A Handful of Stars (Star Svensdotter #2)

by Dana Stabenow

  There were a couple of “Amen”s and “Praise his name”s from the crowd. Brother Moses’ voice dropped. “But you all know what waits around the corner for the backsliders and soulless sinners among you! Yes! I’m speaking of eternal damnation here! Thank you, Jesus! Yes, thank you, Jesus, for giving us the choice, and for giving us the vision and the backbone to choose the path of godliness and righteousness and the way of our Lord!”

  Brother Moses raised his arms, laid on hands, and transformed a heckler into a true believer there and then. The poor saved soul, looking as if he were overdosing on redemption, staggered to his feet and emptied his pockets of handfuls of what looked to me like rocks into a very large collection basket carried between two white-clad members of the Brethren. The crowd sucked in a collective gasp of breath and Brother Moses beamed.

  I looked over at Caleb. “All I ask is that you keep him off the Hokuwa’a and away from me.”

  “Consider it done.”

  “A dollar a kay,” a voice said.

  “Huh?” We turned. Two men were standing nose to nose with their heads low and their fists clenched. One had no chin and the other only one eye.

  “The going rate for freight to 2Pallas is seventy-five cents!” One Eye protested.

  “Two dollars,” No Chin replied.

  One Eye hesitated.

  “Okay, a buck seventy-five,” No Chin said, “but that’s my last offer. I got expenses, maintenance on my scooter, and my time’s as valuable as yours any day.” Their fists unclenched and the deal was closed.

  “I knew we should have brought somebody from Boeing with us.”

  Caleb looked thoughtful. “Now there’s a man who’s more interested in finding someone who’s already staked a claim than he is in finding a claim himself.”

  “Those are the ones who make the bucks in the end.”

  “Cigars! Hand-rolled Havana cigars! One to a customer! Cigars!”

  I jerked around. “People smoke out here?”

  The cigar salesman—short, stocky, and energetic—spoke around one of his unlit products clamped in one comer of his mouth. “Sure, lady, whaddya think, we’re uncivilized or something?”

  “What’re you charging?” Caleb inquired.

  The salesman surveyed Caleb with small, sharp eyes, his head cocked to one side like a bird’s. “Well now, son, normally it’s the item’s weight in ore assayed to forty percent pure of total weight, or ten dollars in Alliance scrip, but for you—”

  “How do you tell how much it weighs?” Caleb asked.

  The salesman plucked a digital scale, seemingly from the air, and held it up.

  “How do you know what kind of ore you’re getting, or how pure it is?”

  Again from the air appeared a traveling assay kit, complete with chemicals, solvent, mortar and pestle, and test tubes.

  Caleb shook his head admiringly. “How’s business?”

  The salesman looked cautious. “Fair,” he said, looking around him with a furtive air. “Fair.” He espied a potential customer and was gone.

  “Means he’s already paid his way out and probably back, too,” Caleb told me.

  I was still in shock. “They smoke out here, Caleb! In an enclosed space habitat they actually light up a cigar! We could be incinerated at any moment!”

  He patted my shoulder absentmindedly. “Um-hmmm. Listen, I wanted you to see this. No, up higher. Yeah. There.”

  I followed his forefinger back to the pillar and one of the more official-looking notices. It was dated less than a month previously. It was fancied up with scalloped silver edges and the SOS starburst at the top and declared Piazzi City reopened for trading, assaying, and general hoorahing twenty-four hours a Ceres day, seven days a Ceres week, in language so benevolent and magnanimous it reeked of bonhomie and good fellowship. And patronage. And not one word of apology to the miners for locking them out and denying them medical aid.

  While we were reading, someone cleared his throat. We turned to see a short, pudgy man with black hair, narrow, tilted brown eyes, and a petulant mouth. “Kevin Takemotu.” He shoved out a square, rather dirty hand. “I’m the mayor. Suppose you’re Svensdotter.”

  I smiled at him. “How did you guess? Perhaps because we’ve been standing out here waiting for you for half an hour and more?”

  His color deepened and he dropped his hand. “Expected you in my office,” he said brusquely.

  “I know you did,” I said in my gentlest voice, and continued to smile.

  “Svensdotter?” someone said. “Are you Star Svensdotter?”

  “Why, yes,” I said, and we were surrounded. They deserted Brother Moses, the community bulletin board, their deal-making, a few of them even came out of the bars to crowd around and shake our hands, stammer out thanks, and ask where Charlie was. I was pleasant in return, even charming, if I say it who shouldn’t. Through it all I watched Takemotu out of the corner of one eye. He stood at the edge of the crowd with a blank expression. When at last we managed to break away, fielding invitations to obscure claims and camps all over the Belt, he led us into his office. He went behind his desk and sat down.

  I remained standing. Caleb took his cue from me. Takemotu looked up, and as I was already at least a dozen centimeters taller it was something of a strain for him to maintain eye contact. With an air that would pass—barely—for civility he stood and gestured to the chair against the wall. “Sorry there’s just the one chair.”

  I smiled at him again. “We can wait until you have another brought.”

  His expression didn’t change. We waited. Takemotu called next door and a young woman in SOS black and silver toted in a chair. I waited until she left, moved both chairs to where they directly faced across Takemotu’s desk, sat down, and smiled. “Traveling in vacuum is thirsty work.”

  Takemotu sent out again, this time for coffee. We exchanged civil if strained chatter until it arrived. He mumbled ungracious thanks for our help during their medical crisis. All three of us ignored the fact that Caleb had had to force his way into Piazzi City at gunpoint to secure shelter for the ailing. Takemotu seemed to notice for the first time that we overflowed the seats of our chairs and said, “Why didn’t you leave your suits at the hatch?”

  “No lockers were available.”

  He looked at us beneath heavy brows. “No need. It’s a shooting offense hereabouts to steal someone’s p-suit.” Still, he made no offer to help us out of or hang up ours. The coffee came, tepid and tasteless, but at least it was wet. Sean and I were sweltering, which always makes me irritable. It may have been the reason I was less than tactful in opening negotiations with a request to rent space for the Sisters of St. Anne’s boarding school, as well as a branch assaying office for the Terranova Expedition. Ceres had the strongest surface gravity in the Belt next to our as-yet-unassembled station. All that meant was that your food and your feet stayed down, providing they started out that way, but it was enough for the work we wanted to do.

  Takemotu resisted the suggestion. It wasn’t hard to see why; in his place I might have done the same. Terra-Luna Mines and Standard Oil and Solar had the prettiest little setup for price fixing it had yet been my privilege to run across. On the way down Strasser had told us all about it, in detail and embellished with curses freely bestowed on everyone involved. SOS and T-LM bought ore for a fixed, flat rate, agreed upon by the superintendents in advance and redeemable only in Ceres scrip. Virtually the only place to spend that scrip in the entire solar system was in the local bars—and in the Planetismal Trading Company, which I was willing to bet the Hokuwa’a had some familiar names among its founding officers. Belters in Ceres bars almost universally partied away their latest delivery, went into debt outfitting their next foray into the Belt, and never got out again. It was a good bet we weren’t going to be paying for any ores delivered to us in Ceres scrip, or in Alliance dollars, for that matter, and we threatened the cozy arrangement now in place. If I were Takemotu, I might have taken a blunt object to the oxyge
n valves on our pressure suits myself.

  I didn’t say any of this, though. I examined my fingernails carefully and said instead, “I couldn’t help noticing all the business one of the storefronts on the square is generating. Takemotu’s Sublight Services, wasn’t it, Caleb? Any relation to you, Mr. Takemotu?”

  “Son,” said the man behind the desk.

  “Yes, indeed,” I said dreamily, raising my eyes to the ceiling. “You’re providing quite a humanitarian service there. I noticed a lot of miners sending messages home to Terra or Luna. Some of them didn’t have to wait more than fifteen minutes for a return reply from their families. Collect.”

  He hesitated. “Our comm engineer has developed a wave-enhancing process that boosts transmission speed.”

  I lowered my eyes to his face and said gently, “I’d certainly be interested in meeting your communications engineer.” I gave him a bland smile. “Perhaps if he is willing to adapt his system, the expedition could donate a viewscreen to your service. I’m sure seeing the faces of their loved ones would be a real morale booster. With no time delay in transmission, it would be the next best thing to being there.”

  I knew, and now Takemotu knew that I knew, that unless someone had changed the laws of physics when I wasn’t looking it still took between twenty and forty minutes, depending on where Ceres was at the time, for a single transmission to travel between Terra and the Belt. Any replies those miners were receiving from their families in fifteen minutes had been written not by their families but by an industrious little elf in the back room of Takemotu’s son’s business.

  It hurt him to get the words out, but before we left Takemotu’s office the Terranova Expedition had the run of Ceres and lease-purchase options on some prime caverns adjacent to Piazzi City. I could tell from Caleb’s expression that he would have preferred more direct action, but SOS and T-LM had got there first, no matter how sloppy their operation was now. Upon inquiry, Takemotu confirmed what Charlie had told me: that Ceres did not have anything as basic as a medlab. The bottom line had apparently blinded the organizers of the Belt Rush to everything but net profits. In a transparent effort to improve those, Takemotu inquired after our proposed transportation methods.

  “Some robot processing ships to refine as they go,” I said vaguely. “Some rocks are pure enough to start with that we can ship them whole. It’s all pretty standard. I’m sure we don’t have anything to teach you.” I sat for a moment enjoying the expression on his face. If he disagreed with me he was committed to sharing information and he didn’t know if I had anything he wanted. If he agreed, he would never know. “But enough shop talk. We were reading the notices on the bulletin board in the square. A lot of them use someone named Maggie as a reference. The miner Strasser also mentioned her. Who is she?”

  Takemotu pressed his lips together. “She came out about three years ago, from Ellfive—Terranova it’s called now, you say. She runs the biggest local whorehouse.” There was a malicious flicker in his eyes. I wondered idly if he was going to draw an inference from the professional tendencies of Terranovan immigrants, but he didn’t dare go quite that far. “And I think she prospects for silicates on the side.”

  Silicates. The other shoe dropped. “Maggie Lu!” I exclaimed, my memory finally clicking in.

  “You know her?” Caleb said.

  “She used to work in the Frisbee,” I said. “She’s the one who had that little problem with your predecessor.”

  A light dawned, and he said, “She the one who spaced the third security supervisor?”

  Takemotu’s eyes widened. I frowned at Caleb. “We don’t know that.” He raised an eyebrow. “For sure. Anyway, she’s the one. Used to be a lab tech for Silicon Syndicates in the Frisbee. After the security supervisor disappeared, she left. She was a damn good chemist, too, especially in formulating explosives. They were angry when she shipped out. I didn’t know she came in this direction.”

  I asked Takemotu for directions. He did not rise to show us out.

  “I didn’t notice the Ma Bell operation,” Caleb said.

  I pointed out the storefront with the long, patient line leading from its doors. “It’s an idea as old as Jefferson Randolph Smith, and probably older,” I said cheerfully.

  “Shouldn’t we do something?”

  “Anybody dumb enough to believe they can talk to Terra sametime from here deserves to get ripped off,” I said. “I don’t know how some of these people survive in vacuum.”

  “Sometimes I think you are not a nice person,” he remarked.

  “Sometimes I think you are right.”

  We entered the bar Mother had gone into. Inside, the ceiling and the light were both very low. The noise of piano music badly played, shouted conversations, shattering glass, and falling bodies took up the slack. We hesitated in the doorway, waiting for our eyesight to adjust so we could see something. A squat woman shoved past us. She had dark hair that looked as if it had been hacked off by a blind samurai and a jumpsuit that had seen a better century. Neither had been washed in the last hundred million kilometers or so. Caleb looked at me and wrinkled his nose and I said, “Nature art disdaineth, her beauty is her own.”

  The crowd sensed an epic moment in the making and parted before her. She swaggered up to the bar. Her jumpsuit had pockets over each breast, upper arm, forearm, hip, thigh, and calf, all of them bulging with intriguing lumps and bumps. Coming to a stop center stage, she raised her right leg up and brought her heel down on the bar with a crash that jolted the glasses and brought silence to the room for at least two seconds. The seat of her well-worn jumpsuit promptly split open, to tremendous cheers and applause. Fortunately for our delicate sensibilities she was wearing long johns.

  Oblivious, the woman ripped open the pocket over her right calf and out spilled what looked to my untutored eye like the same bunch of rocks earlier donated to Brother Moses and his evangelical crusade. The barkeep, wiser in the ways of Belters, reached beneath the counter for what proved to be a compact assay kit. He scooped up a few pebbles and shook them in a test tube filled with a clear liquid. After a few tense, expectant moments, the liquid turned a deep, glowing red, the color of rubies or a good cabernet.

  A roof-raising shout went up. They crowded around to thump the woman on the back and shake her hand. She called for a round for the house, cause for another cheer. The barkeep put away the assay kit and produced a digital scale to weigh out the tab. Our drinks, when they came, weren’t much more than watered-down molasses with a faint flavor of rubbing alcohol. “Gak.”

  “You said it.”

  A loud crack made us both jump and Caleb grabbed for his side arm. The piano player slowly toppled from his stool. Into the startled silence the bartender swore loudly. “Goddammit, Lyin’ George, I told you the next piano player you shoot you replace! Now get on up there afore I take your own pistol to you!”

  Lyin’ George, a barrel-chested miner in filthy clothes and a sheepish expression, shuffled forward and sat down on the piano stool. A bad rendition of “Chopsticks” followed and Lyin’ George barely made it through the door in front of a virtual hail of glasses and pitchers.

  Caleb made as if to help the bartender haul away the piano player’s body. The bartender waved him away. “Thanks, mister, I can handle it.”

  Caleb stood there with his arms dangling at his sides, one of the few times I’d seen him at a loss. “What’re you going to do with the body?”

  “Recycler in back,” the bartender said matter-of-factly.

  I looked from him to my glass. I set it down very gently on the bar and took a few unobtrusive steps away.

  The squat miner knocked hers back in a single gulp, spied mine and finished it off, a third followed and she started on her fourth barely without pause. A grizzled Belter sat next to her with tears flowing unashamedly down his face and into his beard, fingering bits of ore still scattered across the bar. She noticed. She shifted her drink from one hand to the other and gave him a rough hug. “Don’t
worry about it, Mel boy,” we heard her say.

  “Don’t worry about it?” Mel boy said through his tears. “I sold you that claim for sixty thousand and now you stand to take a half million out of it and you tell me not to worry?” He sniffled.

  “More like a million five, in Alliance dollars,” she said cheerfully. Mel boy sobbed outright. She patted his shoulder with a rough hand. “Hell’s bells, Mel boy, I’ve took enough to see me through the next twenty winters, and in Belt time, too. I give you my coordinates and you work over the tailings, okay?”

  “I think I’m in love,” Caleb said.

  “Control yourself,” I replied, “there’s Mother.”

  Mother didn’t bother to look up from her interview with a man bigger than Tweedledum and Tweedledee, who had what looked like but could not possibly have been a bearskin draped around his shoulders. “I’m fine, dears. Go away, please,” she said to us, and continued to the giant, “Three wives? And how many children did you say you have? Dear me. And yours is the only family on—what was that designation again? 8482Sultan? Of course it is.”

  Maggie’s Place was reached by a good-sized tunnel about a half a kilometer from the entrance to Piazzi City. There was an almost discernible path worn between the meter-high posts cemented into the surface. Red lights glowed dimly from the tops of the posts and I grinned. We moved forward carefully; the surface gravity was like Luna’s in that if you got going too fast you could find sheer inertia pitching you forward on your helmet, with a cracked visor to brighten your day. “I wonder if we could launch ourselves off Ceres just by jumping,” I said.

  Caleb’s voice crackled over my headset. “Could we not find out today, please?”

  We passed between the lights and found the tunnel entrance. The light from Sol dimmed and then vanished as we descended deeper into what was clearly a man-made tunnel. After about twenty meters it opened suddenly into a small cave. There was one vacuum vehicle grounded just outside the lock, with the large yellow pinwheel warning of nuclear fuel present plastered to its stern; we gave it a wide berth. I wondered what a REM badge clipped to the owner would read.