Devil to the Belt (v1.1) (25 page)

So let him run through the Human Services money. Let him settle and think about surviving. There wasn’t any negligence, there wasn’t any charge to file, and Dekker didn’t go to trial, however much Alyce Salazar wanted his head. Salazar was threatening civil suit now, to tie up the bank account and the insurance, but Crayton’s office said don’t worry about it: the daughter was over 18, the partnership was signed and legal, with a survivor’s clause, and the account was jointly acquired, anyway. Dekker was safe: there was no legal way Salazar was going to get at him.

That
card could go in the pending settlement stack.

Strolling along the frontage spinward of The Hole, Sal had things of her own to say. And for openers, since Meg wasn’t getting started: “I’ll tell you this, Kady, we got to get him out of there, God, of all places for him to come!”

“Natural enough.”

“Natural! He said it, they friggin’ took every lovin’ thing he owned—what’s he going to do, forget it?”

Meg walked a few steps further. Kicked at a spot on the decking. “Dunno. Difficult to say. But what are we going to do, throw him out? That’s brut sure he won’t forgive.”

“Forgive, hell!”

Another silence. “You know, brut frank, Sal—there’s a difference in Ben and Bird.”

“We’re talking about Dekker. Or why are we out here?”

“We’re talking about that. Calmati, calma, hey?”

“So say! Doesn’t make sense so far!”

“I tell you, I never had any use for the mother-well. You less.”

“Damn right.”

“Watch it go, right? Screw it all, all that shiz.—But—I get out here, Sal, I dunno, thinking it over—I
know
why Bird paid for this guy a room.”

“So? Why did he?”

“You know you don’t say ‘morning’.”

“Of course I say morning. And what’s that to Flaherty, anyhow?”

“You say it because I say it. You didn’t come saying it. Or ‘evening’. Brut different, Sal.”

“So?”

“Different the way Bird’s different from us. Never saw how the motherwell matters til I figured that.”

“That’s shit.” Sal hated soppiness. This was getting soppy, it wasn’t like Meg, and it was making her increasingly uncomfortable.

“May be shit,” Meg said. “But I know why Bird paid.”

“Because the motherwell makes you crazy.”

“Dekker’s from the motherwell. At least from Sol Station—which is close enough for ‘mornings’.”

“Accent tells you that.”

“Yeah. But we
think
in accents. That’s what I’m talking about. Yours and mine. I can turn my back on the motherwell, I can take what I want and leave the rest. Bird’s not rab, Bird’s just norm, but I know how his mind works—I dealt with there, remember.”

“Are they all fools?”

“Fools, peut et’. But not the only. You mind me saying, Sal—you’re going to be a skosh bizzed at me over this—”

Puzzles and puzzles. A body could be irritated at motherwell Attitudes, too. “All right. So we got this deep secret difference. It’s worth five. Go.”

“Head-on, then—MamBitch is scamming her kids.”

“Is that new?”

“It is when you don’t see it. You know, even the vids that get out here, they’re pure shit, Aboujib, they’re company vids. They’re slash-vids, cop-chasers, fool-funnies, salute-the-logo shit, intensely company, intensely censored—you understand me? MamBitch has been robbing you all along, little bits and pieces. Robbing me too. Those sods brut
like
what’s rab. Rab’s no trouble to them, hell, rab’s where they’re going—forget Earth. Forget what’s old garbage.—Only out here the
company’s
going to pick what’s rab. Capish’?”

“Neg.” She looked at Meg with the slight suspicion Meg was talking down a long motherwell nose at her, a long thirtyish nose at that. But Meg hadn’t made sense enough yet to make her mad. “This going somewhere significant eventually?”

“It’s the Institute, all over again. Understand? You didn’t take the shit there. But you don’t say ‘morning’—”

“F’ God’s sake, Kady, good morning, then!”

“But Belters don’t say it. Bird remarked it to me once: Belters don’t and Sol Station will. Belters don’t give you a second cup of coffee without you pay for it. On Sol Station you expect it. Belters don’t give you re-chances. You screw up once, you’re gone, done, writ off—”

“E-vo-lution. Don’t let fools breed.”

“Corp-fad, Aboujib. It’s wasn’t always that way.”

Down a damned long motherwell nose.

“You take a look at corp-rat executives the last couple of years, Aboujib? Seen the clothes? Rab gone to suits.”

“So? Poor sods still got it wrong.”

“No. No. They got it
right. I
don’t say on purpose—I’m not sincerely sure they have that many neurons compatible—but they
like
the rab. In their little corp-rat brains, shit, yeah, dump the past, let the company say what’s fad, what’s rab, and what’s gone—they don’t ever like some blue-sky lawyer citing charter-law at ‘em, so that’s gone. Don’t teach anybody about the issues: all us tekkie-types and pi-luts need is slash-vids and funnies, right? Tekkies don’t need to know shit-else but their job. Hell, the rab never said dump all the smarts, we said Stop thinking Earth’s it, wake up and see what’s really going on out there; but the stupid plastics said,
Dump the past
. We said Access for the People, and the plastics say
Grab it while you can
. Corp-fad. Plastic is, Aboujib, plastic
sells
, plastic doesn’t ask questions, plastic’s always dumber than the management, and hell, no, management didn’t plot with its brain how to take us over, they just wobble along looking for the easy way, and damned if we didn’t give it to them.”

Corp-fad made an ugly kind of sense. The Institute was without question MomCorp’s way of making little corp-rat pilots—she’d seen that happening: she wouldn’t salute the logo and they’d found a way to can her, right fast.

“I’m 35,” Meg said after a moment or two of walking. “I’m an old rab. Eight, nine years ago they shot us down at the doors and the politi-crats in the company’s bed said that good old EC was within their rights, it was self-defense, the rab was breaking the law and endangering a strategic facility, d’ you believe that? Corp-rat HQ is a strategic facility? —Time the miners
and
the Shepherds had the guts to tell the whole damn company go to hell, turn the whole operation independent. But where are they, Sal? Where are they? Freerunners are mostly gone. Brut few coming out here now: the company’s training the new generation, paying their bills and giving them the good sectors til they get it all in their pocket. The Shepherds let the company handle their outfitting and now they’re fighting to hang on to the perks they have. The rab got themselves shot to hell in the ‘15 and here we got these damn synthetics swaggering around with the company label all over. The plastics don’t know what we were. They turn us into clothes. Into corp-fad. Damn young synths make the music without the words. The Movement’s probably dead back at Sol. Old. Antique. And where do I go?”

“Brut cold,” she said, and put her hands in her pockets, walking step for step with Meg, Meg seeming to have finished her say. Crazy as it sounded, she wondered if the Institute
had
censored the things it didn’t want them to know, on purpose, and when she thought about it, rights damned sure had changed—

Things like abolishing crew share-systems, the way they’d used to be on Shepherd ships. Like the bank refusing to honor cash-chits, the way Shepherds had paid out bonuses, and kept money outside the bank card system.

She thought about the courses she could have sailed through if she’d kissed ass. She thought about her mama and her papa’s friends, Mitch among them, who’d said… You’re a fool, kid. Should have kept your head down til you graduated. We can’t make an issue, you understand? A kid with a reckless endangerment on her record isn’t it…

So she was a fool and the instructors washed her out, told her the same as they’d told Ben: Insufficient Aptitude.

She was learning from Meg—she’d learned more from Meg than she ever let on with the licensing board; and when the time came Meg couldn’t teach her, then she’d go to Mitch a hell of a lot better than Mitch ever thought she was… flight school washout, Attitude problem and all.

But meanwhile her mama’s and her papa’s friends were going grayer and thinner and more brittle, some dying of the lousy shields they’d had in the old days, the old officers and crew hanging on to their jobs because they were the skilled crews the company urgently needed—

But the company was training new techs fast as they could, and the new head of MamBitch was talking about substituting Institute hours for the experienced Shepherds’ years, requiring re-certifications every five years after you were forty.

The Shepherds had naturally told MamBitch where they’d send the cargoes the hour they did that and the company threatened to pass those re-cert rules if the Shepherds ever did it—but the company didn’t have enough pilots to plug in those slots right now that wouldn’t dump more than cargo into the Well, or fry themselves and their ships by pure accident. Yet.

So Big Mama had had to assign her shiny new tech crews to tend the ‘drivers for now, because Shepherd crews wouldn’t fly with the corp-rat cut-rate talent straight out of ‘accelerated training’—and because the military was hot on Mama’s neck about schedules. But time and the Belt were taking their natural toll and the day was coming, even a dumbass Attitudinal washout could see it ahead, when there’d be just too few of the old guard left to make a ripple in the company’s intentions: someday company was going to pass its New Rules, and she was the right age to be caught in it. She didn’t like Meg’s line of thought at all, and she couldn’t figure how it had much to do with anything present—which was what Meg had promised her.

“So?” she said. “So what’s this leading to? What’s this to do with our problem?”

“If you want to figure Bird,” Meg said, “you seriously need to understand, blue-skyers don’t know what short supply is. They don’t think by the numbers: air’s free and they got nothing but heavy time, so they give it away—they give it away even if they haven’t got it, because that’s their pride, you see? They have to say they can, even if they
can’t
, because natural folk can, and anything less they won’t admit to.”

“Way to starve,” Sal said. “Way to end up on a company job. That’s pure fool, Kady. And Bird isn’t.”

“Air’s free on Earth. Feet can go.”

“If you don’t mind dirt. And they got laws that say where you can go. I heard Bird say.”

“Yeah, well.” Meg walked a few more steps. Sal remembered then that, old business at Sol Station notwithstanding, Meg was a whole lot closer to blue sky than she ever could be, and she worried that maybe she’d cut Meg off with that zap about dirt.

But Meg went on as if she hadn’t taken offense: “That’s how it is for corp-rat execs, isn’t it? Air’s free wherever they are. Short for them is when they run out of their Chardonnay ‘87—I know. Hell, I used to run that freight. I know what those sons of bitches are eating, them with their Venetian antiques and their mink bedspreads.”

“Venetian?”

“Italiano. Ochin expensiv. Fragil. Minks are fuzzy live crits. You wear their skins.”

Sal looked at her. Sometimes Meg scammed you when she was in a mood. Hard to be sure.

“No shit. I used to freight it. Pearls, fancy woods, stuff like that. If you skimmed that stuff, you could black market it to starships or you could sell it right back to guess where?”

Sal lifted a brow.

“I guess the corp-rat got his apartment furnished,” Meg said. “Or he got a cheaper source. SolCorp didn’t want me going to trial, hell no. They told me I could come here and fly for myself or I could pilot some pusher back and forth off Mars for good old EC if I sincerely didn’t want to go do mining.”

That was half what Meg had said and half what she’d never said—that she had been dealing black market with some exec, and it was that guy who’d blindsided her.

Things you found out, after this many years.

She liked Meg hell and away better than she had those years ago, that was sure—understood a good deal more of her thinking; but not all of it, never all of it, and she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to know where Meg had been or what Meg had been trained to do. Dive into a planetary well or bring a ship out of one—the thought gave a Shepherd’s daughter the chills.

“So, well, Bird’s got a little ahead at this guy’s expense, he’s short—Bird’s not going to say no, isn’t going to make this guy ask, either. Machismo. Something like. Fact is,
I’ve
been where this guy is and it makes me a skosh mad, Sal. It sincerely does.”

“Well, I’d agree with you I don’t like to see the guy screwed, hell, I put it on Mitch, and
they’re
bizzed about it—but they’re going to do a real fast hands-off after what he did. I’ll tell you the word I don’t like, Kady, it’s what I heard from Persky—the guy yelled out about Bird and Ben knowing a ‘driver was out there—”

“Yeah, well, he was drunk.”

“Doesn’t matter if he was drunk, Kady, dammit, I got very scarce favor points with Mitch—”

“Screw Mitch.”

“Yeah, the hell with Mitch—Mitch’ll give me a choice, get out and away from Bird, that’s what he’ll tell me.”

“Would you do it?”

“It’s all over the damn ‘deck what he said—”

“Tss. They drugged him stupid, Aboujib.”

“We got a live charge here, Kady. We can’t afford this.
They
can’t!”

“All right, I’ll tell you what Bird said to me. This is a confidence. Black-hole it.”

“Go.”

“ ‘Driver’s sitting out there right where the accident happened. Dekker gave ‘em the coordinates. Said he and his partner had found a big rock. Class B. That’s where that thing is sitting, chewing it up and spitting it at the Well, fast as it can. Few more months and it won’t be there.”

“Why in
hell
didn’t you tell me?”

“I
am
telling you. I found it out from Bird last night. That’s what you can see on those charts you lifted.”

“Shit!—But that doesn’t make sense. Something rolls in from Out There—yeah, rocks like that happen, but
we
don’t get ‘em. Those things show up on optics.”