Heavy Time

Caroline J Cherryh

[Alliance-Union 01]

EBook Design Group digital back-up edition v1 HTML

May 1, 2003

valid XHTML 1.0 Strict

CONTENTS

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IT was a lonely place, this remote deep of the Belt, a place where, if things went wrong, they went seriously wrong. And the loneliest sound of all was that thin, slow beep that meant a ship in distress.

It showed up sometimes, sometimes missed its beat, “She’s rolling,” Ben said when he first heard it, but Morrie Bird thought: Tumbling; and when Ben had plugged in the likely config of the object and asked the computer, that was what it said. It said it in numbers. Bird saw it in his mind. You spent thirty years tagging rocks and listening to the thin numerical voices of tags and beacons and faint, far ships, and you knew things like that. You could just about figure the pattern before the computer built it.

“Got to be dead,” Ben Pollard said. Ben’s face had that sharp, eager look it got when Ben was calculating something he especially wanted.

Nervous man, Ben Pollard. Twenty-four and hungry, a Belter kid only two years out of ASTEX Institute when he’d come to Bird with a 20 k check in hand—no easy trick, give or take his mother’s insurance must have paid his keep and his schooling.

Ben had bought in on
Trinidad’s
outfitting and signed on as his numbers man; and in a day when a lot of the new help had a bad case of the Attitudes and expected something for nothing, damned if Ben didn’t wear an old man out with his One More Try and his: Bird, I Got an Angle—

Regarding this distress signal it wasn’t hard at all to figure Ben’s personal numbers. Ben was asking himself the same questions an old man was asking at the bottom of his mortgaged soul: How far is it? Who’s in trouble out there? Are they alive? And… What’s the law on salvage?

So they called Base and told Mama they had a Mayday, had she heard?

Base hadn’t heard it. That was moderately odd. Geosyncs over the Well hadn’t heard it and ECSAA insystem hadn’t picked it out of all the beeps and echoes of tags and ships in the Belt. Base took a while to think, approved a course and dumped them new sector charts, with which Mama was exceedingly stingy: Mama said Cleared for radio use, and: Proceed With Caution. Good luck, Two Twenty-nine Tango.

Spooky, that Base hadn’t heard that signal—that she claimed that was a vacant sector. So somebody was way off course. You lay awake and thought of all the names you knew, people who could be out here right now—good friends among them; and you asked yourself what could have happened and when. Rocks could echo a signal. Lost ships could get very lost. That transmitter should be the standard 5 watts, but a dying one could trick you—and, committed, boosted up to a truly scary
v
, about which you could also have second thoughts, you had a lot of things on your mind.

The rule was that Base kept track of everything that moved out here. If your radio died you Maydayed on your emergency beeper and you waited til Mama gave you clear instructions how she was going to get you out of it—you didn’t expect anybody to come in after you. Nowadays nobody went any damn where out of his assigned sector without Mama confirming course and nobody used a radio for long-distance chatter with friends. You get lost in the dark, spacer-kids, you go strictly by the regulations and you yell for Mama’s attention.

That ghosty signal was doing that, all right, but Mama hadn’t heard… and by all rights she should have. Mama said it could be a real weak signal—they were running calculations on the dopplering to try to figure it… Mama claimed she didn’t hear it except with their relay, and that argued for close.

Or, Mama said, her reception could have a technical problem, which at a wild guess meant some glitch in the software on the big dishes, but Mama didn’t talk about things like that with miners.

Mama didn’t talk about a lot else with poor sod miners.

“You remember those jackers?” Ben asked, waking up in the middle of Bird’s watch.

“Yep,” Bird said, working maintenance on a servo motor; he tightened a screw and added, then: “I
knew
Karl Nouri.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Only twenty years back. Hell, I drank with him. Nice guy. Him and his partner.”

That got Ben, for sure. Ben slid back into his
g-1
spinner and started it up again.

But after a while Ben stopped, got out, hauled on his stimsuit and his coveralls and had breakfast, unshaven and shadow-eyed.

A man felt ashamed of himself, disturbing the young fellow’s rest.

But the remembrance of Nouri went on to upset Bird’s sleep too.

No one was currently hijacking in the Belt—the company had wiped out Nouri and his partners, blown two of them to the hell they’d deserved, luring help in with a fake distress signal, killing crews, stripping logs for valuable finds and ships for usable parts—

Nouri’s operation had worked, for a while—until people got suspicious and started asking how Nouri and his friends were so lucky, always coming in with a find, their equipment never breaking down, their ships real light on the fuel use.

Careful maintenance, Nouri had insisted. They did their own. They were good at their work.

But a suspicious company cop had checked part numbers on Nouri’s ship and found a condenser, Bird recollected, a damn 50-dollar condenser, with a serial number that traced it to poor Wally Leavitt’s ship.

They’d shipped Nouri and five of his alleged partners back to trial on Earth, was what they said, company rules, though there’d been a good many would have seen Nouri himself take a walk above the Well.

But worse than the fear in the deep Belt in those days, was the way everybody had looked at everybody else back at Base, thinking: Are you one of Them? or…

Do you think Z could be?

One thing Belters still argued about was whether Jidda Pratt and Dave Marks had been guilty with the rest.

But the company had said they were. The company claimed they had solid evidence, and wrote down personable young Pratt and Marks in the same book as Nouri.

After that, hell, freerunning miners and tenders hadn’t any rights. The company had never liked dealing with the independents in the first place: the company had made things increasingly difficult for independent operators once it had gotten its use from them, and the Nouri affair had been the turning point. No more wildcatting.

Nowadays you documented every sneeze, you told Big Mama exactly what you’d found with your assay, they metal-scanned you when you went through customs, and you kept meticulous log records in case you got accused of Misconduct, let alone, God help you, Illicit Operations or Illicit Trading. If you helped out a buddy, if you traded a battery or a tag or a transponder back at Base, you logged the date and the time and you filled out the forms, damn right you did: you asked your buddy to sign for a 50-cent clip, if it had a serial number on it, and the running unfunny joke was that the company was trying to think up a special form for exchange of toilet paper.

Nowadays it was illegal to keep your sector charts once you’d docked: Mama’s agents came aboard and wiped your mag storage, customs could strip-search you for contraband datacards if it took the notion, and you didn’t get any choice about the sector you drew when you went out again, either—’drivers moved, by the nature of what they were, you had mandated heavy time, no exceptions, and Mama didn’t send you to anything near the same area. It was illegal to hail a neighbor on a run.

You spent three months breathing each other’s sweat, two guys in a crew space five meters long and three meters at the widest, so tight and so lonely you could hear each other’s thoughts echo off the walls, but if one freerunner tried to call another a sector away from him, he and his partner went up on Illegal Trading charges faster than he could think about it, it being illegal now to trade tips even with no money or equipment changing hands: the company reserved the right to that information, claiming miners had sold it that data and it had a proprietary right to assign it to interests of its own—meaning the company-owned miners: to no one’s great surprise the courts had sided with the company. So it was also, by the company’s interpretation of that ruling, illegal to hail another ship and share a bottle or trade foodstuffs or any of the other friendly deals the Nouri crackdown had put a stop to.

So when they’d advised Base they wanted to move out of their assigned sector on a possible ship in distress, Mama had taken a nervous long time about giving them that permission. BM—Belt Management—was a sullen bitch at best, and you
never
tried to tell Mama you were doing something purely Al-truistic. Mama didn’t, in principle, believe that, no’m. Mama was suspicious and Mama took time to check the records of one Morris Bird and Benjamin Pollard and the miner ship
Trinidad
to find out if
Trinidad
or either of her present crew had demonstrated any odd behaviors or made any odd investments in the recent past.

They could use their radio meanwhile to talk to the beep. Mama would permit that.

And evidently Mama finally believed what they heard—a ’driver ship fire-path crossed the charts she sent, which might well explain an accident out there, and
that
could make a body a little less anxious to go chasing that signal, but it seemed a little late now to beg off: they had the charts, they’d seen the situation, they couldn’t back down with lives at stake, and Mama had set all the machinery in motion to have them check It out.

Right.

Mama couldn’t do a thing for them if it did turn out to be some kind of trouble.

Mama had indicated she had no information to give them on anybody overdue or off course, and that was damned odd. The natural next thought was the military—they asked Mama about that, but Mama just said Negative from Fleet Command.

Meanwhile that beep went on.

So Mama redirected a beam off the R2-8 relay, boosted them up along what Mama’s charts assured them was a good safe course, and they chased the signal with the new charts Mama fed them, using the ’scope on all sides for rocks or non-rocks along the way—there was a good reward if you could prove a flaw in Mama’s charts; if you had the charts legally, then you could work on them: that was the Rule.

At this speed you just prayed God the flaw didn’t turn up directly in your path.

But as sectors went it was the Big Empty out here, nothing but a couple of company tags and one freerunner’s for a long, long trip. Mama’s charts were stultifyingly accurate… except the source of the beep, which seemed to be a weak signal. That was Mama’s considered current opinion.

Meaning it was close.

Fourteen nervous days of this, all the while knowing you could make a big, bright fireball with depressingly little warning.

Naturally in the middle of supper/breakfast and shift change, the radar finally went blip! on something not on its chart, and Bird scalded himself with coffee.

The blip, when they saw it on the scope, did match the signal source.

“Advise Mama?” Ben said.

Bird bit his lip, thinking about lives, Mama’s notoriously slow decisions, and mulling over the regulations that might apply. “Let’s just get the optics fined down.

No, we got no real news yet. We’re doing what Mama told us to do. Looks like we can brake without her help. No great differential. And I seriously
don’t
want Mama’s advice while we’re working that mother. That’s going to be a bitch as is.”

“You got it,” Ben said with a nervous little exhalation. Ben set his fingers on the keys and started figuring.

“Looks like it caught a rock,” Bird said, pointing out that deep shadow in the middle of what ought to be the number one external tank.

“Looks.” Ben had been cheerful ever since optics had confirmed the shape as a miner craft. “Sure doesn’t look healthy.”

“It sure doesn’t look good. Let’s try for another still, see if we can process up a serial number on that poor sod.”

“You got it,” Ben said.

They crept up on it. They put a steady hail on ship-to-ship—having that permission—and kept getting nothing but that tumble-modulated beep.

It was no pretty picture when they finally had it lit up in their spots.

“One hell of an impact,” Ben muttered. “Maybe a high-
v
rock.”

“Could be. God, both tanks are blown, right there, see? That one’s got it right along the side.”

“Those guys had no luck.”

“Sudden. Bad angle. Lot of
g
’s.”

“Bash on one side. Explosion on the other. Maybe it threw them into a rock.”