Devil to the Belt (v1.1) (16 page)

“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.