Devil to the Belt (v1.1) Read online

  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 w
eeks. 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.