Devil to the Belt (v1.1) (19 page)

“Five hundred.”

“Five thousand.”

“The hell!”

Tucker shrugged, slid his eyes away, filled his mouth with sandwich. The bass fluttered up and down the scale.

“All right!” Ben yelled.

Trinidad
was free. That had come through this morning. Thank God. Bird nursed the beer to the bottom and the last lean froth—wanted a second one, but the tab at The Hole was already too high. August friggin’ 15th, and
Trinidad was
still at dock.

Meg patted his shoulder, went over to the bar. He figured what she was doing, then, and turned half around to protest, but Mike was already drawing the first one, and Sal Aboujib laid her hand on his from his other side. “Beer’s cheap,” Sal said. “Let her buy this one. We owe you a few.”

He had a slateful of figures that wouldn’t balance, Ben was still arguing about staying on, Dez Green and Alvarez and a good many of the other independents who’d been in when they arrived had all checked out on runs, and he was trying right now to decide whether old bones could run the risk of shortening their own time here, or whether they should just lease
Trinidad
out to Brower and his mate and sit at Base running up sleepery and food bills—maybe even lease her to Meg and Sal.
Promise
them the new ship if they got it. In that consideration they were short of supplies, the bank was not cooperating, and the damned LOS never had turned up again. They could try one more thing to get Recoveries to wake it up, but that computer time was expensive—and he just wasn’t sure it was worth it. They’d had another minor LOS yesterday, not on one of their own, but on one they had a 15-and-20 on, on Peterson’s lease; and he wished to hell he knew whether it was just bad luck, Peterson’s fault, or whether there’d been any assignment in that sector when the thing went dead: the company just didn’t like to hand out that kind of information. There were hotheads on helldeck that’d go for somebody if they got the wrongful or rightful notion they’d been robbed. Couldn’t blame Mama on that one. Fights with chains and bottles were hell on the cops.

So they took the second LOS and they were going to have to tighten belts, that was all. And he knew why Meg and Sal were moping around with him and Ben instead of out running down a lease or even hitting on them for
Trinidad
, when that would have been the logical thing.

Hard
at this point to tell them they weren’t good enough to make enough to rate any prime lease, and they’d better go court somebody else, when Meg and Sal were courting them with all the finance they had and they were, dammit, day by day letting them do it, standing by them when anybody else would have called them fools.

You know, he’d told them more than once, at the first; I got to be honest with you: I don’t think that ship of Ben’s going to come through.

Did that drive them off? Hell no.

He should have said, plain and cold: Meg, I hear you’re one hell of a pilot, and Sal, you’re not bad at the numbers, but you just haven’t got the years—haven’t got the math, haven’t got the sense of how things work—

Should have said, a long time ago: You two shouldn’t ever have made a team: two greenies in the same ship is never going to get better fast enough for what you want.

But he knew what kind of slimespots they d already shipped with before they’d proved on
Trinidad
that they could go it alone, and started getting leases: and Meg had courted him real hard just before Ben showed up with the cash and the schooling—he still flinched when he recalled having to tell Meg that; and Meg taking it real well, though she looked as if she’d got it in the gut. Maybe Sal even knew. And she and Sal had stayed teamed, even so.

They’d take good mechanical care of a ship, and bring her back sound and clean. Last lease he’d had with Hall and Brower, you couldn’t say that. And they might do better with decent charts—and a little help from Ben.

Sal and Ben were a close pair lately. Those who knew Ben might snicker; and those who knew Sal would never in a million years win a bet on what really went on for some of those hours in the room, which was Ben talking numbers and Soheila Aboujib ticking away with her rented comp, with her lip caught in her teeth and this frown that would break glass—Sal could look madder than any individual he knew except
Crazy
Bob Crawford. Ben was hard to shake when he got an idea, but when it came to plain determination to make it, Aboujib and Meg Kady both were right up there with the cussedest.

We could do worse, Ben kept saying—when who to lease to had never been Ben’s department, just which draws to lease and which to work—but he couldn’t say Ben was wrong, except today it came to him that they’d blown near two months here, and they only now got
Trinidad
free. He and Ben could go ahead and make a run—

Yet here they both were, with karma piling up with the pair who’d stayed by them. He couldn’t figure how he’d gotten into this, or when it had gotten too late—but when the cops had raided them and thrown Meg and Sal’s stuff all over, that had been a real bad time to tell them shove off and forget it—

It seemed a worse time this morning, with their account bleeding money and him into Meg for a beer. He knew he ought to say, coldly as he could: Meg, Sal, don’t you buy me a damn other drink this morning, because you’re not getting what you’re after, and you’re wasting your money on what isn’t going to come through—

But Meg set the mug down in front of him, patted him on the shoulder and sank into the chair beside him. “We got an idea, Bird. You and Sal go out in
Trinidad
. Ben and I stay here to keep that application alive and take care of problems—we get us a little finance, put what Sal and I got in the pot with yours—make sense?”

“I got to say—” was as far as he got toward a desperate
I don’t think this is a good idea, and I can’t take your money
—

—when a familiar step came up behind him and a hand slapped a paper down in front of him.

His eyes must be going. For a moment it failed to make sense as what it was. A piece of real paper. With official print.

And Ben landing in the chair on his other side, grabbing his arm, shaking him and saying, “We got it! We got it, Bird!”

“The ship?” Of a sudden he knew it was a ship title. He’d handled
Trinidad’s
—years ago, before he put it in the bank vault. “It says Two-Two-Ten-Charlie. That’s not the number…”

“Same ship. Same ship with the blown tanks. They renumbered it. Like she was new. New start. Everything. We can sell her or we can fix her. We got her, Bird!”

He felt a little dizzy. He took a drink of the beer. Meg grabbed his arm from the other side. Sal was on her feet hugging Ben, and Ben was ordering drinks.

“Wait a minute!” he said, “wait a minute! Free and clear?”

“Free and clear,” Ben said. “We got a few charges to pay, but hell, we got the collateral, now!”

“What charges?”

“We got—8, 9 k to pay… plus the dockage.”

“Nine
thousand
!”

“Administrative. It’s nothing, Bird,—
nothing
, against the value of that ship. Figure it! It’s ours!”

“I don’t believe it.”

Ben pointed on the paper, where it said:
joint ownership
, and both their names. That wasn’t the terms of the split they’d always had, but, hell, he thought, Ben had hunted down the forms, Ben had done the legwork, Ben had pushed the thing when he never thought it would happen.

Mike came over, Mike heard how it was, and gave them a round of drinks on the house—The Hole never did that. But Mike did now.

They had more than was good for them.

Which was when Ben said how he’d heard Dekker was going to be in hospital a long, long time. How he’d gotten his license pulled.

Brain damage, Ben said.

“Shit,” he said, suddenly sick at the stomach.

“Hey, I told you,” Ben said. “Dekker’s a certified mental case.”

“They pull him all the way?” Sal asked.

Ben shrugged. “Close as makes no difference,
if
he gets re-certified there’s no way they give him a class 1. D3, maybe, but no way he can ever be primary pilot. Ship’s
ours
, on account of it was a tumbling wreck when we got it, and just because he was inside it is im-ma-terial. He was just baggage. He couldn’t stop it and he was in no shape to help himself.”

Poor guy, he thought.

“Fact is,” Ben said, “we
still
got a stack of bills against his account. And if he’s gone for a long walk, he doesn’t need the money: they’ll just ship him out to the motherwell. I got an attachment on his bank account.”

That was too much. “Now, wait a minute, Ben, we
got
the ship.”

“And the repair bills. And our fuel and our dock time—and
its
dock time, don’t forget that. They’ll stick us with all those bills.”

Unpleasant thought. “And the clean-up inside,” he said. “God, have you got any figure what that’s going to cost?”

“I dunno,” Ben said. “But we can get our expenses back.”

He was disgusted with himself, being happy to hear that. Maybe there was a lot of disgust at the table. Meg and Sal had gotten real quiet.

But Ben pulled out his pocket slate and started running figures. “What we can do, we do the repairs ourselves, we use the reserve cash—”

“Whoa, wait a minute. That’s our private insurance fund.”

“You don’t have to think like that now. That
ship
out there’s our insurance fund. We got flexible capital now, Bird, sure we want a reserve, but we got to get that thing in running order. We risk it now, while it’s in this shape; we don’t lease
Trinidad
this run, we can do that work in a month if we push it, and we build back our fund. It’ll work.”

“Hell,” he said, “I don’t know. This poor guy—”

“It’s not our problem,” Ben said.

“Ben…”

Ben gave him a bewildered look.

“We don’t take anything more from that guy. That’s flat. No more charges against him.”

Ben didn’t say anything for a moment. Ben looked as if he were worried about the objection, or confused. Finally: “Yeah, well, all right. But we’re talking about a guy that may not make it out of the psych ward.”

“If he does.”

“Yeah, if he does, fine. So we’re all right, so we collect it and if he gets out we can stand him a stake. If not, who cares?” Excitement got the better of him, he broke out in a grin and slapped Bird on the shoulder. “We got it, Bird, we got it, we got it made.”

The guys went off to somewhere, talking about checking out prices on tanks, happy, mostly—they all should be. Everything had worked.

But Meg sat there with Sal turning her glass in a pointless circle and scared for a moment that didn’t clearly make sense. She wasn’t superstitious, as a rule. Maybe she’d gotten to distrust a winning hand: it always seemed to be the big breaks that stung you, the ones that made you lose your sense of reality and pushed you to commit to big mistakes—like the break that had had her believing that sumbitch back at Sol.

“No damn luck at all,” she said. “Poor bastard’s had all up and down, isn’t he? Good old MamBitch. Screwed him good.”

“Yeah,” Sal said. “Didn’t Mitch say?”

“Suppose he
is
crazy?”

“Ben swears he is.”

“Brut bad luck for him.”

“Company’d only get that ship. That’s who we’re screwing.”

“That’s the truth.”

“Bet MamBitch passes a reg real fast says this can’t happen again. Bet MamBitch never severely figured somebody’d get through the shitwork and file all those forms. They don’t count on us knowing how.”

“Ah, but they paid off. That proves MamBitch is honest, doesn’t it? Then she’ll pass her rule.”

Sal gnawed her lip, tilted her head to one side, a clash of metal-clipped braids. “That gives Mama credit for brains. That’s never been proved.”

“That’s the truth. True here, true everywhere.”

Clink of glasses.

“Here’s to one more poor bastard,” Sal said. “Up the corp’s.”

“Yo,” Meg said. “Here’s to regulations.”

“Stupidity,” Sal said.

“Inefficiency.”

“Venality.”

“Is that a division?”

“Right under the corp-rat president.”

Clink. “Here’s to somebody Responsible.”

“Must be on Mars.”

“Sure ain’t here.”

A quiet snort. And a look in Sal’s eyes that was dead serious.

“Screwed,” Sal said.

“Yeah,” Meg said, “but what’s new? Maybe he’ll get lucky. Maybe they’ll ship him back to his zone, let him re-train.”

“Lay any bets? He could have
friends
there.”

“No takers,” Meg said, and stirred a water-ring with her finger.

Sal said: “Worth a nudge.”

Meg looked at her then, and Sal made a little shrug, gave her a lift of the brows with this smug look in her eye.

“You let it alone, you and your friends.”

“No worry, Kady.”

“Yeah.” Cold as ice, Sal was; but sometimes you got this feeling she was thinking of something that risked her neck and she was breathing it in like an oxygen high. Sal was a Shepherd’s daughter. Sal was also an orphan—in one deep dive into the Well.

That was worth remembering, too.

THEY’D asked his shoe size at breakfast. Now they turned him out of bed, gave him underwear and socks that came folded, likewise a cheap little Personals kit, a pair of brand new boots (black) and coveralls (blue) with fold-marks all over, so he looked like a mental case. They let him shave himself this time, but his hair hung around his ears and down into his collar: he didn’t even remember the last time Cory had cut it. He just stood there in front of the mirror staring at a hollow-cheeked, wild-eyed stranger and didn’t understand what Paul Dekker had to do with this gaunt crazy person. He didn’t remember that small white scar on his temple, didn’t understand how it could have healed so far without him ever knowing he’d gotten it… Tommy took him gently by the arm—he liked Tommy more than Alvie. Alvie just did his job; Tommy cared. Tommy always gave him that little moment to get his balance, that moment to figure out that he had to do what they wanted, because Tommy had his orders, but Tommy was never rough with him, and Tommy guided him now with a real concern for his comfort.