Beltrunner

by O’Brien, Sean

  “I guess not. So I’ll go back to the Dulcinea and you’ll arrange for an ice transfer?”

  “Yes. So that’s it, then? You’re leaving the rock?”

  Collier’s head snapped back to the horizon. “Isn’t that what you want?”

  “Of course. I just didn’t … you’re being reasonable about it.” Isa sounded surprised and even a little disappointed.

  “What choice do I have? If I stay, you’ll wreck any mining equipment I use. I won’t see a gram of P from this rock, and I’ll have to try to replace my tools. What do you want me to do, Isa? Throw sand at you when you hover over me? Spit at your impact probe? You’ve got me by the balls, Isa, and I know when it’s time to cut my losses. So just send over the damn ice, without any of your gloating.”

  “You were never reasonable,” Isa said evenly. “That was the whole problem. Are you saying you’re coming around to—”

  “Damn you, Isa. You can’t just win, can you? Just like you couldn’t just leave me. You had to follow me. And now, now that you are going to take right out from under me the biggest strike I’ve had in years, you can’t just do it. You have to talk to me about it. Well, how’s this for talk: you’re nothing but a corporate whore, Isa. You might have had a heart at one time, may have been your own person. But now you’re nothing but another Ad Astra whore, doing what they tell you, hoping the suits will see fit to send some money your way. I’m glad you left. Sancho, cease receiving from that damn ship.”

  His radio went dead.

  Chapter Two

  Ceres had only nine working, freelance-accessible docking cables : the rest were either inoperative or reserved for the various corporate mining concerns that plowed the Belt. According the Ceres Charter, the planetoid was supposed to make a minimum of twenty cables available to free Belters, but over the years provisions had been added to the Charter that did not require all twenty to be operational at any one time. When a corporate cable went bad, it was reassigned to the “free” group and one of the operative free cables was reassigned to the corporation. Technically, the Charter was not being violated, even if free Belters were.

  Fortunately, three of the free cables were not in use when the Dulcinea arrived. Collier made arrangements with the cablemaster (or rather, he instructed Sancho to do so, since the cablemaster was a purely automated affair) for docking.

  The trip back to Ceres had taken a fortnight, and although he still had supplies for a month, he would have to arrange with his creditor for more propellant. He did not relish the thought of appealing once again to Barney Starcher for an extension of credit — it was demeaning to listen to the weak-chinned banker lecture him on his fiscal responsibilities. “Why don’t you join up with one of the corps, Collier?” he would say in his nasally whine. “They would pay well to have a man with your experience.” Then he would sigh and push some buttons on his deskplay. “You don’t even have enough money for docking fees.”

  To hell with it. He still had biologicals he could sell. His waste containers were at least half-full, and should fetch enough for docking fees for a day.

  “The only thing I have that’s worth anything is my own shit,” he murmured.

  “Biologicals are selling at a moderate rate today,” Sancho said brightly. “Market rate is four point one one per kilogram.”

  “Thanks, Sancho. Docking complete?”

  “Not yet. About ten more minutes, Skipper. Do you want me to arrange to sell the bios?”

  “Sure. I’m going down to Ceres as soon as we’re cabled. Will you be okay?”

  “Of course. I’ll run some checks, see what we might need repaired. You reported some damage to Rocinante’s high gain antenna.”

  Damn. He had forgotten about that. “No, I’ll fix that myself. Run your checks, let me know if there’s anything vital that’s hurt.”

  “Okay. We have seventeen point three seven one kilograms of biologicals available to sell. Should fetch us almost seventy-one and a half, minus transaction fee. I’ll take care of it for you.”

  “Good,” Collier said dismissively. The conversation was not pleasant. He knew the necessity of selling his waste, but he could not escape the feeling of desperation it entailed. He had seen the lowlifes in Ceres, usually ex-Belters, hanging around the bars, begging for food. If they could just scrounge two of their three meals a day, they could sell their waste for enough money for the third meal and use the waste from that to keep the cycle going. It was a life, but Collier shuddered every time he saw one of the shitbums shuffling around.

  Now, he was only a few steps away from that life himself.

  When Sancho announced that cabling was complete, Collier again donned his suit, forgoing the sealed capsule descender Ceres offered him. He couldn’t afford such a luxury. He’d go down in his suit — both because it was cheaper to rent a locker than use the descender and because he was an old hand: he didn’t entirely trust Ceres to hold its atmosphere. There were very few like him anymore. He knew he would look somewhat incongruous wandering around in his pressure suit in the shirtsleeve atmosphere of Ceres Underground, but he was used to that. Moreover, it had become almost expected of him. Crazy old Collier in his vacc suit.

  He left the ship and propelled himself down toward Ceres with a gentle tug on the cable. Dulcinea was tethered ten kilometers “above” Ceres, and with the planetoid’s mere 0.03 g pull, she could keep herself there with only minimal thruster activity for a long time. Still, he didn’t like leaving her alone. Sancho’s idiosyncrasies made for entertaining shipboard life, but always in the back of Collier’s mind was the possibility his computer companion would seriously malfunction one day.

  There was little he could afford to do about it now. He tried to get his mind off the issue by tuning in to Ceres’ broadcasting.

  There was the usual chatter about corporate billets for willing Belters — mostly rockherder jobs. Collier could not bring himself to call what the corporations did “mining”: standing off a respectable distance, blowing up an asteroid, then herding the various pieces into the vessel’s processor lacked elegance and skill. Corporate ventures could afford to operate on such large-scale terms. Given the chance, would he himself work the same way?

  No! He would never believe that. Just because necessity forced him to be precise and selective in his endeavors did not mean that he would abandon the techniques he had learned. If he had a mining ship armed with a thousand impact probes, canopies thousands of kilometers wide, and a processor capable of handling house-sized chunks of asteroid, he would still work the same way as he did now. One rock at a time, locating veins, taking out of the rock what was valuable.

  He grunted at himself. Easy to say in the hypothetical. He didn’t have that kind of arrangement, so he could well hold on to his noble poverty.

  He made the rest of the descent in a foul mood, only half-listening to Ceres’ broadcasts. Presently, he grounded and entered Ceres through one of the free airlocks that abutted the capsule descender assembly he had not used. His health pass was still good from the last time he had been examined, though he always thought the frequency of checkups was far too liberal to do any real good. There could be all manner of communicable diseases floating around the tunnels. He himself hadn’t updated his panimmunity course in years and was still operating on version four. As he lacked the funds to update his system, the point was a moot one. If he caught something, he caught something. There was not much he could do about it.

  Ceres’ microgravity had made him hungry. Even an old Belter like him wasn’t fully able to shake off the effects of the very slight pull on his stomach, so he made his way with the ease of familiarity to one of his favorite (and cheaper) haunts, the Trojan Point.

  The tunnels were crowded. Collier recognized the insignia of the Horizon Mining Consortium on many of the young-looking men and women who moved past him through the hollowed-out interior of Ceres. More than a few o
f them noted his vacc suit and he heard several comments directed his way about it. Brash, scrubbed-looking men with light beards and crisp caps grinned crookedly at him as they bounced past him, most on their way to some of the more cosmopolitan areas of Ceres’ interior. Collier suddenly felt very old as he threaded his way through the crowds.

  A shitbum sat outside the Trojan Point, somehow looking heavy in his ragged coveralls. He was mumbling to himself, not paying attention to those who walked over and around him. As Collier approached, he could smell the decay on the man — a pungent odor of putrefied barley and sour milk hit him like a wall even as the wretch looked up with rheumy eyes.

  “Outbound in fir’ days. Gotta get muh … muh … gotta get muh…” the man looked back down again, mumbling.

  Collier sighed. He dug inside a zippered pocket in his vacc suit and withdrew two violet iridium-plated coins. “Here,” he said, dropping the coins toward the man’s shallow plate. The coins fell slowly in the microgravity and hit the plate with a gentle ping. One of the coins skittered off the plate, but the shitbum took no notice.

  “Damn it, you could at least pick up your own money,” Collier said, bending down to retrieve the coin. As he did so, he felt a tug on the collar of his suit.

  “Gotta give … give … need to get me some … some … outbound in fir’ days. Cap’n says I gotta shot at mate. I jus’ need … need…” the man let go and resumed his cryptic monologue.

  Collier straightened, having gently placed the coin on the man’s plate. He stood there for a while, watching the shitbum. He had the telltale look of a corp miner who had either quit or who had been let go and who had let his anti-agathic nanobots be recalled. Now that he could no longer afford the lease on them, his body was collapsing rapidly.

  Collier swore for the fiftieth time he would never fall for that trap. How many corp miners were paying ten, fifteen, twenty percent of their already meager commissions to a nanobroker just to keep them young and healthy? It had been described to him years ago as the “ultimate win-win:” the leaseholder got the benefits of anti-aging nanobots which patrolled the body and kept it running smoothly, while the broker earned a steady salary on the lease — a lease that had the benefit of being extraordinarily long due to the very service it was offering.

  Collier had seen too many miners fall on hard times and fail to make lease payments, at which time the nanos were deactivated. The host body, which had become accustomed to the nanos, was no longer able on its own to maintain health, and the out-of-luck miner found himself falling apart rapidly.

  That horror was one Collier would not wish on his worst enemy.

  He lightly skipped over the shitbum’s legs and entered the Point. There were not many patrons inside, a fact in the Point’s favor. Collier made his way to the old-fashioned bar, a brass ring that circled the interior of the rather cramped space the Point occupied. As he slid onto a stool and attached the mooring straps, he idly wondered how the bar stayed in business. To the best of his recollection, there were never many people in it — how did its owner stay afloat?

  The thought brought him dangerously close to his own financial situation, which was something he did not at present care to examine too closely. He knew he should not be here: he should be looking up Barney and trying to secure another loan for an excursion. But at the moment he couldn’t dredge up enough willpower to see his creditor just now. He wasn’t in a groveling mood, and he knew he would need to do a lot of that in order to finance another outing. Just a few drinks would put him in the right frame of mind, he lied to himself.

  “Still nothing, Col?” the barman said, sliding over to Collier’s stool.

  “How do you know?” Collier said through a half-smile. “I could have struck it big.”

  The barman shook his head. “Nah,” he growled. “You wouldn’t be here if you had.”

  Collier grunted. “True.” He looked up from the railing. “How’ve you been, Phil?”

  Phil shrugged, his close-cropped salt and pepper hair glistening with sweat. “Not great, not too bad. Staying alive. You?”

  Collier shrugged back. Phil was not quite a friend — Collier didn’t return to the Point frequently enough to call him that — and therefore didn’t deserve to be burdened with Collier’s problems. “Staying alive myself. You still got Tank 8 stuff?”

  “Sure. It’s something like fourth generation now, but I don’t think you’ll be able to tell the difference. It’s pretty good,” Phil was already squeezing some amber liquid into a conical flask. “It’s, uh, one-eighty now.”

  Collier raised his eyebrows. “That much?” he dug into his arm pouch and produced two coins, tossed them toward Phil. They turned lazily in the air, and Phil had ample time to return the pouch to its place behind the bar and snatch the coins from the air.

  “Thanks.”

  Collier sipped carefully at the flask. Phil had been right — Tank 8 fourth generation was almost indistinguishable from the original stuff. He remembered years ago when the infamous Tank 8 distillation had first made its appearance. Rumor was that Ceres Authority hydroponics engineers had run the batch secretly and had been threatened with sleepship exile to Mars when the substance made its way somehow to the commercial market. It was an incredible success — so much so that the two engineers responsible quit their jobs and went into business for themselves. They paid off the Authority to avoid prosecution and now ran the Tank 8 distillery, guarding their recipe carefully. Every so often a chemist from the Jovian system would claim to have analyzed the mixture and threaten to produce the drink him- or herself unless paid off. So far, no one had successfully shaken Tank 8 from its perch as the primary distillery for Ceres.

  His thoughts were interrupted by the loud arrival of several orange-clad Horizon Consortium miners. They burst through the doorway floating parallel to the ground, skimming the barstools like swimmers. Collier scowled and turned back to Phil, who was trying unsuccessfully to hide his annoyance. There were no formal rules about such behavior, but it was generally considered gauche to take advantage of Ceres’ weak gravity. One was supposed to try to walk on the floor. That, Collier thought, was another tradition that was being ignored and replaced with hard practicality.

  The corp miners approached the bar, some oriented upside down in relation to it, others face-forward, using their hands to balance on the brass ring. “Set us up, barman,” one of the lightly-bearded young men said too loudly.

  “What with?” Phil replied laconically.

  “Whatever you’ve got growing,” the miner said carelessly. He proffered his right thumb. “Put it on this. I’m good for it.”

  Phil scanned the man’s thumbprint and grunted when he read the display on his scanner. “Hit a strike, did you?”

  This seemed to be impossibly funny to the miners, who by now had crowded around Collier, casually bumping into him from the side and from above. Collier sipped at his Tank 8, trying to ignore the disturbance.

  “You got that right. One month’s salary, hazard pay, and bonus — somethin’ like nine hundred each. Each!”

  “Good for you. Go take a niche. I’ll send the drinks to it.”

  Another of the miners from behind Collier called out, “Where are all the women? Ain’t you got a whoring license?” This, too, seemed to be a source of merriment to the miners.

  “No,” Phil said through clenched teeth. Collier glanced at him but made no comment. “I do have a Synthia if you want to use her.”

  The miner who had offered to pay for the drinks lost his smile instantly. “Fuck you,” he said. “Just send the goddamn drinks to our niche.” He stared at Phil for a moment, then pivoted on the brass ring, preparing to shove off toward one of the wall niches. In swiveling on his hands, one of his feet kicked Collier in the head.

  Collier swiped at the offending limb and sent the miner helicoptering through the bar. The youngster lunged at a light fi
xture above him, too late realizing how hot it would be. He snatched his hand away almost instantly, then thudded harmlessly against the far wall, which was not too distant in the cramped Trojan Point.

  Collier felt a hand on his shoulder. “You want to start something, grandpa?” came the voice from behind him.

  “Leave it,” Collier said calmly, without turning. “Take your drinks and your Synthias and go drink up your bonus money.”

  The hand squeezed his shoulder in what might have been antagonism: in the vacc suit, Collier could barely feel the pressure. “You’re already dressed for the outside, gramps. Why don’t you take a walk?”

  Collier still didn’t look behind him. He thought he had counted seven of the Horizon men — even if no others had joined them, the odds were heavily against him. Besides, he didn’t have the money to patch up the suit if it got damaged, nor could he afford any fine he might earn in a scuffle.

  “Sure thing, kid. Let me finish my drink and you can have the place to yourselves.” His tone was casual, but not unfriendly.

  He felt the hand withdraw and he sighed inwardly. He met Phil’s eye and the two shrugged in relief. From Phil’s gaze Collier could tell the Horizon men were moving away toward whatever niche they had selected.

  Collier tossed back the rest of his drink in one gulp. “Phil, thanks again for the drink. Can’t say I like your new customers, though.”

  “Their money is as good as yours, Col.”

  “And there’s more of it, huh?” Collier snorted, and Phil had the decency to look abashed. “See you later, Phil,” he said, and carefully walked out of the Trojan Point, making an extra effort to remain properly oriented.