Devil to the Belt (v1.1) (8 page)

Bird came back with an armful of blankets and jammed one between his head and the pipes, one at the small of his back. “Don’t lose that,” Bird said, and took a bit of webbing and tied it around him and the blankets and the conduits, telling him he had to, it was for his safety, but he had stopped believing Bird. He thought about Sol Station. Mama coming home from work. Cory meeting him at Refinery One dock. Hi, there, she’d say. I’m Cory. And a person who’d been a lot of letters and a lot of postage would be flesh and blood…

If he could get to dockside, if they brought him that far, she’d be there… if he could get to the 12th he could get there again…

He’d run out on his mother, Cory had run away from hers. His mother just let him go. Cory’d sent those letters that would always be stacked up in her mail-file and waiting for her… He’d say, Don’t read them, but Cory would. Then she’d be down with a guilt attack for days, and go off by herself and spend hours at a rented comp writing some damn letter home—but he wouldn’t. There was a lot he should have said when he’d had the chance. But it was Cory that didn’t get any more chances, and that wasn’t fair.

“Stand by,” Bird yelled up at him. “Dekker? Hear me? We’re about to catch the beam. You all right up there?”

He thought he answered. He was thinking: We’re not going home. We’re not ever going home again. There’s going to be all these letters stacked up and waiting for Cory, and Cory won’t ever read them. They’ll just tell her mother… and she’ll kill me…

“Dekker! Dammit, pay attention!” Ben’s voice. “Answer!”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Dekker!”

He said it louder. The acceleration pressed his body against the blankets Bird had tucked between him and the pipes. The tape cut off circulation and his fingers on that hand went numb. He began to be dizzy: the ship was going unstable—all of it came back, the explosion and the ship tumbling, things flying loose—

“Cory!” he yelled; or maybe that was then. He had no more idea. Someone told him to shut up and he remembered that he had been rescued, but he had no idea where they were going or whether he was going to live.

Finally the pressure let up and he hung there with his head throbbing and the feeling slowly returning to his hands. Pressure in his sinuses and behind his eyes built to a blinding headache when he tried to wonder what was happening or where he was.

“What time is it?” he asked, but no one paid attention to him. He asked again, his voice cracking: “What time is it?” and Ben sailed up into his vision, grabbed him by the knee, grabbed him by his collar and hit him across the face.

“Shut up!” Ben yelled at him. He tried to use his knee and turn his face to protect himself. Ben hit him again and again, until Bird came in from below and pulled Ben off him, yelling at Ben to stop it. Bird said, “Go back to sleep, Ben.” And Ben yelled back: “How can I sleep with What time is it? What time is it, God, I’m going to strangle him before the hour’s out—I’m going to fuckin’ kill him!”

“Ben,” Bird said quietly, taking Ben by the shoulder. “Ben. Easy. All right.—Dekker…
shut the hell up
!”

After that, it could have been next day, next week, a few hours, he wasn’t sure. Ben came floating up to him, carefully took him by the collar and gathered it tight, and calmly said, right in his face, “It’s my watch now, hear me? We’re all alone. Do you hear me, Dekker?”

He nodded. He looked Ben in his close-set eyes and said yes again, in case Ben hadn’t understood him.

“You want to know what time it is, Dekker?”

He shook his head. He remembered that made Ben crazy. Ben wound his grip tighter, cutting off the blood to his head.

“If you ask the time just one damn more time I’m going to break your neck. You understand me, Dekker?”

He nodded. The edges of his vision were going. Ben went on looking at him with murder in his eyes.

He remembered—he was not sure—Ben taking pictures of him while he was unconscious. He thought, while Ben was shutting the blood away from his brain, This man is crazy. He’s crazy and I’m not that sure about Bird…

“Hear me?” Ben said.

He tried to say yes. Things got grayer. The ship was spinning. Ben let him go and went away. Then he gulped several lungfuls of air and started shivering. He wished Bird would wake up, he wished he knew where he was going now, and whether Cory would be waiting on the dock. They said Refinery Two, but that was like saying Mars or the Moon: places were different, and you didn’t know where you were going even if you knew the name.

The Belt was like that. It was always like that. The rules changed, the company tried to screw you, but Cory always did the figuring, Cory had had college, Cory knew the numbers, and he didn’t.

He wished they had never taken him off that ship. He wished they had never found him. Or maybe he was dreaming. He had no idea now what was real.

Dekker was off his head again, mumbling to himself, just under the noise of the pumps and the fans. Ben put a hand over that ear and tried to concentrate on the charts, feeding in info that was going to come in handy, because Big Mama didn’t like to tell freerunners anything except what she had to—but with a spare and illicit storage, an enterprising and close-mouthed freerunner could vastly improve on Mama’s charts, look at the sector she offered you, and
tell
which runs to take at any cost and which to lease out if you had any choice.

So you paid close attention while you were running, you listened to the sectors you were passing through blind and used your radar for what it was worth, on all the sectors around you while you ran on Belt Management’s set, (they swore) safe course out and home; and you filed every piece of information you could get your hands on, listening for the older tags, making charts of the new, figuring where good rocks might cluster, assembling the whole moving mass of particles around you, because when Jupiter swept the Belt on his twelve-year course, slowing rocks down, speeding rocks up, and now and again changing certain orbits by a million or so k or flinging certain rocks clear out of the Belt, those all-important numbers did change. It was Sol’s set of dice, but Jupiter did make the game interesting, and the freerunners with the best numbers and the best records were the freerunners that survived. Rocks hit each other now and again,’driver-tenders got careless, and now and again you might find an uncharted big bit of some old rock long since ground to bits and used, a chunk still running the old orbit path, give or take what rocks did to each other and what Jupiter did and what the occasional’driver did when it went firing loads through the Belt to the Well: not much to hit out here, but now and again, generally thanks to some’driver, they did, with shattering results. Sometimes, again, strange rocks just wandered through, old bits of comets, Oort Cloud detritus, God only: every rock had its path, they all danced with Sol, but some were distant partners—and with the mass they were hauling now, you just hoped to hell Mama liked you, and gave you solid numbers.

“We’re not real easy to stop,” he had said to Bird, among other things.

“We could brake,” Bird had said.

And he: “Yeah, yeah, and we’re carrying more mass than those cables are rated for.”

“Won’t happen,” Bird said.

Thinking like that infuriated him. The thought of the rigging failing, the thought of, at best, a walk outside for repairs, at worst, the whole sail failing beyond repair—
Trinidad
taking, at this heading, the long, long fall into the Well—made him crazy. He was already holding on to his temper with his fingernails and Bird came out with
It won’t happen
.

He had fantasies of killing Dekker.

Maybe Bird.

But that was as crazy as Dekker was. . He kept feeding in the information. He kept building and refining his portable record. He ignored Dekker as much as possible. Thing about null-g, you couldn’t get your finger to stay in your ear. Not easily. He thought about his earplugs, over in the cabinet, but those worked too well for his peace of mind.

He cast a glance askance at Bird sleeping so quiet in his net, where they had strung it between the galley and the number one workstation, Dekker being just too close to the spin cylinders. Dekker might have been crazy long before this—and Bird just might be soft enough to let the guy loose on his watch. That was all it took, let Dekker near a wrench or, God forbid, get his hands on something sharp.

All that blood in the ship, all those little red splatters on the suits—did a cut on the forehead bleed like that?

He had to have it agreed with Bird. They had to keep that guy confined—somehow, someway. They couldn’t sleep in nets for a month, they needed the spinners: and the idea of being blind and tucked in a spinner for six hours wondering what Dekker was doing on Bird’s watch already upset his stomach.

And, damn, he intended to keep every move logged, everything they did, everything this Dekker did, every spate of What time is it?

Dekker would get the time, all right. Logged on and logged off.

He’d get the expenses written down, too, exactly the way he knew how to do it in a record Management would accept—because Benjamin J. Pollard wasn’t letting an old man’s softheadedness rob them of a break like this. Hell. No.

REFINERY Two was only slightly prettier than a rock, but it did come welcome—that k-plus wide sooty ring that you only caught sight of on camera—and most to Bird’s knowledge were eager to see it, and did turn the optics on, long before it was regulation that you had to get visual contact. There she hung, magnified in the long lens, spinning with a manic vengeance, with her masts stuck up like spindles and her stationary mast surfaces bristling with knobby bits that were pushers and tenders, and shuttles from the Shepherds and such. A few, hardly more than ten or so at any one time, counting company rigs waiting crew change, were ships a lot like
Trinidad
, a whole lot like
Trinidad
, if you took plan B on your outfitting, and opted for green in the shower.

A lot of the fitting inside Refinery Two was a lot like
Trinidad
, too, except, one supposed, if you got down to corporate residence levels, and there was about the same chance of freerunners seeing that in person as getting a guided tour of the company bunker on Mimas.

Belters lived and Belters died and Refinery Two just rolled on, this big factory-hearted ring which was the only close to
g-1
place miners and tenders in R2 zone ever got back to. She swallowed down what the Shepherds gathered in, she hiccuped methane and she shat ingots and beams and sheet and foam steel. She used her own plastics and textiles or she spat them at Mars, in this year when Jupiter was as convenient to that world as Sol Station was. But nobody knew what went to Mimas. Some said what was down there repaired itself and had more heart than any company exec—but that was rumor and you didn’t want to know. Some said it wasn’t really the ops center it was reputed to be, in case of something major going wrong at the Well: some said it was the ultimate bunker for the execs—but you didn’t say
war
in polite society either and you didn’t think too much about the big frame that sat out there aswarm with tenders and construction craft, a metal-spined monster that took rough shape here at the source of steel and plastics before it moved on to final rigging at Sol. You called what was going on out in the Beyond a job action or you called it a tax strike or you called it damned stupid, but if you were smart you didn’t discuss it or that ship out there and you didn’t even think about it where Mama might hear.

A-men.

“Well,” he sighed, “she’s still here. Kept the porch light on and the door open.”

Ben didn’t say, What’s a porch light? You never could get a rise out of him like that.

“Used to sit outside at night,” Bird said, “look up at the stars—you know what a shooting star is, Ben, lad?”

“No.” Ben’s tone said he was not at the moment interested to know. He was working approach, as close as his second-class license would let him. “I’m about ready to hand off. You got it?”

“Yeah.”

“Dockmaster advises they copy on the request for meds. They’re on their way.”

“Good on that.” He saw Ben furiously ticking away at the comp. “—I got your handoff. Take it easy.”

“Take it easy. We got meds and customs swarming in here, we have to have the records straight.”

“Everything’s in order. I checked it. You checked it.—You’re sure they copy on that mass.”

“Yeah. I made ‘em say-again.” Ben was going through readout. No papers. Everything was dataflow. BM wanted forms, and it was all dataflow, not at all like the old days when if you fouled up some damn company form you got a chance to read it over slow and easy and say it right. Now in this paperless society the datalink grabbed stuff and shoved new blanks at you so fast you didn’t have time to be sure all your answers made sense.

“You got all that stuff,” Bird said. “And welcome to it. Damn, I hate forms.”

“No worry.”

Ben had a sure instinct for right answers. Ben swore it was a way of thinking. Ben input something and said, “Shit! Shut him up!”

He only then realized Dekker was talking, mumbling something in that low, constant drone of his. “I can’t half hear him, he’s all right.”

“I can hear him! I can damn well hear him—Where are we? Where are we? What time is it? I tell you—”

“Easy.”

“I’ve
been
easy. I’m going to kill him before we make dock, I swear I am.”

“No, you’re not. He’s being quiet. Just let him alone.”

“You’re losing your hearing. You can’t hear that?”

“Not that loud.”

“The guy’s crazy. Completely out of it. Only good thing in this business.”

“Ben… just—drop it, Ben. End-of-run nerves, that’s all. Just drop it, you mind?”

There was a cold silence after that, except the click of buttons. And Dekker’s voice, that
was
loud enough to hear now and again once you thought about it.

Long silence, except for ops, and approach control talking back and forth with them, walking them through special procedures.