Devil to the Belt (v1.1) Read online

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!”

  CHAPTER 6

  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 i
n 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…”