Devil to the Belt (v1.1) Read online

  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.”<
br />
  “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?”