It’s not going to work. Company’ll find an angle. You watch.”
“Que sab?” Meg said. “But if it did—”
“Meg, he’s been damn crazy. Ever since we found that ship. I tell you, I was afraid—” He’d been too long away from a drink. He hadn’t dared indulge, on the return trip, and this one hit him like a hammer. He almost said: Afraid of him,—but that word could get back to Ben, and he didn’t want that. He said, instead, “Ben works real hard. But sometimes he gets to looking most at where he’s going, not what he’s doing.”
Meg reached out and laid a hand on his arm. “Yeah, well, cher, you want us to talk to him?”
“No, no, it’s between him and me. Let him get this bug out of his works. He’s going to find nothing but a string of bills to that ship’s account. It’s probably in hock for its last fuel bill. If we get expenses I’ll be happy.”
“Can’t blame him for trying,” Sal said. “Hell, I’d brut kill for a chance like that.”
You never knew on some things whether Sal was kidding.
“Look,” Meg said, squeezing his wrist. “What say you screw the med-regs, cancel here and come down to 6 with us?”
“Meg, my old knees—”
“Old, hell. We got a nice berth there at the Liberty Bell. You just stay here and collect Ben when he comes in. We’ll party tonight. Get the spooks out. We knew we were waiting for somebody.”
“Yeah,” said Sal. “Just give us a little time to clean up the room.”
“Clean up, for God’s sake—what are we? Strangers?”
Meg elbowed his arm, getting up. “Hey, we just got to get a few things out of it. Female vanity.”
He gave a shake of his head and sipped his bourbon. A few things out of the room. The things might well be male. But he charitably didn’t suggest that.
And it was (charitably) true Meg and Sal might do some feminine fussing-up in the place; and it was no real surprise that Meg and Sal might bounce a casual acquaintance or two in favor of him and Ben—they were simpatico, for some reason God only knew; they were also on Trinidad’s lease-list, though they were just in themselves, and in no position to take a ship out for another month or three.
“See you below,” they said, and went.
Pretty woman like that could’ve talked him down to helldeck tonight if she’d insisted: pretty woman like that—
Who lied like a company lawyer.
Meg was an ex-shuttle pilot, native to Sol Station (or Mars)—accused at Sol Station of political agitation (or arrested for smuggling, depending on how many Meg’d had). Either one in fact could’ve gotten her deported down to the motherwell if they’d gotten the evidence she’d evidently managed to dump. In either case, the company had (she said) invited her to leave places conveniently close to sources of luxuries. Meg had taken up with Sal when she got here—Sal herself had gotten bounced out of Institute pilot training, Sal never had said why, but it didn’t matter: there were a number of things Sal would have done, and you could take your pick. Sal was smart, she’d had at least her class 3 license, and by his reckoning, she had what the good numbers men had: she went past the numbers to see the Belt in her head. It was formal schooling and experience Sal lacked—and the way Sal had been getting it, in the School of Last Resort, you just hoped to live long enough.
He was sure the pair skimmed, occasionally—just clipped a little off another freerunner’s tag if they didn’t know him personally.
But not from their friends. Or if they had—he figured they’d pay it back when they had it to pay and never tell you they stole it. That was the kind they were, even Sal, who was real loose about a lot of things, and he counted that honest. Everybody got desperate enough sometime. He’d done it himself once or twice or three. And paid it back to the guys he’d done it to, without ever telling them he’d done it. He understood that kind of morality.
So he’d lease Trinidad to Meg and Sal now and again—a classier ship than they could generally get, with equipment other rigs didn’t have. They were learning. They took advice. He’d lease to them this time, if they’d been ready to go—he liked them, that was reason enough.
But all of a sudden there was this other ship: he’d seen that idea light up in their eyes—that if by some stroke of cosmic luck they did get a second ship, then somebody had to be leasing it, didn’t they, maybe on a primary basis? Surely he wasn’t going to sell it to the company. God only how far their imaginations took those two.
Damn, he asked himself, what was the jinx on that ship, that it made Ben crazy and now it had Meg and Sal thinking about something they just weren’t damn-all good enough yet to ask for?
While nobody gave two thoughts to the poor sod in hospital who was screwed out of everything he had, not to mention the owners and the lease crews over at Rl who might be screwed.
Sometimes he thought he was too old and too far from his beginnings. Sometimes he dreamed about pine trees and sagebrush and sunsets.
But he dreamed very realistically about poverty too—recalled what it was to scrape and save to get up to space for schooling; then by desperation and some fast talking to make it out to Asteroid Exploration, Inc., to a program that let you lease-purchase: they’d been that desperate for miner pilots then, desperately looking, in the start-up of the current push.
Most of them that had come out then were probably dead now: he knew about the ones on R2, and he was the last of that lot. The plain station labor that had gone into refinery jobs and processing—God only: maybe a lot of them were dead too. He remembered young faces; he remembered the talk about what they were going to find, how they were all going to get rich on company wages.
Yeah. And now that the mapping was mostly done and the company had its ’drivers working real smoothly, the company didn’t want the freerunners anymore. E-co-nomics, they said. Freerunners didn’t fit the system the way it had grown to be, all company-run, and ASTEX stacked the deck any way it liked. You couldn’t complain and you couldn’t get clear—because that took money you didn’t have; or if you did sell your ship back to the company you got to Sol Station with, after passage, 50, 60 k in pocket, back at your starting place aged 50 plus with your bones all brittle and that 60 k all you had for your retirement and your medical bills.
But he read his brother’s letters and he knew beyond a doubt that thirty years was too long an absence for anyone: Earth had changed, attitudes had changed—people worried about things that didn’t worry him and they didn’t worry where he knew they should. Earth was at war with its colonies, shooting hell out of human beings, while Earth-folk argued whether the eetees at Pell had souls, and blamed the government for the market crash when company merchant ships went on strike about the damn visas. You had the rabs walking around in shave-jobs and glitter and scrawling slogans because society was going to hell and the human race with it; you had the Isolationists who wanted to shut down the far star-stations and not speak to anybody but Earth and Mars and the Belt; and you had the Federationists and the Separationists and the pacifists and the neo-nationalists and the New Evangelicals all of whom thought they knew how to reform the human race; you had the Euconomists and the anti-geneticists and the ones that claimed there was a youth drug from space that the governments had embargoed, but the rich could still get it; and you had various defense departments in the United Nations and United Internationals building those bloody huge warships to enforce the embargoes against the rebels in far space, while the Free Trade Party that had won the election in the PanAsian Union wanted to get rid of all the embargoes, cancel the visas and let people go where they wanted to go—but out there in deep space things changed, things changed constantly, faster than anybody could keep up with. He had not quite been born when somebody out at Cyteen had discovered Faster Than Light and rewritten the book, and hell if he understood FTL physics or its politics, but the company built its ships out of the metal he’d found. They’d armed the traders of the Great Circle before he was born, and right now they were building those new translight carriers to Teach the Colonies a Lesson. All this had been going on near a hundred years, but it was breeding at FTL rates now—they’d shot the rab reformers at the company doors back in the ’15, they’d established the visas, they’d shunted Earth Company operations out into half a hundred subsidiaries like ASTEX that only tangled the company’s books beyond the capacity of any single Earth-based government to audit, and nobody was responsible for a damned thing. They’d had draft riots at Sol Station a year ago, four kids killed, they’d had two officials up for falsifying military supply records, so the rumor had been,—while out here in the Belt there were construction workers and those great steel skeletons you weren’t supposed to talk about, that eventually, after a handful of years, powered up and pushed themselves on toward Sol Station for finishing. All this went on. But if you looked at the vid on the wall and wondered what else might be going on you didn’t know about, the company News & Entertainment division was running a program on hydroponic gardening.
Damn crazy life. Sometimes you sat out there in the Belt with one other guy in a little ship and wondered what would happen to you both if humanity did go crazy and blow itself to hell. Lately you kept an anxious ear to the news Mama doled out daily and tried to figure out who was actually running things in the motherwell, because damned if the company was going to tell you about it in so many words: ASTEX, Asteriod Explorations, was part of the Earth Company, which had the whole damn United Defense Command on its leash; the whole thing was a damn alphabet riot—ASTEX, EC, SS, UI, MEX, and FN, for starters, and everybody was sleeping in more than one bed, governmentally speaking—
Which he preferred not to. Maybe the kids in the colored hair and the glowpaint and the nose-rings were right. Maybe humankind would blow itself up. Maybe Belters would survive out here and breed themselves a whole new human race—
One that thought Shakespeare was a physicist.
He got up and carded himself a drink—canceled the rez for himself and Ben at the Starbow, while he was at it, since he hadn’t used the key that had dropped from the slot; and seriously wondered if his back was going to take it on 6—in various considerations.
“Bird?”
Well, so Ben had survived. Ben was back with excitement bubbling in his voice. He turned around as Ben stopped and caught his balance against the vending machine.
“Bird, we got a chance. We got a real chance.” A gasp for breath. “Broke my neck getting up here.” Another breath. “Ship’s got a double registry—over on Refinery One. Paul Dekker and Corazon Salazar. She’s Cory, she’s the partner—and his title’s completely clear.”
“You’re kidding. He’s no more than a kid.”
“Dunno what she was, but they owned that ship. They owned her clear—no liens, no debt, nothing, Bird, we got it! We got the only claim against it! We’re first in line!”
He picked up his drink out of the dispenser and just held it in a shaking hand. You didn’t think about things like that, you didn’t ever start wanting something that just couldn’t happen. But knowing they had bills to meet and the company paying claims so slow nowadays—
God forgive, he started thinking then—if Dekker was crazy—if they really were due that ship…
“Your name’s Dekker,” they asked. Meds. He remembered them. But how he had gotten here he couldn’t remember. He didn’t know how long he had been here. He didn’t know how long he had been out just now. He asked questions back, but he never got much help from their answers.
Sometimes he thought he was on a ship like his own ship; sometimes he thought he had been hallucinating all of it. “Bird?” he asked sometimes. Sometimes he was afraid Ben was going to come floating up and hit him.
Sometimes he thought Bird and Ben had been something he’d dreamed in this place, and he simply couldn’t figure how he had gotten here, unless Cory had somehow gotten the ship straightened out and brought him in. He felt tranked. He thought, This is a hospital. This is Base. We’re home. We’re safe…
“Where’s your partner?” someone asked him.
He slitted his eyes open, lifted his head so far as he had strength to do. He saw a white coat, a man writing on a slate.
“Where’s your partner?” the med asked him. “Do you remember?”
Black. An alarm screaming. The ship jolted and spun—he struggled against the weight of his own arm to reach the controls, wondering whether the autopilot could possibly straighten them out or if it had engaged already. He didn’t know. He hit the switch. Something jolted the ship, threw him against the workstation—
“Mr. Dekker. Do you recall what happened?”
Green-walled shower. The watch showed March 12.
“What day is it?” he asked. But they didn’t answer him. He tried to see his watch, but he couldn’t move his arms. “Bird, what time is it? For God’s sake, what time?”
The man in white wrote on his slate and said, “What time do you think it is?”
“Give me my watch. Where’s my watch?” It wasn’t on his wrist. It had lied to him. Or it was his only way back. “Where’s my watch, dammit!—I want my watch!”
The man left. Others came in and shot something into his arm. After that he could hear his heart beating heavier and heavier, and he was slipping into dark.
“Bird?” he asked, thinking Ben must have something to do with this. “Bird, wake up—Bird, help me—Bird, wake up and help me!”
GLASS touched glass, in the Liberty Bell, on 6. “Here’s to friends,” Sal said, and Bird, telling himself it was far too soon to plan on anything, had made up his mind not to tell Meg and Sal a thing.
But that had gone by the side the minute they’d seen Ben’s smugly cheerful face.
“You got it!” Meg said, before they even got their drink orders in.
“We’re at least tracking,” Ben said. “We’re gaining on it. They’re going to expedite the claim.”
For the life of him, Bird couldn’t figure how Ben managed to get around people in offices. But he did.
So here they were, on their way to feeling no pain at all, .7 g be damned.
It wasn’t as if Meg and Sal would leave them cold tomorrow if the deal fell through. They weren’t that kind. But they sure as hell enjoyed the party tonight.
They enjoyed it afterward too, piled into two adjacent rooms in the Bell—actually the party traveled and they had to throw this one pair of tender-jocks out twice, who complained they’d been invited.
“No, you weren’t!” Sal Aboujib said. And shut the door and slid down it, laughing. Meg was laughing too much to help her, so they hauled her up and picked her up, Sal yelling that they were going to drop her on her head.
So they fell on the bed—which at low g meant a slow bouncing, all of them, while up and down went sort of alcoholically crazed for a moment.
“God,” Bird said, falling back on what he thought was mattress. “I’m zee’d.”
Meg fell on him with a vaporous kiss and he stopped caring which way was up.
Turned out when they waked it was Ben and Sal’s bunk they were in, but that was no matter, Ben and Sal had just gone off next door. But they had last night’s sins to pay for—a hangover in low g, with your sinuses and your ears playing tricks, was hell’s own reward.
“Cory?” Dekker asked. “Cory?” But he was not in the ship, he was inside white walls with white-coated medics who asked him over and over “What happened to Cory?” and he couldn’t altogether remember what their truth was, or what they wanted him to say. He asked for Bird, and they asked him who that was, but someone said in his hearing that that was the man who’d brought him in.
From where? He tried to remember where he had left Bird, or what had happened, but it always went back to that shower stall, the watch showing him the time… March 12. And it was his choice what would happen that day…
He slept again. He was more comfortable when he waked. His hands were free and they let him sit up and gave him fruit drink. A man came and sat down by his bed with a slate and started asking him questions—How old are you? Have you any relatives? all rapid-fire. It was the sort of thing they asked if you’d had an accident, something about next of kin. It scared him. The shower in this room wasn’t the shower he remembered, he could see the white walls through the door. He’d jumped ahead. Cory wasn’t with him, and he was in a hospital having to go through these questions like some actor in a vid. It couldn’t be real. God, he didn’t want his mother to hear he was lying in a hospital somewhere she couldn’t help, he’d screwed up enough: he just said he was from Sol Station and shut up.
“What was your relationship with Corazon Salazar?” they asked him then, cold and impersonal. He said, going through the ritual, “She’s my partner.”
But if he went on answering, they’d write it down as true and he’d be here, he couldn’t go back to the shower, he’d be out of the loop and he’d have no chance to fix it: Cory would be dead then. No way back.
The man asked, “Did you have relations with her?”
That made him mad. “That’s not your business.”
The man asked: “Did you ever quarrel?”
“No.”
The man made a mark on his slate. “What did you invest in that ship?”
He didn’t understand that question. He shook his head.
“Did you put any money into it?”
He shook his head again. “That wasn’t the way it worked. Cory was the money.” Cory was the brains too, but he didn’t admit that to a stranger. Cory was the one who had no question what she wanted. But the man didn’t ask that. The man said, “What happened out there?”
He couldn’t go back to the shower now. No green walls. White. He thought, What should I tell them? And the man said, “Does that upset you? You said Ms. Salazar was working outside the ship. Why?”
He said, not sure what he might have changed, “We were working a tag.”
“Did Ms. Salazar regularly do the outside work?”
“I’m the pilot.” Two answers right. He felt surer now.
“I see. So she hired you. And gave you half interest in her ship. For nothing.”
He nodded.
“Where did you meet?”
“We wrote letters back and forth. We’d been writing a long time. Since we were kids.”
Another note on the slate. “Then it was more than a business relationship.”
“Friends.”
“You didn’t have a falling-out, did you?”
He looked at his watch. But it wasn’t there. They’d taken it.
The man said, “Did you quarrel?”
“We never quarreled.”
“She always did what you wanted? Or didn’t she, this time?”
He didn’t understand. He shook his head. He thought about the shower, but it wasn’t vivid this time. Even the green seemed faded.
The man asked: “Why did you cross the line? To cover what you’d done?”
He didn’t understand what they were getting at. He shook his head again, looked furtively at his wrist, remembered he mustn’t do that. It upset people. Like Ben. It upset Ben a lot…
“Tell me the truth,” the man said. “What were you doing out there?”
“We had a tag,” he said. “We were working it.”
He lost the room of a sudden. It was dark and there were the boards lighting and blinking. He tried to find the safe white wall again.
“Did you leave her there?” the man said. He couldn’t remember what he’d just said, he could only see the boards, and someone was holding him down. He got an arm free. People were yelling. There were flashes of the white room, there were faces over him and they were all holding him. He yelled: “Let me go!” and felt a sharp explosion against his shoulder, but they kept holding him, telling him to calm down.
He said, out of breath, “I’ll be calm. I’ll be calm, I don’t want any more sedatives—”
Because when they drugged him he had no idea where he was or how long he was out or where he went in that dark…
He opened his eyes again with a terrible leaden feeling, as if he weighed too much and he couldn’t wake up—but he knew where he was, he was in the hospital. Two very strong men were holding him down and asking him how he felt now.
He was out of the dark. He said, when he had gotten a whole breath, “I’m fine. I’m fine. Just don’t give me any more shots, all right?”
“Will you talk to us? Will you behave?”
“Yes,” he said.
The man in white leaned over him then, took hold of his wrist and asked him, “Are you still worried about your watch?”
His heart gave a little thump, making him dizzy. But he knew it was a test. He wasn’t supposed to ask the time. They beat him when he did that. Or gave him shots. He shook his head, wanting to stay awake now.
The doctor said, “We’re going to take some readings while we talk. Is that all right?”
Another test. He made up his mind then: it didn’t matter what the truth was. If he didn’t say exactly the right thing they’d give him shots. He’d been in trouble in his life—but this was serious. This was a hospital and they thought he was crazy.
The doctor asked him, “Are you still worried about your watch?”
Black. The siren going. He heard something beeping wildly. A timer was going off and he didn’t remember setting it. He could see the doctor frowning at him—he tried to track on the doctor: he knew how important it was. And when he did that, the beeping slowed down.
“That’s better,” the doctor said. “Are you all right? Do you want to tell me what just happened?”
He got a breath. He said, calmly, trying to pay no attention to the beeps, “Cory was outside. We were working this tag—”
“On which side of the line?”
“On this side.” Stupid question. The beeps went crazy a moment, when his heart did. He got it calm again. “We were working this tag. A big claim. Big. Kilometer wide…”
“Are you sure, Mr. Dekker?”
“It was that big. And we were out there. We’d shot our tag, but it wasn’t a good take. Cory said—” The beep sped up again and he slowed it down, staring at the wall, remembering Cory saying, We’re not letting those sons of bitches—“—We had to fix it. And she was going to go in—”
“You couldn’t handle a rock that size.”
“It was stable. Not that bad.” Again the beep. He said, before it could get away from him. “But this damn ’driver—he wasn’t on the charts—he wasn’tslowing down. I said—I said, ’Cory, get in here, Cory, he’s still not answering me, Cory, get inside—’”
“Get the trank,” the doctor said. The beep became a steady scream. Like the collision alert. Lights were flashing.
“I said, I kept saying, ’You sonuvabitch, my partner’s out there, my partner’s outside, I can’t pull off—’”
They hit him with the trank. Two of them were holding him. But he kept screaming, ’“I can’t pull off, you sonuvabitch!’ ”
“It’s not working,” somebody said.
The doctor pushed his eyelid up, leaning close, said, looking elsewhere, “Get the chief,” while breath came short and the monitor was beeping a steady panic:
“They didn’t list it,” he said. “It wasn’t broadcasting—”
The doctor said, “Make up another dose. 50 ccs.”
“It wasn’t on the damn charts—”
“Easy,” the doctor said. “We understand you.—Cut that racket.”
The beeper stopped. He took an easier breath.
“Good. Good.” Another dark space then.
Somebody had had an accident, an Rl ship turned up in R2 zone, probable ’driver accident—which should be BM’s job, but it was in William Payne’s day-file, straight from Crayton’s office, in General Administration.
The memo said: Handle this. We need minimal publicity.
Payne paged through the file. A freerunner pilot in hospital—making wild charges about a ’driver captain violating regulations…
God. The Shepherd Association was hardnosing it in contract talks, the company trying to avert a strike—Payne shook his head. Not quite his job, but it was very clearly an information-control situation, and that was his department, as executive director of Public Information. One could even, if one were paranoid, suspect a set-up by the Independents—but it seemed the pilot’s physical condition was no fake, and a miner was dead.
Bad timing—damned bad timing for this to come in.
The question was how far the rumors had already gotten. Freerunners had done the rescue. That was one problem. News & Entertainment could run another safety news item, give the odds against a high-v rock, remind everyone it was a remote possibility—or maybe best not to raise the question. The Shepherd Association wanted an issue. It was begging for a forum. Meanwhile the police were going over the wreck, poking about—that was a department Public Information couldn’t entirely handle. Best keep them away from the issues in the case.
A release from the pilot was the all-around best fix. Evidently BM had a crack team going over that ship—that was good: if there was a mechanical fault, settle the problem there, no problem. Get a statement from the pilot, fix culpability if there was any—
Not with a company captain, damned sure, and not in a lawsuit that could bring the Shepherd Association in as friends of the court. That certainly wasn’t what Crayton meant by “settlement.”
A hand touched Dekker’s face. It gave him the willies. He couldn’t do anything about it. Couldn’t even open his eyes yet.
“Mr. Dekker, would you answer a question for me? There’s something I don’t understand.”
He got a breath. Two breaths. Did get his eyes open, marginally. “What?”
“Why the watch?”
“Kept the time.”
“Mr. Dekker.”
Clearer and clearer. It was the doctor again. He made a ’ try at sitting up, inched higher on the pillows.
“How are we feeling, Mr. Dekker?”
“Like shit.”
“You were talking about the watch.”
Beep.
“Explain to me about the watch, Mr. Dekker. Why does it upset you?”
He wished he knew the answers to that one. The doctor stood there a long time. Finally he thought, Maybe this one’s going to listen. He said, tentatively, “We had some stuff linked to the main board. Way Out was old. The arm didn’t work off the main board. It was supposed to be a three-man, you know, the way some of the ships used to be…”
“Go on, Mr. Dekker. The watch.”
“You couldn’t work the arm and see the log chrono. Real easy to lose track of time when you’re working and we didn’t trust her suit indicators. So we used my watch.” His voice shook. He was scared the doctor was going to interrupt him and order him sedated if he lost it. And he wasn’t sure if he was making sense to the man. “It only timed an hour, you know, the alarm was a bitch to set—so we’d set it to January 1.—What day is it?”
“July 15th, Mr. Dekker.”
He despised crying. He didn’t. He wouldn’t. The doctor was getting impatient. He took deep breaths to help him. “Don’t give me any shots. I need to figure—how far is it…”
“Don’t distress yourself, Mr. Dekker.”
January has thirty-one days. February is 28. March, 12.
71.
Out there in space. Seventy-one days. She’d have been out of air in 4 hours. Oh, God…
“Mr. Dekker.”
“March has thirty days. Or 31?”
“31.”
12 from 31 is 19. Nineteen days in March. April is—
Thirty days hath September… April, June, and November…
The doctor patted his shoulder. One of the orderlies came back.
“No!” he yelled. “I’ve almost got it, dammit!”
They shot him with it anyway. “Be still,” they said. “Be still. Don’t try to talk now.”
49. They found me on the 21st. 49 and 21. Do you count the 12th twice?
I’m losing it… start again.
Or can I trust my memory?
It was still 6-deck and still a waiting game. Every day Ben went down and checked the lists. Every day it turned up nothing but PENDING. Trinidad herself was still hung up in the investigation—there was no way they could lease her, no matter that there were a dozen teams applying; there was no way they could even start her charge-up, and every day she sat at dock she was costing money instead of earning it. Bird haunted the supply shops, pricing the few small parts she needed; but they couldn’t even get access to her, the way Bird put it, to fix the damned clothes dryer.
“You can’t hurry the police,” Ben said, trying to put a reasonable face on things. “It can’t be much longer.”
And Sal, between sit-ups—they were working out in the gym: “I thought you could fix anything.”
“Not in my range of contacts,” he said, frustrated himself. Nudging Security was asking for more investigation.
“Hell,” Bird said, mopping his face, leaning on the frame of a weight machine. “I sincerely hope they just get something decided. My heart can’t stand much more of this prosperity.”
Meg didn’t say anything but, “Easy, Bird.”
Payne said: “No, dammit, just don’t answer. Tell Salvatore—no, don’t tell Salvatore. I’ll talk to him…”
Hell of a day. A Shepherd crew and a tender crew mixed into it in a bar and a bystander was in hospital; and this—
Some clerk in Rl had return-sent the Salazar kid’s mail as Deceased, Return to Sender, and the sender in question, Salazar’s mother, had hit the phone asking for information on her daughter. The operator in ASCOM, knowing nothing about it, had sent the call to Personnel, the confused clerk that took the call in Rl Personnel there couldn’t find Salazar’s file and insisted to the bereaved mother there was no such person, while her supervisor had tried to stall for a policy clarification out of Rl’s Administrative levels, then realized she was out of her depth and tried to send it through to a higher level, after which it had bounced confusedly from department to department until a secretary in Legal Affairs put the call on hold and the woman hung up.
Salazar’s mother was on the MarsCorp board, for God’s sake. Nobody had told him. Nobody had told Towney. Nobody had flagged the dead miner as a problem—
Alyce Salazar’s next phone call had hit the president’s desk. Not Towney’s, in ASTEX. Hansford, in the Earth Company’s Sol Station headquarters. Hansford had called Towney, Towney had had to release the file, and Hansford’s office had released the details to MarsCorp.
Alyce Salazar had found out Dekker had survived, and immediately claimed it was no accident, he was a scoundrel who’d seduced her daughter, kidnapped her to the Belt, and killed her for her money.
Which turned out to have been a fair amount, before expenses. There was a binding surviving-partner clause—
But Alyce Salazar was an angry woman, one damned angry woman… and lawyers were talking to lawyers at very expensive phone rates.
“Mr. Crayton is on the line,” Payne’s secretary said.
God…
“Mr. Crayton, sir…”
Crayton said, “Have you got the letter?”
“Yes. I have it up now.”
“One went to Security.”
Oh, my God… “I’m sorry, sir. I certainly didn’t—”
“Not from your office. From Ms. Salazar. She wants that boy’s head. You understand the implications? We need this mess cleared up. We don’t want him in court. I want you to patch this up. Get the facts straight. We’ve got to have an answer for this one.”
Still no police clearance. And on a certain afternoon in the Bell, when Ben was in the bar doing some technical reading, Meg slipped into the chair across the table, leaned both arms on the table and said, “Benjie, cher, let’s go do talk.”
He’d thought at first Meg was just bored, Bird being out of sorts for the last couple of days; and he wasn’t totally surprised, back in her room, to end up in bed in mid-shift,—not the first time for him and Meg, but it was all the same unusual, even if he was entirely sure—and he was—that Bird wouldn’t take exception. The side-shaving was a turn-on. The mop on top and down the back was several shades brighter than elsewhere, but it was beyond a doubt Meg’s right color; and she had some kind of creature tattooed around one leg—snake, Meg had told him once, early on in their acquaintance. Bird had told him what kind it was and said if it bit you, you were dead in three minutes. He thought that might well fit Meg, if you got on her bad side.
But he wasn’t on her bad side. He had it figured by then that Meg had ulterior motives, though Meg wasn’t the sort to hold a man off while his brains scrambled—he swore he couldn’t do anything until she’d told him what was going on, but she proved that wrong: she had him truly gone before she started asking him about the ship, about Dekker, about the way Bird was stewing and fretting—
“Bird’s severely upset,” Meg said. “You think there’s a chance on that ship?—Because if there isn’t, you got to talk to him.”
“Dekker’s brain’s gone. No question. Yeah, there’s a solid chance on that ship, there’s a good chance.”
“Bird says if you get anything it’ll have to be in court. Bird’s saying you won’t win. That it’s all just a waste. But he doesn’t act it.—Is there anything the company can turn up? I mean, you didn’t seriously transgress any regs out there…”
So that was what was bothering Meg. Meg and Sal had to be looking for a lease for their next run, if that ship wasn’t going to come through—or if they were only going to sell it to the company. Meg and Sal hadn’t been betting elsewhere: that was what he suddenly figured, and they were down to decisions. “There isn’t going to be any court. I promise you. You know what Bird’s problem is? He’s scared he’s going to make money. Every time you get to talking about it—he just looks off the other way. If I hadn’t filed on that ship, you think he’d ever have done it? Hell, no. He’d have waited till he got his legs. Then he’d have said, well, it’s too late, there’d be other creditors—you tell me what goes through his head, Meg. I swear I don’t know.”
“Dirtsider.”
“So?” One of Meg’s stories had her born on Earth, too. But that didn’t seem to be the version Meg was using today. “Are they all like that? Is it something in the water?”
“Bird grew up poor.”
“So I grew up an orphan. So what’s that got to do with anything?”
“It’s habit with him: when he gets enough—that’s all. That’s all he wants from life. He doesn’t want to be rich. He just wants enough.”
It didn’t make any sense—not at least the why of it. He held the thought a moment, turned it over, looked at its underside, and decided he wasn’t going to understand. “Well, it’s not enough for me. Damn well not enough for me.”
Meg sighed. “Haven’t ever seen enough to know what enough is.”
“Damned short rations,” he said. “That’s what Bird’s ‘enough’ comes to. And it doesn’t keep you fed when your legs and your back give out. Doesn’t get you insurance.”
“Insurance,” Meg chuckled. “God, jeune fils…”
“That’s a necessity, dammit! Ask me where I’d have been if my mama hadn’t had it.”
“Yeah, well.—She was a company pilot, wasn’t she?”
“Tech.” He rolled over. He didn’t like to talk about things that were done with or people that didn’t come back. They didn’t matter. But the example did. “You don’t get any damn where halfass protected. Insurance—my company schooling—Bird’s knowing who to lease to—”
“Like us?”
Oh, then, here was the approach. Meg was looking at him, chin on hands, putting it to him dead-on, with no Bird for a back-up. He didn’t want to alienate Meg and Sal—especially Sal. They weren’t the best miners in the Belt, but they had other benefits—not all of them in bed. And he kept asking himself if he was using good sense, but the answer kept coming up that there might be miners better at their job, but if you wanted a couple of stick-to-a-deal, canny partners, present company and Sal weren’t damn bad.
Some of Bird’s friends, now—had his affliction. And they were going broke or had gone.
Meg said, “You suppose you could put in a word with Bird, explain how we’d be reasonable. We’d work shares.”
Not every day somebody as tough and canny as Meg needed something from him—seriously needed something. He toted it up, what the debts might be, what the collection might be. If one looked to have a long career leasing ships—one needed a couple of reliable partners who knew the numbers. And Sal in particular had possibilities—if Sal could get a grip on her temper and shake out that who-gives-a-damn attitude. Sal also had useful contacts. While Meg—
He said, he hoped after not too long a pause: “I could talk to him. What are friends for?”
“Wake up.” Someone shook at Dekker’s shoulder. “Come on, Dekker. Come on. Come out of it.”
He didn’t want to come back this time. It was more white coats. He could see that with his eyes half shut. But there was dark green, too, and the gleam of silver. That didn’t match.
A light slap at his face. “Come on, Dekker. That’s fine.—Do you want an orange juice?”
It never was. It was a cousin of that damned Citrisal. But his mouth was dry and he sipped it when they put a straw between his lips and elevated his bed. G felt heavier here. He thought: This isn’t the same place. We’re deeper in.
“How are you feeling?” his doctor asked him.
But he was looking suddenly at the company police, realizing what that uniform was.
“Paul Dekker?” the head cop said. “We want to ask you a few questions.”
He heard that beep again. That was him. That was the cops listening to his heartbeat, and it was scared and rapid.
“Have you found her?” he asked. Cops always came with bad news. He didn’t want to hear what they might have to say to him.
But one of them sat down on the side of his bed. That man said, “What did you do with the body?”
“Whose body?” For a moment he honestly didn’t know what they were talking about, and the monitor stayed relatively quiet. Then his pulse picked up. “Whose body?”
“Your partner’s.”
The beeps became hysterical. He hauled the rate back down again, saying calmly, “I couldn’t find her. They hit us. I couldn’t find her afterward.”
“Mr. Dekker, don’t play us for fools. We’ll level with you. Don’t you think it’s time you leveled with us?”
“This ship ran us down—”
“—and it wasn’t on the charts. Come now, Mr. Dekker, you know and I know you had a motive. College girl comes out here with her whole life savings, and here you are—not a steady job in your life, no schooling, not a cent to your name. How’d you get here? How’d you get passage?”
“Cory and I were friends. From way back.”
“So she puts up the equity, she just insists the ship go down as joint ownership, with a death provision in there—”
“No.”
“Or was that your idea?”
“I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”
“You signed it. We’ve got your signature right at the bottom.”
“I didn’t read it. Cory said sign, I just signed it!”
The officer had reached for a slate the other cop had.
He pressed buttons. “We have here a deposition from your port of origin, from one Natalie R. Frye, to the effect that you and Ms. Salazar quarreled over finances the week you left…”
“Hell if we did!”
“Quote: ‘Cory was mad about a bill for a jacket or something—’”
“I bought a jacket. She thought I paid too much. Cory’d wear a thing til it fell apart…”
“So you quarreled over money.”
“Over a jacket. A damn 38-dollar jacket. We fought, all right, we fought, doesn’t everybody?”
“Ms. Frye continues: ‘Cory had been sleeping around. Dek didn’t like that.’”
“Screw Natalie! She wasn’t a friend of ours. Cory wouldn’t spit on her.”
“Did Ms. Salazar’sleep around’?”
“She slept where she wanted to. So did I, what the hell?”
“Well, that wouldn’t matter to anyone, Mr. Dekker, except that she never got back.”
The beeps accelerated, not from shock: a fool could see where this was going. He was shaking, he was so mad, and if he went for the bastard’s throat they’d trank him and write that down, too.
“Cory’s lost out there,” he said doggedly. “A ship ran us down—”
“Mr. Dekker, there was no other ship in that sector.”
“That’s a lie. That’s a damn lie.” He reached frantically for things they couldn’t deny. “Bird knew it was there. Ben knew. We talked about it. It was a ’driver, was what it was—it wasn’t on my charts—”
The officer said, dead calm: “Bird and Ben?”
“The guys that picked me up!” He was scared they were going to tell him that never happened either. But someone had brought him in. “I called that sonuvabitch, I told it we were there, I told it my partner was outside—”
“Are you sure the rock didn’t block the signal?”
“No!—Yes, I’m sure! I had it on radar. Why in hell didn’t it see me?”
“We don’t know, Mr. Dekker. We’re just asking. So you did see it coming. And did you advise your partner?”
They made him crazy, changing the rules on him. One moment they accused him. Then they believed him. Sometimes he seemed to lose things.
“Didn’t you say you’d hit a rock? Wasn’t that your story at one point?”
He was lost and sick and the drugs still had him hazed. The beeps increased in tempo. He wasn’t sure whether it was his heart or something on com.
“So where did you manufacture this ship, Mr. Dekker?”
“It was out there.”
“Of course it was out there,” the officer said. “You had it on your charts. Your log showed that. How could we doubt that?”
He was totally confused. He put his hands over his ears, he tried to see if the alarm going was his heart or something in his head. “Call the ’driver, for God’s sake. See if they picked Cory up.”
“Didn’t you call?” the cop asked.
“Yes, dammit, I called, I called and it didn’t answer. Maybe my antenna got hit. I don’t know. I called for help. Did anybody hear it?”
“A ship heard you. A ship picked you up.”
“Different.” He was tired. He didn’t want to explain com systems and emergency locaters to company cops. “Just call the ’driver out there.”
“If there is a ’driver out there,” the cop said, “well ask. But if they had picked up your partner, wouldn’t they have notified their Base? Don’t you think they’d have called that in?”
He thought about that answer. He thought about the way that ship had ignored warnings. He thought about it not answering his hails. He thought—It’s not hours, is it? It’s months, it’s been months out there.
The alarm sounded again. He wanted it calm, because when he didn’t do that within a certain time they sedated him, and he was trying to be sane for the police. “I don’t know they heard me. Just call them.”
“We’re going to be calling a lot of people, Mr. Dekker.” The cop got up from his bed. “We’re going to be asking around.”
They walked to the door. The doctor went with them. He lay there just trying to keep the monitor steady and quiet, on the edge of hysteria but a good deal saner than he wanted to be right now. He remembered Bird, he remembered Ben. He was relatively sure he had come here on their ship. But sometimes he even feared Cory might not have existed. That he had always been in this place. That he was irrevocably crazy.
IF 8 was gray and automated, 6 was green paint and a few live-service restaurants and shops, but the time still dragged: you worked out in gyms, you hit the shops til you had the stuff on the counters memorized, you skipped down to 3-deck for a while and maybe clear to 2 for an hour til your knees ached and your heart objected. The first few weeks after a run were idle time, mostly: you didn’t feel like doing much for long stints. You’d think you had the energy and then you’d decide you didn’t; you sat around, you talked, you filled your time with vid and card games and when you found your legs, an occasional grudge match in the ball court or sitting through one of the company team games in the big gym on 3-deck was about it. But mostly you worked out til you were about to drop, if you had to wrap your knees in bandages and pop pills like there was no tomorrow—and that was what Bird did, because the younger set was chafing to get down to heavy time that counted, down in the neon lights and fast life of helldeck—down in the .9 g on 2 that was as heavy as spacers lived—specifically to The Black Hole, that was the accommodation they favored, and the hour Mike Arezzo called and said he had two rooms clear, adjacent, no less, they threw their stuff in the bags and they were gone.
Checking in at The Hole felt like coming home—old acquaintances, a steady traffic of familiar faces. Mike, who owned the place and ran the bar out front, kept the noise level reasonable and didn’t hold with fights, pocket knives, or illegal substances. Quiet place, all told. Helldeck might have shrunk from its glory days: worker barracks and company facilities had gnawed it down to a strip about a k and a half long, give or take the fashionable tail-end the corporates used: that was another ten or fifteen establishments—but you wouldn’t find any corporate decor in The Hole; no clericals having supper, not even factory labor looking for a beer. The Hole was freefaller territory: dock monkeys and loaders, tenders, pushers, freerunners, construction crew from the shipyard and the occasional Shepherd—not that other types didn’t stray in, but they didn’t stay: the ambient went just a bit cooler, heads turned and the noise level fell.
It went the other way when lost sheep turned up.
“Hey, Bird!” Alvarez called out, and heads turned when they walked in. Guys made rude remarks and whistles as Meg sauntered up to the bar and said, “Hello, Mike.”
Mike said, accurately, “Vodka, bourbon, vodka and lime, gin and bubbly…” and had them on the bar just about that fast.
Home again for sure. Close as it came.
“How’s it going?” Mike asked. “Persky says you got a distress call out there. Pulled some guy in.”
“Yeah. Young kid. Partner dead. Real shame.”
Alvarez said, “What’s this with Trinidad hanging off the list? The cops impounding her?”
God, the other thing helldeck was good for was gossip.
“Nothing we did,” Ben said, fast. “But Mama’s got her procedures. You contact a ship from across the line—”
“Across the line—”
Some parts of a story you saved for effect. They were worth drinks, maybe supper. “Wait, wait,” Alvarez said, “Mamud and Lai are over at The Pacific, I’ll phone ’em. Wait on that.”
—You got one grounded bird here, Bird had used to joke, when it came to getting about in .9 g; hard as null-g was on the body, you got so frustrated with walking on helldeck—it took so long to get anywhere, and the Trans was always packed. Food and drink didn’t have to be chased—that was the plus. But when you first got in you always felt as if you’d forgotten your clothes: you got so used to the stimsuit moving with you and fighting every stretch, you kept checking to make sure you were dressed. Air moved over your skin when you walked. And how did you spot a spacer in a fancy restaurant? Easy. He was the fool who kept shaking the liquid in his spoon just to watch it stay put—or who set something in midair and looked stupid when it didn’t stay there.
He was also the poor sod always in line at the bank, checking his balance to see if Assay or Mining Operations had dropped anything into his account—or, in this case, down at the Security office to see if, please God, the technicalities had been cleared up and some damned deskpilot might just kindly sign the orders to get his ship out of port.
No.
And no.
The 28th of July, for God’s sake, and the cops hadn’t finished their search.
And when he decided to stop by the bank and check the balance, to see if the last of the 6-deck bills had come in, dammit, the bank account showed a large deduct.
So… the aforesaid spacer hiked the slow long way to the Claims Office, and stood in line in this scrubby-poor office to find out the state of affairs with Trinidad’s claims-pending and its tags. Ben had gotten into his nice office-worker suit and gone clear around the rim to say hello to friends in Assay who just might hurry up the analysis—and you’d sincerely hope it wouldn’t run in reverse.
“Two Twenty-nine Tango,” he told the clerk, who said, “Trinidad, yeah, Bird and Pollard, right?”
“Right.”
The clerk keyed up and shook his head. “I hate to tell you this—”
“Don’t tell me we got a LOS. You don’t want to tell me that.”
“Yeah.—You got a pen? I’ll give you the number.”
“I got my list,” he said, and fished his card out of his pocket and stuck it in the reader on the counter.
“That’s number T-29890.”
“Shit!” he said, and bit his lip. On principle he didn’t cuss with friendly clerks. But it was the second best tag they had, a big rock for these days. Iron. And he had been careful with it. He raked his hand through his hair and said, “Sorry. But that one hurts, on principle.”
“Maybe better news tomorrow. They do turn up again.”
“Yeah,” he said, “thanks.”
So they’d lost a tag. It happened. You sampled a rock, you took a sample in and ran your on-site tests, and if you liked it and thought Mama would, you called and told her you had potential ’driver work here. You got your big bounty when your second, official Assay report confirmed your work; and you got a certain monthly fee just for having it on the charts; but you didn’t get paid percentage on the mineral content until some ’driver finally got around to chucking it back in bucket-loads, until the Shepherds got it in, and the refinery reported what it really had. Which happened on the company’s priorities, not yours.
And if you had a Loss of Signal that meant Mama had to do the bookkeeping on it, and Mama had to re-tag it, pick it up on a priority, or let it go until another pass—all that was shitwork Mama didn’t like to do, when a nice neat tag that stayed on was what you got that bonus for, and back it came unless you personally could firm up those numbers and keep track of it. If it got perturbed out, as did happen, you could lose it altogether, or have to fight it in Claims Court.
So, well, this one was too good to let slip or leave to chance. Maybe a little computer work could find it. There was a remote chance it could just be occulted for a while, something in the way that wasn’t on the charts—a LOS could sometimes put Recoveries onto another find, in which case you got that credit; it had happened in the long ago; but generally a rock just, in the well-known perversity of rocks, got to turning wrong, and managed to turn in some way that the strip transmitter was aimed to the 3% of the immediate universe Mama’s ears didn’t cover—or the transmitter could have died: they didn’t live forever, especially the junk they got nowadays.
So it was hike over to Recoveries and pay a couple more c’s out of the account for the technicians to pull up a file and figure probable position and talk to it and listen with a little more care, first off, in the hope of getting contact, before they went to the other procedures. Meanwhile the bank didn’t pay interest on what Mama had taken out, that was why they did immediate withdrawals these days: every damn penny they could gouge.
“Odd-shaped rock,” he typed on the form, and invoked the data up out of Mama’s storage. Photos. And mass reckoning. And the assay report on the pieces they’d knocked off it.
The Recoveries clerk took the dump, looked at it, and lifted an eyebrow. “Thorough. Makes our job a lot easier. We might have a real chance of waking this baby. Or getting a ’driver on it before it gets out of reach. Real nice piece, that.”
That made him feel better at least. You kept the people in Recoveries happy and they maybe paid a little more attention to getting you found or a little more urgency to getting you picked up—unlike the guys who took only one sample and that from the only good spot on the rock.
A lot of novice miners had gone bust that way—talk Mama into a whole lot of expensive tags on junk, just collect the bounties and puff up the bank account and buy fancier analysis gear—and a few took the real risk and outright falsified the samples. It paid off in a few instances—but the sloppy work that usually went along with that kind of operation sooner or later started showing up in reprimands and fines, and a crew got back to Base some trip to find out their bank account had been holed while they were gone—
Mama didn’t ask you to write a check these days: under the New Rules, she just took it, and you could sue if you thought you’d been screwed—if you could afford to hire the company’s own lawyers.
And you’d never say that ’drivers ever, ever cheated in reckoning the mass they’d thrown; and you’d never ever say that a refinery would short their receipts. ’Driver captains and refinery bosses never, ever did things like that.
But you did do real well to get a reputation for being meticulous, taking multiple samples, being clean with your records, making it so ’drivers and tenders knew your tags were worth going after. Knowing your mass. Photographing all the sides, including after the tag was on. Most of all knowing the content—rocks being their individual selves and damned near able to testify in court who their parents were.
No skimmer liked to mess with his claims, no, sir—because Morris Bird was real friendly, he was on hailing terms with most of helldeck; and when he got a few under his belt he told everybody far and wide how he kept accidents from befalling his claims and how suspicious it was if it came in short.
There had only been one or two uncharitable enough over the years to remark that sleeping with the two most likely to do the skimming couldn’t hurt. But he had stood up for Meg and Sal, and so had no few others.
It made him happier just thinking about it—
Made him outright laugh, thinking how that had probably done more to reform Meg Kady than all the Evangelicals and the Islamic Reformeds who handed out their little cards on helldeck.
Sal, now, he thought—reforming Sal was a whole different proposition.
You got all kinds on helldeck—except you didn’t walk it in any business suit, not if you didn’t want to get laughed out of The Hole. So Ben shed it at the locker he kept on 3-deck, put on his casuals and his boots, after which it was safe to go home.
Change of clothes, change of style—Ben Pollard went most anywhere he cared to go on R2 and nobody would find him out of place.
But fact was, helldeck was where he most liked being—down in the hammering noise and the neon lights. He’d been scared as any company clerk when he’d first laid eyes on it, at 14, even if his mama had belonged here—but even at that age he’d known sure as sure that Ben Pollard was never going to have the pull to get out of the company’s lower tiers. He’d learned how it really was: the ideal the company preached might be classblind; but funny thing—kids without money ended up like Marcie Hager, in the middle tiers, where you had certain cheap perks, but you’d never get a dime of cash and you’d never get further—and aptitudes and Institute grades had damned little to do with it. President Towney’s son, for an example, was about as stupid an ass as had ever graduated from the Institute—and they put him in a vice-presidency up in the methane recovery plant… while Ben Pollard, a Shepherd’s kid, got a stint at pilot training (at which he was indifferent) and geology, at which he was good; and a major in math, thank God. But he couldn’t get into business administration, not, at least, tracked for the plum jobs. They went to relatives of company managers. They went to company career types, who had paid their dues or whose parents had, or who tested high in, so he had heard, Company Conformity.
Shit with that. He took a little jig step on his way back from the Assay office, and on helldeck nobody took exception to a little exuberance—if a guy was happy, that guy must have reason: in a society that lived on luck you wanted to brush close to whoever looked to have it, because that guy might lead you to it.
What he had was a card in his pocket that said they had a couple of nice pieces, and that money was going into the bank, dead certain. You tagged things and you didn’t know how long it was going to be til the ’driver got there, but what you had in your sling was money—and in this case, a good chunk of it.
Yeah!
“Meg or Sal in?” he asked Mike at the bar when he got to The Hole—he knew where Bird probably was, where Bird had been this time of day for the last week.
Mike said, “They aren’t, but the cops were.”
He looked at Mike a moment. It was hard to change feet that fast. “Cops.”
“They weren’t in uniform. But they had badges. Anything I should know?”
He sighed, said, because, hell, you needed the local witness on your side if it came to trouble: “All right, Mike. The guy we rescued—out in the Belt. We got a claim in on the ship. He owned it. Sole survivor. The guy’s crazy. God only knows what he’s said. Police are probably checking us out to be sure we’re on the straight.”
Mike looked a shade friendlier at that. And interested. “Claim on the ship, is it?”
He tapped his key on the bar. “More of a long, long story. But that part’s blackholed. You, we trust. Let me go check this out.”
He went back through and down the hall where the sleeping rooms were, opened the room he had (at least on the books) with Bird.
“Shit!” was his first reaction.
Not as if they had much to disarrange, but thieves could have hit and been neater. Four days to get their Personals out of police hands and here was everything they owned strewn over the sink, the lockers open, their laundry scattered on the bed—and a big bright red sticker on the mirror that said: This area was accessed in search of contraband by ASTEX Security acting with a warrant. Please check to be sure all your personal items are present and report any broken or missing articles or unsecured doors immediately by calling your ASTEX Security Public Relations Department at…
He pulled the sticker off the mirror. Paper thicker than tissue was worth its weight in gold. Literally. You could fold the thing and write important secret notes on the edges if you could find a pencil, which was equally frigging scarce.
Shit, shit, shit!
He opened the side door that led into Meg and Sal’s room—it was technically a quad. Same mess, only more so. Meg and Sal had more clothes.
Meg and Sal were going to kill them. That was one thought going through his head. The other was outrage—a sense of violation that left him short of breath and wanting to break something.
What in hell were they looking for?
Something off that ship?
Datacard?
He had a sudden cold thought about the charts. But he had that datacard in his pocket, where he always carried it. He felt of his pocket to be sure.
Damn!
He headed out, locked the door, walked down the hall and tried to collect himself for Mike, who asked, “Anything wrong?”
“Not that I know. Be back in a bit.” He kept going, to the nearest Trans to get him up to 3-deck.
He had this terrible cold feeling, all the ride up, all the walk down to the gym and the lockers. His hands were shaking when he used his personal card to open the locker. He suddenly thought: Everywhere I use this card they can trace it. Same as in the Institute. There’s nothing they can’t get at…
He got the door open, he felt of his suit pocket—
The card with the charts was there. He’d been so excited about the Assay report he’d forgotten to switch it back.
But, God, where’s it safe now?
In the room they’ve already searched?
Maybe they’d expect him to do that. And they might be looking for one kind of trouble—but if they found something illegal—
Damn!
Dekker opened his eyes tentatively, hearing someone in the room—realized it was his doctor leaning over him. The drugs had retreated to a distant haze.
“About damn time,” he said.
The doctor moved his eyelid, used a light, frowning over him. “Mmm,” the doctor said. Pranh was his name. Dekker read it on the ID card he wore.
“Dr. Pranh. I don’t want any more sedation. I want out of here.—What did the police find out?”
Pranh stood back, put his penlight in his pocket. “I don’t know. I suppose they’re still investigating.”
“How long?”
“How long what?”
“How long have they been investigating?”
“Time. Does that still bother you?”
It still touched nerves. But he was able to shake his head and say—disloyal as it felt to say—“I know Cory’s probably dead. Right now I want to know why.”
Pranh’s face went strangely blank. Pranh looked at the floor, never quite at him, and started entering something on his slate.
“You haven’t heard from the police,” Dekker said. It was hard to talk. There was still enough of the drug in him he could very easily shut his eyes and go under again, but he kept pushing to stay awake. Pranh didn’t answer him, and he persisted: “How long has it been?”
“Your partner is dead. There’s no probably. Denial is a normal phase of grieving. But the sooner you get beyond that—”
“I don’t know she’s dead. You don’t know. For all I know that ship picked her up. I want to talk to the police. I want a phone—”
“Calm down.”
“I want a phone, dammit!”
“It’s on the record. A rock hit you, a tank blew.”
“There wasn’t any rock—”
“You said there was. Are you changing your story?”
“I’m not changing anything! There was a ’driver out there. It didn’t answer our hails, it ran right over us—”
“Denial,” Pranh said quietly. “Anger. Transference. I’ve talked to the investigators. There’s no ’driver. There never was a ’driver near you. One was working. It’s possible there was a high-v rock. A pebble.”
“Pebble, hell! I want to talk to the police. I want to know what that ’driver captain says! I want a phone!”
The doctor went to the door, leaned out and spoke to someone outside. And left.
“I want to talk to somebody from Management!” he yelled at the empty doorway. “Dammit, I want to talk to somebody who knows what’s going on out there!”
But all that came through the doorway was a pair of orderlies with a hypo to give him.
He swore when they laid hands on him and when they gave him the shot; and he swore all the while he was sliding back down again. He felt tears running on his face, and his throat was raw from screaming. He thought of Cory, Cory shaking her head and looking the way she did when something couldn’t be fixed.
Can’t do it, Dek.
And he said to himself and to Cory, Hell if not.
Two pieces of news Ben had for Bird when he walked into the Hole, and good as one was, the bad won. Hands down.
“We got an LOS on a big one,” Bird muttered as he sat down on his bed. He threw that out flat, because it was completely swallowed up in this. “Sure it was cops?”
“They left a note. A sticker.” Ben showed it to him, folded, from his pocket. “It was worse than this. I straightened up some—folded Sal and Meg’s stuff.”
“Got them too.”
“Got them too.”
“Damn.” He shook his head. It was all he could think to say.
“Maybe,” Ben said, “maybe they’re just checking us out. I mean, legally, they can search anything they want—and we have this claim in—”
“Legally I’m not sure they can,” he said, tight-jawed. “But the complaints desk is hell and away from R2.” Then he thought about bugs, signed Ben to hush, got up and took him out and down the hall to a table in the bar. By that time he figured Ben knew why. Ben looked worried as he sat down.
“Two beers,” he said to Mike Arezzo. And brought them back and sat down. He said to Ben: “They could have bugged the place. But if we ask to move, they’ll be asking why and they’ll get interested.”
“I don’t know why they’re on us in the first place,” Ben said. “It’s that damn Dekker, I know it is. No telling what story he’s telling them.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Well, it would be damn useful to know. I can talk to somebody in—”
He laid a hand on Ben’s arm. “Don’t try to fix this one. I don’t care who you know. It’s too dangerous.”
“Dangerous, hell! We haven’t done anything but save that guy’s neck!”
Ben really believed in some things. Like The System and The Rules he regularly flouted. “You remember you asked me about Nouri and his lot. And I said that wasn’t that long ago. Police can do any damn thing they want to. They did then. They still can. Your company education tell you that?”
“There are regulations they have to follow—”
“That’s fine. There’s regulations they sometimes don’t follow. Remember Nouri? Wasn’t anything they didn’t search on these docks; and you didn’t say, I got my rights. The company has its easy times and it has its crackdowns, and both of us can remember when toilet paper didn’t have stuff in it to break it down so you can’t make press-paper anymore, you got to use those damn cards you stick into these damn readers that we don’t know where the hell they connect to; I can remember when ships could kind of work in and out of the sectors and you could link up and share a bottle; now they’ll slap a fine on you you’ll never see the top of. I can remember when they didn’t care about this stupid war with people clear the hell and gone away from here, that they say now can just come in here and blow us to hell, and once upon a time we didn’t have the company bank taking LOSes out of your account if you paid for a search, not until Recovery turned up an absolute no-can-do. I’ve seen a hell of a lot change, friend. I’ve heard about how the company has to do this and the company has to do that, and if we organize and everybody stands together the company’s going to give in. Hell! We’re not the Shepherds, the company doesn’t have to give in. The company can replace us, the company’s aching to replace us, and if it wasn’t for the charter that says they have to deal with independents on a ‘fair and equitable basis’ they’d have screwed us all right out of existence. They teach you that in company school?”
“There are still rules. They’re still accountable to higher management.”
“Yeah, they’re accountable. The only accounting that matters is the balance sheet. We shouldn’t have filed on that ship, Ben. We shouldn’t have done it.”
“You’re not making sense. It’s the company’s rules. They set up the salvage rules. You’re saying they’re not going to follow them?”
“Ben, the rules aren’t supposed to cost the company money. That’s the Rule behind the rules. I’ve had a bad feeling about this whole business from the beginning. You don’t win big. You never win big.”
“If you don’t take the breaks you have you damn sure don’t win anything!”
“You’re all shiny new and bright polished. I was that a long time ago.” He took a mouthful of the beer and swallowed. “I remember when they started making this stuff, too. You don’t want to see the vats this came from.”
“Yeah, well, maybe everything you remember was better. Maybe everything now is shit. Or maybe it was always like this.”
“We didn’t always have the company on our necks. We didn’t always have them gouging every penny they can get their hands on, we didn’t always have a friggin’ military shipyard next door making us a target—we haven’t always had all this damn happy stuff on the vid all the time, when we know nothing happy is going on back home, Ben!” It was too much to say, even out in the bar, where bugs weren’t likely. It was too much even to think about. Ben looked confused.
“Here’s home, Bird. This is home.”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s mine, too. But sometimes I’d like to kick its ass.”
Meg and Sal came in the door. They had to explain to them how it was.
Sal said, “Sons of bitches,” meaning, he hoped, the cops. But Meg and Sal were smarter than Ben in some ways. They shut right up, and said a dinner would patch things—
Funny, he thought then, that they had never even once thought that the cops could have been searching after something Meg and Sal had done, and them almost certainly skimmers, and just back from a run. But the company never minded skimming much, the way it never minded how Sal took money from guys—Sal just didn’t do favors for free, unless she was your partner. And truth be known she got a bit out of Ben, the way they’d just gotten their dinner paid for. Company brats understood each other.
The gals didn’t even look much upset, just kind of shrugged it off and shook their heads as if two guys who got into somebody else’s trouble could expect police. Or maybe they were just trying to keep everybody level-headed, you never knew with women. They might be madder than hell and thinking how they’d like to break certain guys’ necks, but they’d think about it awhile and figure they were owed for this, more than a couple of beers.
So they said they’d go straighten up, and they left. Ben lingered a minute finishing his beer and then said he’d go check the bank and make sure the money got logged right, which was an excuse: God only knew where Ben was really going.
Bird said, “Don’t you try anything.”
Ben said yeah and left.
Maybe he should have warned the gals about bugs. Probably they were chewing up him and Ben right now. But maybe it was better they did talk in the room, make whoever might be bugging the place think that they didn’t suspect a thing. They knew about the ship, all right. But they didn’t know what else there was to worry about.
Like that ’driver sitting out there where that ship had come from.
’Driver chewing away at what miners found—extracting and sorting and sending bucketloads to old Jupiter, who slowed it down again so the Shepherds could bring it in to be sheet and foam and such. Mama always assigned sectors according to the ’drivers’ work patterns, so you knew there was one somewhere by, but between you and the Well, with its business end pointed the other way. Anytime you thought about going near a ’driver’s actual fire-path, you had to think about how big it was and how small you were and how what it threw came so fast you’d never know what hit you. ’Driver paths were the one item of information Mama gave out for five or so sectors away, not even regarding the line that divided Rl work zone from R2. Every firing of the ’drivers had to be logged and reported to Mama as to exact time. You couldn’t move a ’driver without Mama’s permission. You sure couldn’t hide one.
So Mama just forgot to put a ’driver on Dekker’s charts? It had been on the ones Mama dumped to Trinidad—right where Dekker had given them the coordinates for the accident.
Damn, you didn’t want to have thoughts like that.
Lot of pressure on Mama lately—a lot of crazy behaviors out of ASTEX’s upper echelons—like mandatory overtime in the factories, like trying to revise the contract with the Shepherds, to let them install a few company-trained crew members on Shepherd ships—a fool could see where that was heading. None of the Big Shakeups had ever made sense, but damn-all anybody could do if the Earth Company got behind it. They could change the rules, they could change the laws if there was one in their way. The EC had so many senators in its pocket and the EC was so many people’s meal ticket in one way or another, especially with this ship construction boom; and there were so many blue-skyers bone ignorant about space and politics—
Living down at the bottom of the motherwell like his own brother did, writing him once a year about the wife and the kids and two pages at Earth to Belt mail rates about how he was putting in green beans this spring. God. Did people still think about things like that?
“Just sign this,” they said, and shoved a slate under Dekker’s hand—they had raised the bed up, propped him with pillows, but the trank was still thick and he could hardly focus. It was heavy g this time. It felt hard to breathe.
“What is this?” he asked, because he hadn’t gotten cooperation out of anybody in this place and he didn’t trust any of them. It might be a consent for them to go cutting on him, or giving him God knew what drug, and damned if he was going to sign it unread, in this place heavy as 1-deck.
They said—the they who came and went sometimes, cops, doctors, orderlies, he wasn’t clear enough to figure that at the moment—“It’s just so you can get out of here. You want to get out of here, don’t you?”
“Go away,” he mumbled, sick at his stomach.
“Don’t you want to leave?” He had dropped the stylus. They put it back in his fingers.
He tried to get a look at it, then. It took a lot of work to make out the letters out of the general haze. But it said: AFFIDAVIT. Legal stuff. He worked some more at it. Finally he saw it was an accident report.
Accident. Hell.
He threw the thing. Maybe he broke it. It hit the wall and fell with a clatter like broken plastic. He thought, It wouldn’t do that upstairs.
He said, “I’m not signing anything without a lawyer.”
Hell of a mess they’d left. Meg was maddest about the jewelry. She sat there untangling earrings and swearing. “Ought to say we’re missing something. Serve the cops right.”
And Sal, sorting through the stubs of makeup pencils: “Blunted every damn point. Corp-rat pigs.”
“We haven’t done anything.” It took some thinking, but that was the case. Meg unwound tiny chains and felt an upset at the pit of her stomach. “Sons of bitches why the hell’d they toss everything together…”
Sal came over and leaned on her fist on the bed. Signed, fast and sharp, Careful. Which didn’t help the feeling in Meg’s stomach at all. If they were bugged, and the way things were going she’d believe it, they could make those bugs vid as well as audio.
They didn’t need this trouble. They wanted a chance at that ship, but they sure didn’t need this trouble, and trouble for the guys was what it smelled like.
They could move out. There were sleeperies besides the Hole. They could kiss Ben and Bird off and go find another lease after all; but if that second ship did come Bird’s way—
Then they’d want to cut their throats, was what. Bird and Ben were the best operation they had a chance with: no chance for her in the company. Not much for Sal either: with a police record you could work as a freerunner, but you didn’t get any favors and you didn’t fly for the company, and if anything went wrong on the deck you were on, you were first on the cops’ list.
Just about time something went right for a change. There’d been enough bad breaks.
Like the sector they’d just drawn, which got them a nice lot of ice and rock, in which Mama wasn’t keenly interested, no, thank you. That was the kind of allotments lease crews got lately: there were thin spots in the Belt, they were passing through one, and the ship owners took the good ones if they had to break health and safety regs to get out again.
Well, hell, you hung on. You stuck it. You skimmed when you had to and you did your damnedest. Meg Kady swore one thing: she wasn’t going to die broke and she wasn’t going to be spooked by any company cop throwing her stuff around.
Her hands got real steady with the little chains. She felt her mouth take on this little smile. Fa-mil-iar territory. Amen. “Cops on Sol are higher class,” she said to Sal, right cheerfully. “These shiz don’t take any courses in neat, do they?”
“Sloppy,” Sal said. “Severely sloppy.”
Salvatore sank into his chair, shoved a stack of somebody’s problems aside, and took his inhaler from the desk drawer and breathed deeply of the vapors—enough to set himself at some distance. He took a deeper breath. The drug hit his lungs and his bloodstream with an expanding rush, reached his nerves and told him to take it easy. He hated scenes. Hated them. Hated young fools handing Security more problems and doctors who invoked privilege.
Most of all he hated finding out that there was more to a case than Administration had been telling him.
The phone beeped. He took another deep breath, let it go: his secretary would get it; and he hoped to hell—
“Mr. Salvatore,” his secretary said via the intercom. “Mr. Payne.”
Third call from PI that day. This was not one Salvatore wanted, and he knew what Payne had heard. God, he wasn’t ready for this.
He punched in, said, “Mr. Payne, sir.”
“I’m told we have a problem,” the young voice on his phone said: Salvatore’s office didn’t have vidphones—he was glad not to have. Payne was junior, a bright young man in the executive, V. E in charge of Public Information and PR, directly under Crayton, who was directly under Towney himself, and there was absolutely no doubt somebody else had been chewing on his tail—recently, Salvatore decided. So Payne passed the grief down his chain of command, to Security. “That damned fool is going to keep on til we have a corporate liability. This isn’t going to help anyone, Salvatore.”
“I understand that.”
“Look, this is coming from upper levels, you understand that?”
“I do understand that, yes…”
“This is getting to be a damn mess, is what it’s getting to be. The girl’s mother is after that kid and the whole company’s on its ear. We’ve got contracts to meet. We’ve got schedules. We need that release. We need this case settled.”
“I’m advising him to sign it, Mr. Payne.” Salvatore took a deep breath—of unadulterated office air, this time. God, who was Payne talking to? “We’re working on it. There’s a possibility, the way I see it—” He took another head-clearing breath and took a chance with Payne. “There’s an indication the kids might not have been where their log said they were. It could have been a mistake, it could have been deliberate. I think they may have been skimming.”
There was a long silence on the other end. God, he hoped he’d not made a major mistake in saying that.
“What we have,” Payne’s voice said finally, quietly, “is a minor incident taking far too much company time.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I can’t be more plain than that. We don’t need an independent involved in the courts, especially a kid with camera appeal. I’ve got the data on my desk, I’ll send it over to you. There was no ’driver. We have the log. There was no such entry. I’ll tell you what happened out there, captain, these two kids were up to no good, very likely skimming, probably scared as hell and taking chances with a rock way too large for their kind of equipment. Dekker either screwed up and had an accident that killed his partner, or there was a mechanical failure—take your pick of the safety violations on that ship. Maybe we should be prosecuting on negligence and probably on skimming, but I can give you the official word from Legal Affairs, we’re not prosecuting. The kid’s been through enough hell, there’s no likelihood that he’s going to be competent to testify, or that he won’t complicate things by raising extraneous issues in a trial, and we’re not going to have this drag on and on in a lawsuit, Salazar’s or his. There’s people on this station would love that, you understand me, captain?”
“I do, sir.”
“So get this damn mess cleared up. You hear me? I want that release. I’m sending you the accident report. You understand me? We have elements here perfectly willing to use somebody like Dekker. I don’t want this blown out of proportion. I want it stopped.”
He thought about the recorder on his desk. His finger hesitated over the button. He thought better of that move. But he wanted to make Payne say it. “Stop the investigation?”
“Put out the fire, Mr. Salvatore. We have a damage control situation here. I want this resolved. I want this problem neutralized. Hear me?”
“Yes, sir,” Salvatore said—which was pointless, because Payne had hung up. He punched in a number, the outer office. He said to his aide: “Get me Wills on the phone. Now!”
Dammit, if the kids were slamming—charge them. You skim from the company, you get busted. Period. But the girl’s mother insisted not. The girl’s mother insisted her daughter wouldn’t involve herself in a shady operation. Beyond a doubt Dekker had murdered her daughter for the bank account.
Good point, except it was one doggedly determined killer, who’d wrecked his ship and sent himself off the mental edge for an alibi. He’d seen miners do crazy things, he’d investigated one case that still gave him nightmares, but nobody had held Corazon Salazar here at gunpoint and nobody had any indication Dekker was after money, By what his investigation had turned up, the girl had quit college, taken money from a trust fund, paid Dekker’s way out here and laid down everything she had for an outdated ship and an outfitting—
A mortal wonder they’d gotten back alive the first time—and if anybody’d been kidnapped out here, it sounded more like Dekker… who was just damned lucky to have been found: physics had been in charge of that ship, the second those tanks ruptured: damned sure the kid hadn’t—and God and the computers knew why it had stayed in the ecliptic, but it didn’t sound like good planning to him.
Hell, Dek didn’t handle money, one of the interviewees had said, in the investigation on Rl. He just flew the ship. Always tinkering around with it…
Social? Yeah, he’d be with Cory, but he’d be doing vid games or something—he used to win bar tabs that way. Real easy-going. Sometimes you’d get a little rise out of him, you know, showing off, that sort of thing, but he always struck me as downright shy. The games were his outlet. He’d be off in the corner in the middle of a crowd, Cory’d be at the table talking physics and rocks, yeah, they were a real odd pair, different, but it was like Cory did the headwork and Dek was all realtime—
Yeah, Dek had a temper. But so did Cory. You never pushed her.
Yeah, they slept together—but they weren’t exclusive. Minded their own business—didn’t get real close to anybody. People tried to take advantage of them, them being kids, they’d stand their ground… Cory more than Dek, actually. She’d draw the line and he’d back her up… not a big guy, older guys used to try to hit on him—he’d stand for about so much, that was all, they’d find it out.
Honest? I don’t know, they weren’t in anything crooked I ever heard…
There was a ’driver out there. He had the up to date charts. Company records had it arriving March 24 and the accident as March 12. But the ships’ logs were tied up in BM regulations and the mag storage had been dumped. A panel by panel search of the two ships hadn’t turned up any illicit storage, and Wills hadn’t found any datacards in the miners’ rooms.
Which didn’t mean no datacards had gotten off the ship. Hell of a case for customs to wave past. Administration could come blazing in demanding answers on that.
But no one had told him early on there was any question about the charts; and he consequently hadn’t told Wills. And now the evidence was God knew where. Or if it still existed. You tried to do some justice in this job. There was a kid in hospital in more trouble than he was able to understand, up against a woman with enough money to see him hauled back to Sol—and into courts where Money, the military, dissatisfied contractors, and various labor and antiwar organizations were going to blow it up into an issue with a capital I.
Salvatore understood what they were asking him to do. Found himself thinking how they didn’t demote you down, just sideways, into some limbo like an advisory board no one listened to, out of the corporate track altogether.
He had a wife. A daughter in school, in Administrative Science—a daughter who looked to her father for the contacts that would make all the difference. Jilly was bright. She was so damned bright. And how did he tell her—or Mariko—this nowhere kid in hospital was worth Jilly’s chances?
He took another deep breath from the inhaler, thought: Hell, Dekker’s been no angel. He’s got a police record on Sol, juvenile stuff. Mother bailed him out. Nothing he’s done that we can prove…
But kids don’t know what they’re doing. If the kid can’t use good sense, use it for him.
He felt the slight giddiness the inhaler caused: don’t overdo it, his doctor said, and rationed the inhalers: his doctor didn’t have William Payne on his back. Or a wife and daughter whose lives a recalcitrant kid could ruin.
If Dekker had used his head he wouldn’t be where he was. Salvatore knew kids: kids never made mistakes, kids were too smart to make mistakes—but this kid had made a mistake, he was in far over his head. His partner was dead, a lot of survivor-guilt was wound around that—give the kid an out, that was the answer. No kid was going to understand politics and labor unions and defense budgets. Dekker had nothing to win that way and nothing but grief if he tried. Give him an excuse, offer him a way not to be accountable for his mistakes.
Before his mouth put him in real trouble.
The Department of Statistics says that the rise in birth rates this year reflects the rising number of females in the population, which will only continue to rise. Commenting on this, a spokesman for James R. Reynolds Hospital said today that the company should place contraceptives on the general benefits list. The average number of hours worked has fallen 10% during the last five years while the standard of living has continued to rise…
“Screw that,” Meg said.
“That’s what they don’t want you to do,” Sal said… population increase of 15% during the last decade…
“Then why in hell are they doing overtime?”… President Towney declares that R2 is facing a population crisis, and urges all women to consider carefully their personal economic situation. Statistics prove that women who postpone childbearing until after age 30 will on average enjoy a 25% higher standard of living. President Towney reminds all workers whether male or female that those who desire to advance in the company should Be Careful…
“Think they’ll advance us if we’re careful?” Meg snorted.
“Maybe we should go tell them we’re waiting,” Sal said.
You got the vid blasting away in the gym. You couldn’t escape it. They were sitting there sweating, waiting the breath to do the next round with the machines, and Towney was blithering again.
On the other hand…
Meg looked at her nails. It was a hobby, growing nails in heavy time. They all got clipped when you went to serious work. Or they broke off, eventually, in the dry cold.
Mostly she didn’t want to look up, because there was this chelovek just come in that she sincerely didn’t want the notice of. This gym, Sal wanted. And she’d said to Sal she’d as soon do something a little less exclusive.
“Sal.”
“Yeah, I see ’im.”
Meg looked from under her brows, tried to look like furniture, heart thumping.
Tall guy, hair shaved up, Nordic or something: his name was Mitch, he was a Shepherd tech chief, and he was a friend of Sal’s. Not of hers—most definitely not of hers. Mitch had seen them and done this little take, just a half a heartbeat, and gone on over to the weights.
“I think I’d better evaporate,” she said to Sal.
“No. Sit.”
It was fairly well Shepherd territory they were in, this little gym near the end of helldeck. It was a gym Sal had always had rights in. She didn’t. And this Mitch—Mitch never had approved of their partnership… mildly put.
Sal got up and went and talked with him. Meg tried not to be so forward as to read lips, but she could read Sal, and it wasn’t thoroughly happy.
Then Sal put her arm around Mitch and steered back toward her.
“Meg,” Mitch said.
It was her cussed nature that she wouldn’t stand up. She strangled a towel, tilted her head to get a look at him against the lights and gave him a cool smile. “B’jour, Mitch, que pasa?”
He did rab the way Shepherds did, fash. He meant the same in his way. He didn’t speak the speech, damned sure. Didn’t do the deeds. He said, “Kady. How are you doing?”
“Oh, fair.”
“That’s good. That’s good, Kady. No noise, no fusses. You’re friend of a friend of a friend, you understand. That’s gotten you this far. I must say I’ve been impressed.”
“You’re a sonuvabitch, Mitchell. Nice not seeing you lately.”
Mitch smiled. Good-looking sonuvabitch. And having the authority to toss her out of here, and out of Sal’s life.
“Don’t screw up, Kady. You’re on tolerance. You’ve run the line damned well so far. I’ve told Sal, there’s a real chance on you.”
“Take it and screw with it. I’m not on your tolerance.”
Mitch’s brows went up. Then he got this down-his-nose look, shrugged and walked away.
Meg rubbed the bridge of her nose, not wanting to look at Sal. She didn’t know why she’d done that. Honestly didn’t know why. It wasn’t outstanding good sense.
“Sorry, Aboujib.”
“Yeah, well.” Sal dropped down to her heels, arms on knees. “He asked, he got, he knew he was pushing. He’s all right.”
“Yeah. I know how all right he is. Sumbitch. Little-g god. Shit-all he’s done for you.”
Silence from Sal a moment. She’d gone too far with that one. Finally Sal said, “They’ve heard about the upset in our room. Mitch wants us out. Says lease and go, get out. They’re worried.”
“Hell if!” Meg said. “We’re close, dammit. What’s he bloody care?”
Sal’s dark face was all frown. “We do got a warning.”
“Yeah, well, Aboujib.”
“Severe warning.”
“Wants me out of here, too, let’s be honest. You get a lease, I’ll stay here and hold us a spot on the ship.”
“Didn’t say that.”
“I’m not saying split, dammit, I’m saying I stay here and hold us a spot and you keep your friends happy.”
“He’s advising both of us.”
She took a tag end of the towel, mopped her forehead, an excuse to gather her composure. “We’re that close. Dammit, Sal, you don’t get that many breaks. There won’t be another.”
Sal didn’t say anything for a moment. Meg sat there thinking, Sal’s break’s with them: her real break is with them, if she toes the line. Damn sons of bitches. Couldn’t help her. Couldn’t take her in. Toss a kid out like that… make her turn spirals til she’s proved herself—hell if, Mitchell.
Sal said, finally, “Come on. Out of here.”
On the walk, out in the noise and the traffic of the’deck: “I don’t think there’s a bug there—Mitch wouldn’t talk, else. But there’s a word out, Meg: I got to confess, I maybe said too much.”
“About what?”
“Ben got data off that they got when they were after that ship. He’s been working with it and he doesn’t give a damn what it is to anybody else, it’s his charts and he’s not going to see it dumped. He said that.”
Meg took a long, long breath. “Merde. That’s what you told Mitch?”
“Mitch came to me. They wanted a copy.”
“Ben’d kill you.”
Sal kept her voice low, beneath the noise and the echoes. “Yeah. I know it. But they won’t make the same use of it—just the information, just those chart numbers. You got to fund me, Kady. Mitch’s got my card right now. Access to our locker for the next while.”
“Shit, Aboujib!”
“On the other hand—”
“This thing’s got too many hands as is!”
“On the other hand, Shepherds have got their eyes on us after this. Dunno what they can do with those charts—but they’re thinking there’s something just damn ni-kulturny about Bird’s ship being tied up, about this kid getting killed out there, about the cops looking through the stuff—”
“You told him this. You went to him.”
Sal ducked her head. “I was worried. Worried about whether we shouldn’t cast off and get clear of this, if you want the truth. You ask yourself why the cops would turn our rooms upside down, ask yourself if there’s any damn thing we’ve been involved in out of the ordinary except we got two friends trying to file on a ship.”
“Aboujib,—”
“Yeah, I know. I was just asking a question. I said I thought it could be data they’re looking for—”
“Aboujib, do you seriously mind telling me in the hereafter when you’re going to pull a lift like this?”
“Yeah, well, I figured you’d worry.”
“I’d have killed you.—Ben know?”
“No.”
“So how long before he finds out? God, Aboujib, that jeune fils is no fool. He could’ve bugged the damn card.”
Sal pursed her lips. “Did.”
“Then he does know?”
“Neg. Of course not. He and I both came through the Institute.”
.