Devil to the Belt (v1.1) (35 page)

“
They’re
not going to tell MamBitch anything,” Sal said. Her voice was shaking. “But the question is how long the Shepherds can hold this quiet. This is a seriously bad time for Dek to go missing.”

“If the cops haven’t got him,” Bird said. “Question is—does Mama know what’s in that transmission? They’ll pick him up.”

Sal pulled two datacards from her pocket and laid them on the table. “That’s from a couple of friends. We’re them. They’re real high Access. The word is Find Dek. Get him to the club next to Scorpio’s, and don’t use our cards or his.”

Ben whispered, “Dammit, we got a launch tomorrow!”

“He may not make it.”

We
may not make it, Meg thought. The cards lay there—seriously illegal, what the Shepherds were doing and what they were risking. One kid was dead. Good chance there could be another.

She picked up one card.

Bird picked up the other.

The message stack was jammed by the time William Payne reached the office—halfway through an important dinner and three glasses of wine under his belt when the phone had rung, and he wished to hell he’d had at least one fewer. He turned on the light, slid into his chair and keyed on line, watching the flash of prioritied incomings—

His immediate superior, Crayton, with a cryptic memo:
An unexplained ship to ship message is proceeding from the Shepherds. Be alert for sabotage
.

A statement from the president of the board:
The company stands by its policy on abuse of communications
.

From Cooley, in News & Entertainment:
Continuing regular programming pending further instructions
.

From Salvatore, in Security:
Stage 1 alert in progress. Code team is assembling
.

Payne keyed on, waiting for Crayton’s instructions to flow down, waiting for information to flow up from Salvatore. He was shivering. The temperature in the office was still coming up. Or it was nerves.

The Shepherd negotiations were in trouble, and
this
happened—they were clearly making a move and the company now had to break off the contract talks or lose credibility—

With agitators stirring up the dockworkers and the refinery workers spoiling for a chance to press their agendas—
real
problems in those groups. The EC insisted on dumping its touchy cases out here, and those problems didn’t go away, they just recruited other problems and made demands. They opened valves in the mast. They slashed hoses. They vandalized plastics vats. Now the Shepherds committed a deliberate, massive defiance of company rules—outright challenging the company to take action, possibly even signaling the long-threatened work stoppage.

The right action, it had to be, and incoming information and outgoing instructions intersected at his desk in Public Information.

Continue the media blackout? That might keep the lid on for an hour, but it also made rumor the main source for the workers. Better to start dribbling out information as soon as he could get a policy direction out of Crayton: keep the workers glued to the vid reports and off the open decks. Some offices in the mast had equipment to hear that illicit transmission, and rumors were as quick as two workers hitting the 8-deck vending machines on coffee break. There were war jitters—and coded-com like that could set off alarms over in the shipyard, in the military base, God, clear to Earth’s security zone.

He keyed up, composed a query from PI to Crayton in General Admin.
Request clearance for news release to forestall rumor and speculation
.

There were going to be hard questions for every administrator in the information chain. Every decision over the next few hours was going under a magnifying glass. The EC, the UN, UI—God only knew how far and how many careers were going down with this as it was; the Shepherds, damn them, were calling the company’s bluff.

He wasn’t in The Pacific, wasn’t in the Tycho or the Europa or the Apollo, and so far as they could find out, he wasn’t in any gym they’d ever used. They fanned out, gave up communication with each other—couldn’t phone when you didn’t know where to phone, and you never knew when the company was listening. I’ll check 3, Meg told Ben, last time their paths crossed on the’deck, and she caught the Trans to 3, to check the gyms there.

“Seen a dark-haired guy, rab cut, about 20, thin?”

No, no, and no. She had a stitch in her side, she had a bash on her elbow from a fast stop in .8
g
, and she was running out of places that didn’t involve the cops or the hospital. She imagined odd looks at her back, imagined the rumor starting to run the corridors: What’s to do with the dark-haired rab? On helldeck she’d gotten Will I do’s? from guys she asked, and the last try in the gym she hadn’t—out of breath and looking like no joke at all. That wasn’t good. That invited questions from the cops—especially with the Shepherds sending illegal transmissions. She took the stretch back toward the Transstation at a slow walk, catching her breath and racking her brain for where next to look, when the thought hit her that she was already on 3—and Dekker obviously hadn’t done anything logical, or they’d have found him.

The cops might be tracking card use by now, and using a Shepherd card was about as nervous a proposition as using her own. But there were more Shepherds than there were Meg Kadys on R2, and a cop looking for a guy might just look past her. She about-faced and went for the core lift, used the card and rode it up with a couple of obnoxious tender-jocks who wanted to get friendly. She stared obdurately at the door, arms folded, sweating, panicked, thinking, God, no trouble, I
don’t
want cops…
not
carrying an illegal card…

Up through lighter and lighter decks, where you had to take hold: the tender-jocks tried to talk her into getting off at 8 and going to a sleepery with them. She said no, very patiently, and swore she was going to hunt these guys down and kill them if she got out of this.

8. The jocks got off. Thank
God
… The car made the jolting transit to the core and stopped—the Access light went on and she shoved the card in, hoping to God customs wasn’t on duty right now.

The door opened. She caught the grip on the line, and rode it through the numbing cold—no jacket, obviously not dressed for the core; but she’d done it before, and customs off in their warm little office had seen her come and go like this a dozen times.

Hope to God nobody’s put a watch on the ships.

She was half-frozen by the time she’d braked off the line and caught
Trinidad’s
rigging-cord—hadn’t even a hand-jet: she monkeyed over to the hatch, her breath coming in ragged, teeth-chattering hisses as she opened up and hauled herself through.

The damn fool was there, just doing a little wipe-down on a cabinet. He made a slow turn to look at her, all calm—like, What’s the rush, Meg? What could possibly be the matter?

She brought up against a console, hauled herself steady against the recoil, out of breath, not knowing what that look meant—that he’d lost his mind and gone totally eetee, or that he was holding it together, up here testing the limits of his sanity.

“You kind of missed a dinner date,” she said.

He blinked as if he were dropping into another track of thought. “God,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

Blank and innocent. She wasn’t entirely sure he was sane right now, or that she was even safe with him in this lonely, noise-insulated place. She said, with her teeth chattering, “Dek, we got to get down and find Bird—right now. Something’s come up.”

“Something wrong?”

She wasn’t about to explain to him here, alone. She grabbed his arm. “We just got a problem.” Her teeth rattling made it hard to talk. “Come on, Dek, for God’s sake, I’m freezing.”

“What’s going on?”

“Tell you on the way.” She made a little finger-sign that meant
bug
. “Bird wants you. Now.”

He disposed of the cloth he was holding. He wiped his fingers on his sweater, looking scared now.

But he dimmed the lights and followed her out of the hatch.

Message from Salvatore:
We’ve got some kind of stir among the military personnel on the ‘deck
—
MP’s and officers going from bar to bar, spreading out. Looks as if they’re pulling their people off leave
…

Payne passed the message on to Crayton’s office and grabbed the phone. “FleetCom,” he told it, and got one ring after another, then a robot.

“Input your priority please.”

“This is Payne, ASTEX Public Information Office.”

“
Your call is entered in queue. Your call will be answered
…”

Priority beeped him off. Red lights spread like plague across the phone console.

“
Sir
!” Salvatore said into his ear, but another priority beeped Salvatore down to autorecord.

The phone said, simultaneously with the computer, on voice: “…
This is President Towney’s office. We are in receipt of an uncoded message echoed from Shepherd craft at the Well, quote:…’At 1540 hours on September 2nd, the Shepherd
Athens
picked up an anomalous object in the recovery zone. It proved to be human remains, carrying the identification of Corazon Salazar, a miner registered to Rl, and reported lost earlier this year during a reported bumping incident between the ‘driver
Industry
and the miner ship 1-89-Z. Our calculations indicate an origin consistent with other loads fired by the aforenamed ‘driver. We are in possession of charts which indicate falsification of records. We are advising the company of these facts and we are demanding that charges immediately be filed of willful murder and attempted murder, with arrest warrants issued for the chief officers of the ‘driver ship
—’ “

Sweating, heart thumping, Payne keyed to Salvatore: Whereabouts of Paul Dekker. Priority One.

DEKKER kept his jaw clamped on questions Meg clearly wasn’t going to answer—”I don’t
know
what the situation is right now,” was the last information thing she’d yet said, when she’d insisted on stopping on 4-deck and walking breakneck to a lift that only took cards like the one she was using—which wasn’t hers. Gold. The only card like that he’d ever seen was Shepherd Access.

He’d never seen this end of helldeck, either—where the lift let out. She led the way across the ‘deck immediately to a door next to a fancy restaurant. A card-sized gold plaque was the only sign of business: the Shepherd emblem, Jupiter and the recovery track, right above the card-lock.

“What is this?” he asked.

Meg put the card in, shoved the door as the electronic lock clicked.

He ducked inside after her, into a carpeted reception room where he knew they didn’t belong—by no right ought they to be here, except that card.

A blond man looked up from the reception desk.

Meg said, “This is Dek; Dek, Mitch.—Have we heard anything from the rest of us?”

“Neg,” Mitch said, before Dekker could say anything, and pointed to the first door down the hall. “Wait in there. Both of you.”

“I’ve got friends out there,” Meg objected, “looking for him.”

“We’re
doing
something about it, Kady. We’ll do it faster if you take care of him.”

“Maybe you’d better tell me what’s going on,” Dekker said, but Meg grabbed him by the arm, said, “Dek, come on,” and steered him down the hall.

“Dammit, Meg,—”

“Shit, I don’t know, I don’t know, come on, just awhile—sonuvabitch! I’m up to here with sons of bitches…” Meg took him back into an elegant deserted bar, left him standing while she turned on the lights and set up on her own, poured two fast, shaky drinks, one whiskey, one rum.

He came and leaned his elbows on the bar, said carefully: “We’re not getting out of here tomorrow, are we?”

She took a sip of the whiskey and shoved the rum at him. “Drink up.”

“Meg. What’s happened? What are we doing here?”

She leaned on the bar, nudged his hand with her glass. “You seriously better have a little of that, jeune rab.—They found your partner.”

That
was it.—But the Shepherd Access, Meg’s breathless rush—coming here… He stood bewildered. Meg came around the end of the bar and snagged him by the sleeve, pulled him to a table and set him down opposite her.

She said, “Dek, they found her at the Well. That sonuvabitch put her in a bucket and sent her a long tour of Jupiter. A Shepherd picked her up on the recovery path.”

Meg sneaked up all gentle. Then she shot for the gut. His mind went blank and black—

That huge dark machine…

“Why in hell—” Breath dammed up in his throat. He couldn’t get it out. He reached for the glass, slopped it left and right getting a drink.

Meg reached across the table, reached for his free hand as he set the glass down, squeezed his fingers til they hurt.

“Cher. Death is. Pain’s life. And there’s, above all, sons of bitches. Get your breath. You’re not the only one who knows now. You’re not alone out there. It’s the independents… the freerunners… the Shepherds they were aiming at. The old, old business.”

“But what in hell do they think they’re doing?” His voice came out higher than he intended, hardly recognizable. “What kind of a game is this? How could they ever think they could get away with it?”

“There’s crazy people. They shot us down at the company doors. News cameras everywhere. Everybody in the world saw it. How’d they get away with that, can you tell me, jeune rab? —Have your rum. The word’s out on the Shepherds’ com. They’ll be hearing it at Sol about now. The company won’t want you to talk, you understand—seriously won’t want you to talk to anybody. That’s what’s going on. But if MamBitch pushes now, the Shepherds are going to shut MamBitch down. Let the corp-rats fly the ships with their cut-rate crews. Let the company execs fly the Well.”

“I want that guy, Meg.”

“Close as we can come. You got the guys that launched him.
Somebody’s
job’s gone. Best you can do with these sumbitches.”

He’s reported in the core
, the last report from Salvatore’s office had said. They were still searching; and Payne, with Towney’s office requesting the Dekker file, searched screen after screen of records generated by Salvatore’s investigation.