“I’m feeling a whole hell of a lot better,” he replied emphatically. “The doc is some kind of miracle worker.” He pulled himself down the passageway behind me. “What’s going on downstairs these days? The last I heard, Brazil had finally joined the American Alliance.”
I gaped at him. “Just how long have you been in the Belt, Mr. Strasser?”
“Ten years and five months,” he said proudly. “I was an engineer’s mate on the Sagdeyev in 1996. I jumped ship to do some prospecting of my own.”
“And got lucky?”
He grinned and didn’t answer.
“And started selling your ore to Standard Oil and Solar.”
He stiffened and his eyes became wary. “Terra-Luna Mines, actually, but it doesn’t make much difference here.”
“Really? Why not?”
He looked from me to Caleb and back again. “Why ask me? You’re a relief train for them, aren’t you? They’re expecting you. You should know the setup.”
“Let’s get one thing straight, Mr. Strasser,” I said briskly. “This expedition is not affiliated with either SOS or T-LM in any way whatever. We’re a private enterprise, funded by the independent nation of Terranova. The most anybody expects out of us is a profit. Which we intend to give them.”
“The independent nation of what?”
“Terranova, the habitat circling Terra at Lagrange Point Five.”
“Ellfive,” he said. “I thought Ellfive was an American Alliance colony.”
“It was.”
“It’s independent now?”
“Since a year ago January. At any rate, Mr. Strasser, I repeat, Terranova is not going into business with SOS and T-LM. We’re going into competition with them.” I had to grin at his expression. “Now let’s go tell them so.”
· · ·
Wriggling into a pressure suit wasn’t as difficult as usual, mostly because Caleb had modified ours to accommodate one baby each suspended from a chest harness. Caleb and I both needed pressure suits custom made in our size; I was three centimeters taller, so mine had to be longer, but he outweighed me by twenty-three kays so his had to be bigger around. The twins snuggled into their harness and fell asleep almost at once. I had one of Whitney Burkette’s engineers working on a design for an expandable pressure suit for growing girls and boys; I thought as long as expedition expenses were being carried by Terranova we might as well experiment on the twins and come up with a working model for eventual sale to Belters, not to mention my own crew. One prompt by-product of pioneering is always baby pioneers.
Outside the lock, I saw for the first time the solarsled Daedalus had fashioned for the expedition. It looked just like the Wright Flyer I’d had as a child, until I tried floating down the slough on it. The biggest difference was the shiny sail four times its size that unfolded from the stern.
“Hey, wait up! Can I hitch a ride with you guys?”
Bob Shackleton was making a game effort to pull his way across to the sled. He missed a handhold, grabbed wildly for purchase, and knocked himself loose of the Hokuwa’a’s hull. The reaction from the force of the blow caused him to begin to drift, and he began a frantic and futile wiggle, his pressure-suited arms and legs looking like fat white worms against the blackness of vacuum. “Hey! Somebody help! Heee-eelp!”
Strasser made a disgusted sound over the commlink. “All abooo-aaard!” Caleb said. We straddled the bench that ran the axis of the thing and strapped ourselves down. Caleb fiddled with the controls and we detached so gently from the Hokuwa’a’s hull that it was a surprise when I realized Shackleton was growing in size. Caleb lay the sled next to the drifting figure in one smooth maneuver. “You been spending some time in the cockpit with Crip?” I asked him.
“Got the boathook?” I passed it forward. “Shackleton? Quit thrashing around like that. Grab the hook.”
Shackleton made a pass at the hook and missed. The wide swipe his arm made at the hook caused him to begin to revolve and he drifted out of our reach.
“Oh, for crissake,” Strasser growled. “Gimme that damn thing. I’ll reel in that yo-yo; you mind the store. Get behind him.” He unbuckled, stood up in the stirrups, and took the boathook from Caleb. Caleb trimmed our solar sail and in a few moments we caught up again with Shackleton. Strasser made one pass with the boathook and snagged the emergency latch on the back of the cartographer’s p-suit. “Relax now, dammit! We got you.” He walked his hands up the boathook and, handling the other man the way a child would manipulate a doll, plucked him off the hook and jammed him down on the solarsled’s bench. “Stick your feet in there. Not there, there! Jesus!”
“Whew.” The cartographer sounded exhausted. “Thanks.”
Strasser growled something unprintable.
“Your first EVA?” I inquired politely, restowing the boat-hook.
“First one outside of training. I thought I was a goner.”
Strasser growled something else, equally unprintable, and Caleb said diplomatically, “Now we’re all aboard, off we go, into the wild black yonder.” He punched in the coordinates for Piazzi City and when I looked around five minutes later I was amazed to see the Hokuwa’a a thousand meters astern.
“This sucker actually moves,” I said over the communit. “How?”
“Beats the hell out of me,” Caleb said cheerfully. “Heckel said something about the solar cells creating an artificial solar wind that pushes the sail that pushes the sled that gets us where we want to go, but I’ve only got his word for it, and it all sounds pretty unlikely if you ask me.”
“Great. What happens if we break down?”
“We yell for help. Loudly.”
Sean hiccuped and burped against my breast and I craned the back of my neck up against my helmet to look down at him. Everybody cleaned out their own pressure suits, and I devoutly hoped the twins were not going to make it more of a chore than usual.
Even from 1.8 AUs out the reflection of the sun’s rays was blinding and I was glad when the bulk of Ceres came between us and Sol. I knew intellectually that the rock wasn’t a thousand klicks in diameter but at this distance it seemed nearly the size of Luna, only a lot less welcoming. The surface looked bare and skeletal. Escaping vapors from thousands of lock ventings and leaks of pressurized construction gases hung over the surface in a kind of shroud.
“It gets worse,” Caleb said over our helmet communits.
“I don’t see how it can,” I replied dismally.
We docked in an unpressurized hangar hacked out of the side of a cliff. The interior of the hangar was festooned with other transports moored to every available surface in, to my disapproving eye, very sloppy fashion with no discernible organization. Nor was there any attempt made to standardize moorings; ships were haphazardly attached to various cables, tied down to eyebolts driven into the rock, with runners slipped beneath U-bolts. I saw one weighed down with a rock. More arrived every minute. All their drivers demonstrated a fine disregard for courtesy of the road. I counted two midairs in the few moments we stood watching, both of which involved no great speed and therefore resulted in little more than a string of curses over Channel 9, 1Ceres’s standby.
I touched my helmet to Caleb’s and said, “I knew we should have brought somebody from Boeing with us. Tell me that isn’t an old Sammamish Scooter over there. I haven’t seen one of those since I worked on Luna.”
“I wouldn’t know, it looks more like a garbage disposal to me.”
Whatever it was, the one thing it had in common with all of the various transports was an advanced case of acute disrepair. I shook my head and then remembered Caleb couldn’t see me. I touched helmets with him again and said, “Where’s the lock?”
“They don’t make it any too easy to find, do they? This way.”
Hiding behind an outcropping, it looked like any personnel airlock I’d ever seen, except that it was unattended on either side, letting dual lockseals do guard duty instead. There didn’t seem to be any vacant lockers available for pre
ssure suits.
I popped by helmet and looked at my chronometer. “Less than an hour, lock to lock. Not bad.” I looked around. “Where is everybody?”
“You were expecting maybe a brass band?”
“May we get out of our p-suits, dear?” Mother inquired.
He spread his hands. “Where we gonna leave them, Natasha? Come on. Through here.”
I latched my helmet and gauntlets to my belt and stumped grimly forward toward the lights and noise.
Piazzi City occupied a large cavern below Ceres’s surface. It had started out small, maybe the size of the hangarlock on Terranova, and it had been burrowed out until it was about the original size of Copernicus Base proper. The interior surface was filled in with a pressure-sealed silicate fixative, a dull, grimy gray in color. No sunlight whatever had been introduced into the interior and the result was pretty gloomy. What light there was, was provided by a haphazard array of halogen lamps hooked together with a tangle of cables—“You’d think they’d have taped them over at least,” I muttered, tripping for the third time. It’s not a good idea to fall down in a p-suit, even in minimal gravity. Electric generation did not seem to be any too steady or reliable as the lamps on the walls and the street poles flickered, becoming brighter or dimmer with no warning and for no obvious reason. A few lines of streetlights disappeared down several unfinished, hacked-out tunnels running off the main room.
The place was packed like a salmon stream in June and it smelled worse than the inside of the Hokuwa’a. Everyone seemed to be talking at once, loudly. I counted three shell games from where I stood, each deep in its own intent group.
“Feels like we’re touring an ant farm from the inside, doesn’t it,” Caleb said, wiping his forehead and showing me his wet palm.
“It’s too warm in here,” I said. “Guaranteed low employee productivity.”
“It’s dry, too,” Caleb said. “They’re going to have some problems with dehydration if they don’t watch it.”
Mother sniffed the air appreciatively, her brown eyes bright with interest, her tail practically wagging with enthusiasm.
We came into the public square without challenge. People came and went around us, many of them from the Planetismal Trading Company, a building dug out of one wall, the outside of which was plastered with hand-lettered signs featuring the word SALE writ large in red letters. A typical one read “Deluxe Eldorado Prospector’s Outfit, Supplies for One T-Year, Gourmet QuikFreeze Meals, Portable CampPak Available in Large Sizes. No Money Down, Credit Extended on Your Good Name, We Will Not Be Undersold!”
Not likely, as the Planetismal Trading Company was the only general merchandising store I had seen so far. To its right stood a boardinghouse offering beds with guaranteed clean sheets in six-hour shifts for fifty Alliance dollars or equivalent confirmed-assay ore per shift, a five-minute hot shower for twenty-five Alliance dollars or equivalent confirmed-assay ore, and the services of a pressure-suit mechanic for one thousand Alliance dollars or equivalent in confirmed-assay ore per half hour, advertised as a bargain-basement rate, cheapest in the Belt.
“A thousand bucks per half hour?” I exclaimed.
Caleb shrugged. “Supply and demand.”
I struggled to match his laconic drawl. “Well, if we strike out moiling for gold, we can go into the service industry, I guess.”
“And probably make more money at it, at that.”
Two other buildings, looking as if they had come from the same Lego set as the store, squatted side by side to the left. One bore the gold pan and pick of Terra-Luna Mines, the other the black-and-silver starburst of Standard Oil and Solar. The rest of the structures appeared to be saloons, out of which erupted much noise and the occasional body. Mother, already dictating to Mead over her communit, promptly disappeared into the nearest one. Strasser and Shackleton had vanished at the airlock and Caleb and I were alone.
“Doesn’t look much like either Sodom or Gomorrah to me.”
“Yeah,” Caleb said, “it looks more like Tombstone. But then Time can’t be right all the time, I guess.” He looked around, dangling his pressure suit helmet from one hand. “There.” It was a tiny one-room shack made of preformed silicon flats, set a little back from the square, with “City Hall” painted over the door in barely legible script. “Want to go on in?”
“No.” Through the door of the office we could clearly see the bulk of someone sitting behind a desk, but I was already irritated enough at not being met at the airlock. Not that I expected the brass band, but common courtesy at the very least called for the provision of a guide. The slight was real; I could feel eyes on my back watching to see how I would take it.
Caleb looked at me warily. “Are you going to get mad?”
“Mad? Me?”
He looked even more wary. “I didn’t like the idea of coming over here without a security detachment in the first place,” he said in an undertone. “You behave, Star, or we’ll both be sorry I didn’t.”
“Trust me,” I said, and he groaned. “What’s that?”
He followed my gaze and grinned. “Something you’ll like. Take a look.”
In the center of the square stood a four-sided post, a meter to a side and two meters tall. Someone had made a pitiful attempt to grow a few pitiful blades of grass around its base and the result was what you might expect—pitiful. But so far as I could see, they were the only growing things in sight. Roger would have a stroke.
We shouldered through the crowd for a closer look. The pillar turned out to be a combination newspaper, lost-and-found, community bulletin board, solarsled dealership, employment agency, and personals column. Faxsheets of the latest news beneath the UAPI byline were tacked up, the more recent ones over the old news, all much thumbed. Most of the notices were straightforward and businesslike, some were unintentionally hilarious, others poignant.
Will pay, trade, kill for book/filmtapes.
4C format ONLY, please!!!
See Bob in T-LM Assay on 1Ceres, around
corner to your right.
Silicon assaying and processing,
will do some fabrication,
experienced silicon technician,
reasonable rates.
Maggie on 1Ceres.
White lightning, Kentucky moonshine,
the genuine article.
Brewed of the finest natural ingredients
available in the Belt.
Reserve your liter now.
Dope, crack, snort also available
and certified chemically pure
by accredited lab techs.
Robber Joe’s Fun House on 4Vesta.
Claim jumped, then wife. Dragging up on
next freighter going anywhere. Best offer
for complete outfit, including 2002 Dodge 512
rock buggy and trailer, homemade solar conversion.
It runs. Seller experienced longshoreman,
short-order cook, janitor, can drive anything,
looking for job starting yesterday. Will
stand by on Channel 9 from 0700 to 0800 each
morning 1Ceres time, or leave msg. with Maggie
for Harry on 19Fortuna.
BOOKS, TAPES—buy, trade, sell, loan,
any subject, any condition, any model tapes,
any price. Leave msg. with Maggie on 1Ceres
for Bill Shakespeare on 3839Caliban.
“Who’s this Maggie person?” I asked.
“Runs a whorehouse outside the city. So I’m told.”
“That’s not all she does.”
“She does seem kind of ubiquitous, doesn’t she? Look at this one.”
URGENT! Calico cat in heat, looking for mate.
Will reimburse for fuel getting here and split
sale price on kittens seventy-thirty. Latest
going rate for weaned kitten $5,000 Alliance—
this means fifteen hundred per kitten for you!
Standing by on Channel 9 twenty-four hours
or leave msg. with Maggie.
“We should have brought Hotpants along for the ride.”
“I guess.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. I’ve got a feeling about this Maggie—”
“Here’s her name again.”
Buggy/Scooter/Sled tune-ups, aseptic abortions
and other first aid by qualified medtech,
fresh herbs, munitions, Tarot readings, XXX showtapes.
Mom-and-Pop’s on 6789Cribbage.
Call ahead on Channel 3 or talk to Maggie.
Those arriving without prior appointment will be shot on sight as trespassers.
“First chance we get, we introduce ourselves to Mom and Pop.”
“Deal.”
Sunday Services, 7 pm weekly in lobby of
the Terra-Luna Mines building on 1Ceres.
Brother Moses of the
Divine Brethren of the Promised Land, Ltd.,
conducting. Wedding, baptisms, funerals
by appointment only. Versed in all
denominations, services recognized by
official churches everywhere, Catholic,
Lutheran, Jewish, Moslem, Buddhist.
Rate schedule available upon request.
Contact the Brethren on 55Pandora, Channel 9.
“Mother Mathilda’s got competition.”
Caleb nudged me. “That’s him.”
“Him?” I said. “Him who?”
“Brother Moses.”
“He’s here? Where?”
Brother Moses was indeed present in person, conducting what we later learned were regular Wednesday afternoon sweeps for converts. He was a tall, cadaverous figure in a jumpsuit so white it hurt the eyes. He had hair to match that was longer than mine, a glad hand and a gladder smile. He stood in one corner of the town square pitching his deep voice to reach the very fringes of the crowd. “I can promise you eternal salvation if ye but trust in Him who created us all! I can promise you that! Praise the Lord!”
A Handful of Stars (Star Svensdotter #2) Page 7