The Rhine

by R L Dean

  The last part was going to hurt, all of them. The loss of the can was one-third their profits from this load and the lease was a shared operational expense. They all had to pay. But Yuri didn't begrudge the captain for what he did, because it saved them. But, they all three needed to sit down and discuss the gas mining business. Cracking rocks and ice in the Belt paid less per run, but it was safer.

  "Everything okay?" Haydon asked. He meant with the girl and the checkpoint.

  "Yeah, no problem," was the reply. The captain sounded tired, but Yuri knew it was something more.

  He breathed an inward sigh of relief. At least they wouldn't be arrested for hacking UNSEC software. He was sure it had some fancy criminal name like 'sabotage of proprietary UN digital security property' or something like that, but all he could think of was hacking. And, like getting caught with a gun on the station, it ended in a long term prison sentence. The one bright spot in this was the fact that the one that did the hacking was gone. She had said so herself.

  "Anyway. Let's meet back at the ship in about ... an hour and half to discuss the parts list. I already put in the order for our general restock ... stuff should be at the hatch by then."

  When Mat's face blinked off the handcomm, Yuri drank the last of his beer and held up his hand to the waitress. Then he said, "That girl is hiding something. I mean more than she let on about some FMN nutcase looking for her. I am glad she is gone."

  Haydon's face turned to exasperation. Yuri thought he looked like that a lot. "Yuri, everyone is hiding something."

  That sounded scary coming from Haydon. But Yuri shrugged and smiled politely as the waitress set another beer down in front of him. Before she walked away she wrinkled her nose at him.

  "Anyway, that girl is not really what I wanted to talk about ..."

  "Really? Because that girl is all you've been talking about since we walked off the ship."

  Now it was Yuri's turn to be exasperated. "No, listen. It is about Mat. I think those pirates got what they deserved." He lowered his voice and leaned in. "But, you are used to that ... the guns and bullets and shooting people. He is not. And you are the one that talked him in to it."

  "Oh, yeah," Haydon said, loud enough for the entire bar to hear. "What else you thinking, Yuri."

  Yuri leaned back away from the table and downed his beer, then said, "I think now that that girl is gone, he is going to have a lot to deal with ..." He tapped the side of his head, then finished with, "In here."

  He stood, setting the empty bottle down, then held up his handcomm to signal that he wanted to pay. After the waitress took his money he said, "Come on, there are other places to look."

  Haydon was watching him with his arms crossed over his chest. His eyes slowly slid away, then after a moment he stood and followed Yuri out of the bar.

  21 - Mat

  They walked from the Sadie's starboard airlock down the corridor, toward the security checkpoint. Misaki carried a small duffel slung over her shoulder. It held some of Mat's clothes that he had given her while she was aboard. She was walking with her head down, and Mat was struggling for something to say.

  "You don't have to go with me," she said. Her eyes were watching the deck, but she glanced at him.

  What was he going to do if the retinal scans she took using the medbed didn't hold up at the checkpoint? What if she made a mistake when hacking the manifest? Like every lawfully registered citizen Misaki had a valid UNID record in the UN's massive registrar database that followed her around where ever she went. The way she explained it; once she was scanned at the checkpoint and found in Sadie's manifest that record would simply update across the UN network. If glanced at, it would seem that she transferred from the Pendleton to the Sadie as an engineer. It would in effect hide her time on the tug. Mat would file his report, leaving out the fact that they brought back a survivor. When the incident made the advisory boards on every floating rock in the system with a comm station, her name wouldn't be found. But if the checkpoint's system detected something odd about her retina or her entry in the Sadie's manifest ... what was he going to do? Maybe he should have had Yuri standby in the cockpit and Haydon walk with them down to the checkpoint.

  "I have to," he said, and when she glanced at him again he gave her a smile. An imitation of the brief smile she gave him a couple of times. She returned it, but didn't say anything else.

  The young UNSEC soldier at the desk was clean shaven, like Haydon, but had more hair. He looked up from his screen and smiled as they approached. The two at the exterior hatch in riot gear and carrying rifles, watched on, bland faced.

  Before Mat had a chance to think of anything else— before his heart rate had a chance to climb— Misaki stepped to the scanner and the guy gave her a polite nod. She put her eyes to it. It beeped and she stepped away.

  His heart started hammering after the fact. There was a sudden realization that he was supposed to go ahead. He stepped up and it was over in the matter of a second.

  "Welcome to Butte, Captain Middleton," the desk-soldier said.

  The hatch opened and Misaki walked into the access tube ahead of him. When the hatch closed and the ad screens lining the tube kicked on she stopped, turning to him.

  "Mat," she said, putting a hand on his chest. Her head was still titled down a little, her brows were furrowed and her eyes looking somewhere else. "Let me go." Then she reached up and bussed his cheek, then started to turn away.

  "Wait," Mat said, reaching for her arm, but stopped. "What are you going to do? Where will you go?"

  She shrugged. "I'll sign on a hauler that's going back to the Moon. Visit my mother. After that, I don't know. Maybe stay there for awhile. I want out of space, that's all I know right now."

  He tightened his jaw and nodded, then dug in his coverall pocket. "Here," he said, handing her a handcomm. "It's linked to an account. It's not much, but you earned it as temporary chief engineer."

  It was meant to be funny but the expression on her face didn't change. She stared at the handcomm for a moment, as if she were weighting something, and Mat thought she might do something foolish and turn it down, but then she slowly took it from his hand. "Thank you."

  She pursed her lips and turned again and Mat stood there, watching her walk away.

  "Hey," he said, as she reached the hatch and it began opening. "Hold your head up. You did what you had to do."

  She gave him a final look then stepped out of the tube into Butte's terminal level and disappeared in the mass of humanity.

  Why was his heart still pounding?

  He wasn't sure what he was supposed to do. He leaned against one of the screens lining the tube while it flashed ads. Misaki clearly wanted distance, he just didn't understand why. He knew she was hurt— deeply— and in ways he didn't want to think about. He understood her wanting to go home ... get out of the big black. That all made sense. What he didn't understand was why it felt like she wanted to get away from him.

  Mat, let me go. It was personal.

  He wiped his hand over his face and stared at the screen on the opposite bulkhead for a moment. Pulling out his handcomm he called Haydon. Yuri was probably incoherent by now.

  "Yeah, boss?"

  Even with his face on the handcomm's screen Mat couldn't tell if Haydon was tired or relieved.

  "I'm going to file my report, then go see the Apex coordinator about unloading our cans. And leasing a new one," he said. That last part was going to hurt. But at least by filing the report with the UN rep Apex wouldn't think he sold the can to some other ship and crew. That would get you a fine and a voided contract.

  "Everything okay?" Haydon asked. Mat knew he meant with Misaki and the checkpoint. Yes ... no, he thought.

  "Yeah, no problem." Lord, he felt tired. "Anyway. Let's meet back at the ship in about ..." The UN rep's office and the Apex Coordinator’s office were on the same level, but on opposite ends. "... an hour and half to discuss the parts list. I already put in the order for our general restock. Stu
ff should be at the hatch by then."

  He stared at Haydon for another second, then closed the connection.

  Exiting the tube he stepped into the crowds. The terminal was always a busy place, any terminal on any drop-off station was busy, but this was crazy. He wondered when Control would stop letting people on the station because of life-support issues. Greenery was the best thing for scrubbing CO2 and replenishing oxygen but required more space and maintenance than an oxygen plant. And, like all machines, the plants would break down if overworked. Some of the newer stations were incorporating both green plants and machines. But Butte was old, one of the first drop-off stations built by Apex Mining. Everything about it said machine. Though, someone had made an effort to paint palm trees on the bulkhead surrounding a kiosk that sold authentic flavored island food. It was an old mural, faded when Mat first saw it, four or five years ago, and remained so.

  Mat kept his hands in his pockets, simply to keep other hands out of them. He silently wished he warned Misaki to be careful of pickpockets, but then realized it was a ridiculous thought. She wasn't a child, and like everyone else on a mining ship, she knew that the stations were havens for thieves, and she knew not to get caught by herself down some empty tunnel. But there was this nagging feeling that he should have gone with her. She would probably watch the transit boards first, large screens set in the bulkheads throughout the station that showed inbound and outbound haulers and their destinations. There would be a mark indicating if they were hiring or accepting passengers. If she didn't find anything on the boards her next stop would be the bars. That's how Mat met Yuri.

  UNSEC soldiers were like little islands standing by themselves among the sea of people. They watched the crowds with one hand on their stun batons. They were fixtures on every station. Sort of so ubiquitous you expected to see them, or became blind to them.

  The lift carried him to the second level. The UN rep office was a good section of tunnel that housed other government services; licensing, taxes, legal. This level wasn't as crowded as the terminal, but when he turned the corner into the tunnel he saw three people loitering near the office hatch; two men in coveralls, both leaning against the bulkhead with their arms crossed over their chests, and a woman in a business jumpsuit, standing across from the hatch straight as an arrow, and holding a sophisticated looking handcomm.

  "Closed for lunch?" He asked.

  One of the men frowned and shook his head, then said, "No room. They're packed in there like rats." He was a big guy, like Haydon, and had a patch on the breast of his coveralls that said, Harcourt Mining.

  "So, what's going on?"

  "Pirates," the woman clarified. "Place has been jammed for over a week now. People reporting sightings and attacks. It's turning in to a real problem."

  "We lost two cans!" the other guy said. He was angry. "We dropped them for maintenance and this fraggin ship shows up and starts pulling them in! Then threatens to hole us if we don't stay still! Where are the UN patrols? Aren't they supposed to be watching out for us?"

  This many, was all Mat could think. How could it get this bad?

  "It's the Martians," the woman said. "Where else could they be bringing the ore, except Mars?"

  The guy nodded. "Right, they can't make for a drop-off station, because then they would be caught. They had their transponder turned off, but we got them on camera!"

  Mat didn't follow politics per se but he did follow the news and Jack Aldridge's talk show, The Human Front. Aldridge was a well-known author, journalist, and critic of the times. He was also a bit of a conspiracy theorist, and his current hypothesis was that the Martian government was using its tiny fleet of transports, tugs, and commercial ships as privateers. According to Aldridge the UN was to blame, because they were squeezing the colony on tariffs and embargoed raw ore sales. The Martians wanted the ability to manufacture their own goods, or more of them at least, and they couldn't do that without refineries or manufacturing plants and raw materials. In effect this meant the colony was forced to buy goods from Earth owned businesses. And according to the colonial lease all perfectly legal. Except that it was tyrannical.

  Aldridge's political cartoons were censored throughout the UN network, but Mat recalled seeing one that slipped through showing a caricature of Secretary-General Modi squeezing the neck of Governor Shultz while dollar signs floated in the air around him.

  His conversation with Haydon, while in Medical trying to feed Misaki, came to mind. The mealboxes were distributed by a company that dealt heavily with Mars. And the little picture that Haydon found in the crew quarters on the tug was taken on Mars. Misaki herself thought that the tug crew had been a Free Mars Now cell.

  They continued to talk, his arrival apparently setting off what was seething beneath their collective surfaces. The two men were obvious miners, even without the logos on their coveralls. And the woman was a rep from Ore Systems, a company that manufactured parts for buzzard collectors and a dozen other pieces of equipment for mining. She didn't say why she was there.

  Mat leaned back against the bulkhead and folded his arms, looking out at the end of the tunnel, watching the people pass in the main thoroughfare. The miners and the woman continued their angry conversation.

  Pirates, he thought. As if suffocation, radiation, and reactor failure were not enough to worry about. People are bad, Haydon told Yuri. And that was probably the reason he had no qualms about shooting them. Maybe he needed to start thinking more like Haydon. Maybe the dreams of the tug pilot and the blood splatter would stop.

  Mat's eyes suddenly locked on the end of the tunnel and the stream of people passing by. He caught a glimpse of a tan duffel slung over the shoulder of a small woman with black hair. It was just a blink, that quick.

  Misaki ... maybe. Butte was a small place, if they were here for any length of time they were bound to see one another. He wanted to ... he didn't know what he wanted. No, he knew what he wanted and ... nothing. It ended with her walking away. This is not her fault, Matthew, he told himself. She needed time to heal, a lot of it, and what better place and people to heal you than home and family? Let it be, you have your own family to take care of.

  The hatch to the rep's office opened, distracting him from his thoughts. A man stepped out and headed toward the tunnel entrance. Mat got a look inside, it was standing room only in the waiting room. He couldn't even see the counter or the clerks. The big miner leaning against the wall stood straight, then walked inside, the hatch closing behind him.

  An hour passed and he considered moving on to the Apex coordinator's office and coming back later, but he was standing in line at the counter now, and people kept coming in behind him from the tunnel.

  He called Haydon to tell him he would be late. The mechanic ... soldier ... after the tug Mat didn't know how to think of him, was irritated. It was probably Yuri.

  The woman at the counter barely looked up from her terminal at him. In quick, terse sentences she asked him why he was there and then ran down a list of questions. She frowned once or twice, looking at her terminal screen, then asked him to submit his report and the camera footage and any other pertinent digital materials he wanted to include. He pulled the information up on his handcomm and sent it.

  "Thank you," she said. "If the incident investigator has any questions you will be contacted."

  He felt dismissed ... because he was.

  "Wait. What is the UN going to do about ..."

  "UN Security is increasing patrol throughout the region. Please allow the next customer in line to step forward. If the investigator has any further questions you will be contacted."

  * * *

  The Apex Mining Coordinator’s office served as a central point on the station to arrange transfer of ore canisters from incoming mining ships to outbound haulers. It was the reason that places like Butte existed. Miners employed by Apex always had priority in the transfer queue, but they didn't get paid like Mat did as an independent contractor. What seemed like a life time ago M
at worked at Apex's refinery on the Moon and watched those haulers come in and drop their canisters, one right after another. Feeding Earth's insatiable hunger for raw materials it could no longer pull from the ground or extract from the atmosphere. He didn't particularly like Apex, but they were the biggest game in town. They paid the most, and they had the most haulers leaving any drop-off point on either side of the Belt— and the quicker the canisters transfer from the Sadie to a hauler meant quicker pay.

  Klaus was the long time chief coordinator. He was one point two meters tall with a horseshoe of wild gray hair around his large head, perpetually angry and complaining about his stomach. Mat suspected he was a plant foreman in a past life. He was usually behind his desk, dressed in his rumpled coveralls, scowling. Today he was standing on a short stack of shipping pallets outside his office, shouting at a crowd of people.

  When Mat walked up, Klaus was saying, "There's just not any haulers going out to take the loads. You'll have to take'em yourselves. It's in your contracts!"

  "Klaus you know how long that will take!" Someone shouted back. "All the way to the Moon, then back out to the Belt. Apex is supposed to provide haulers!"

  "Look, what do you want me to do? They won't move until the UN patrols arrive ..."

  "Fire'em and hire new ones! That's what you're supposed to do. They're your employees!"

  Klaus' face was turning red. "And where am'i gonna get new crews? You wanna ditch your ship and run one of my haulers? Huh? Nothing's happening until the UN patrols arrive, and they're saying it'll be more than four weeks. So, you are contractually obligated to haul your own cans to the plant!"

  Mat understood instantly. The pirates.

  "We'll just go to Icecore, or Shenhau! They'll haul our ore!"

  They crowd was getting stirred up, there were shouts of yes, and nods. Mat couldn't remember a delay like this, not one that would require the miners to haul their own canisters to the Moon. But Klaus was right, it was stipulated in the contracts that Apex issued to independents.