Devil to the Belt (v1.1)

by C. J. Cherryh

  He truly wanted to believe the wreck might be a closed case, but experience told him no desk-sitter ever bothered to track and erase what some other desk-sitter had sent into files: that medical report and everything else in the files was going to surface time after time for the rest of his life, he was sure of it, a file uncatchable in its course through the company computers… probably every time he applied for a sector assignment. Damned sure if he tried to certify into C3.

  And BM was putting him back to work, officially—still with no real resolution of what had happened, no answer, no justice. It was a cover-up Cory’s mother evidently couldn’t breach. He was sure she had to know by now—at least the official version. So what was he supposed to do that a mother on the MarsCorp board couldn’t?

  He thought about writing Alyce Salazar directly, send her his own account of what had happened, never mind Ms. Salazar hated him with a passion. But mail went through a lot of hands before it went out of R2. If anyone’s mail found its way to special attention—his was a hundred percent certainty: he’d gotten that canny by now.

  So it looked as if they were really going, and all he had to do was hold on to his nerves and stay out of trouble til launch, hope if the permit was a mistake nobody caught it in time—and try, meanwhile, to believe that Ben had really meant it just now when Ben had slapped him on the shoulder and said, in his subtle way, that in spite of him being an ass, he might actually work out.

  Bird pocketed his datacard and remarked that since BM had a hurry-up on, they had a last few things to do in the shop, and they’d better get at it…

  Sal said, “All right, all right, Bird. God, we put in fifty hours this week!” and Bird said: “Yeah, plenty all right if the shower doesn’t work. Won’t get any sympathy from me.”

  So it was a last-minute rush of things that had waited—no really vital jobs: they hadn’t applied for their run without the big items latched down and Way Out past the mandatory ECSAA inspection: but Bird wanted some cleanup and the shop offered a refuge where a body could sit, put screws in holes and test circuits without a thought in his head except the job he was on, and he personally had no objections—anything that kept his hands busy.

  Ben came and went, handling the legwork. Meg and Sal worked in the shop, raked over old lovers, the quality of hair dye, a vid they couldn’t agree on—chatter, just chatter… human noise. They looked strained. Tired, yes. But he kept having the feeling it was more than that.

  He didn’t think. He didn’t want to think.

  Day before launch. He was holding on. Sal was frazzled. Bird grew short. “Launch nerves,” Meg said under her breath. “Bird, dammit, just take it easy, we got it covered.”

  “It’s a far walk after supplies,” Bird snapped, and went off for another all-day stint on dockside, despite them arguing with him that old bones had as well get all the heavy time they could.

  “Can’t argue with him,” Meg sighed. And Bird sent Ben down with a basket full of odd bits of Trinidad‘s works he wanted serviced—36 hours before launch.

  “Why in hell,” Sal moaned, “didn’t he see about this eight weeks ago?”

  Ben just shook his head. “Does it every damned time. Everything’s a will-pass until he gets to packing the supplies in. Then this latch has got too much give and he’s remembered we had a condensation problem last run.”

  It kept their hands busy. It took their minds off the passing hours. Dekker understood Bird’s state of nerves.

  Eventually, please God, they’d board and start launch routines and, Dekker thought, he might make it off R2 still sane.

  “What kind of vids do you like?” Meg asked him, while he was testing a pressure switch.

  He shrugged, figuring Meg meant they were going to rent a few for the trip, for all the spare time they weren’t going to have, and he’d used to like the action stuff, but now that he thought about it, that wasn’t what he wanted right now. Cory had made fun of his taste for his bloody-awfuls, that was what she had called them—but now he feared he’d never see an explosion in a vid without feeling that awful slam in the gut. He filed that away, in the odd total of silly, simple things he’d been robbed of in the wreck. Maybe he could handle it someday. But not now. Right now he just wanted to keep all that at arm’s length. One step at a time, Mr. Dekker…

  “Dek?”

  “Huh?”

  “You want to go out tonight?”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said sharply—he didn’t mean to be rude, but it was the truth—he didn’t want to go watch things blow up: he didn’t want any dark theater, God knew he didn’t want any suspense—didn’t know what he did want to do 24 hours before launch—but that wasn’t it.

  “Oh, come on,” Sal said. “What about dinner? We can talk Bird into spending money. Something trez genteel. Candles and tablecloths. Give ourselves plenty of time to get through, get in and clean up. What d’ you say? Dinner at 1900, cruise the bars, say our au’voirs along the ‘deck.”

  “Yeah,” he said, finally. Being with people tonight was probably a good idea. Meg and Sal were trying to include him in their festivities, trying to draw him into their conversation, but now that he d committed himself he felt a kind of panic—as if by joining in he’d somehow stepped over an edge he’d really rather reconsider. He had no friends but these people, no future but what they’d arranged for him. They made their jokes, they talked to him, he answered what they asked, one side and the other of a trip for soft drinks and a package of chips.

  But this Attitude kept coming over him—a blow-it-away kind of Attitude, resentment—outright rage at their trying to get at him: they had everything he owned and now they wanted his consent to it; now they wanted the resentment that had kept him alive—stupid way to feel, he thought, but their friendliness and Ben’s made him mad, and he tried to figure out why, and not to be, as Ben called him, an ass.

  But, dammit, everything hit nerves. Even their before-launch dinner. He’d done the same with Cory—Cory didn’t make off-color jokes about the men she’d slept with—

  Sore spot there. His mind was full of pits he didn’t want to look into, this afternoon, pre-launch jitters triggering memories, God only knew what was going on with him—and that the tumbling, out of control feeling he’d had after the wreck was still there, making it impossible to take his life for granted—all the pieces were out of order. Everything felt new, dislocated.

  Rab said do. Act. Move. Be.

  But move where? Be what? Meg and Sal had their heads together, talking in low voices, protecting some secrecy they wouldn’t admit him to—but they wanted him to take their lead. They’d dressed him like some damn doll—not a joke at his expense: far too serious for that. They had designs for him he didn’t think had as much to do with sex as with way-of-life… making bitter jokes, flaunting their difference, trying to drag him away from Cory’s way of doing things and back into all the blind outrage he’d used to feel—wake up, kid, join us, kid, be like us, be with, think like us and survive.

  Maybe it was friendship. Be grateful, he told himself. Go out with them, mind your manners—today’s enough. There’s worse. There’s hell and away worse to have fallen in with.

  There’s the people that run this place.

  He was back on the ship for a moment. And back again sitting in the shop with a small valve switching assembly in his hand and no memory of whether he’d just started or just finished with it.

  Panic shot a chill through him. He sat there staring at the piece and trying to figure out what he was doing with it.

  “That’s the last.” Sal snatched it from his hand and tossed it into the basket. “God, Dek, come on, give it up. We’re done!”

  It wasn’t anything he couldn’t fix with a screwdriver if it stuck later. Nothing vital. Potential malfunction wasn’t what scared him. It was the gap he’d slid into.

  Damn nervous wreck, Sal thought, wiping sweat, kicking the null-g cart’s wheels out. This one’s wheels stuck. The rental office sw
ore they didn’t have another.—Get us all out of here—

  Bang. You lifted one end and rammed it at the floor. Two times freed it up.

  “Aboujib,” someone said.

  She turned about with an intake of breath.

  Mitch’s friend.

  “You’re still launching on the 18th?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Don’t depend on it.”

  “Shit!—What’s going on?”

  “That’s the word. Keep a line on your problem. A tight line.”

  “Why?”

  The Shepherd said, “You got that thing I gave you?”

  “Not on me, I don’t go to the core with it…”

  “I want you to bring it to the club tomorrow. No advance word to Kady, no word to anybody. Just bring that, your friend, and your problem.”

  “We got a—”—launch tomorrow, she started to object. The universe turned around that point. Everything in their minds did, with manic concentration.

  “Tomorrow,” the Shepherd repeated.

  She felt her heart sink. She thought, My God, Bird and Ben have everything they own tied up in this run…

  They can’t not launch tomorrow… Meg and me be damned, they can’t not go tomorrow. “You don’t back out this close, MamBitch won’t change a launch date!”

  “That’s not in our control,” the Shepherd said, and walked away.

  “Why don’t you come with me?” Meg asked him. “Sal’s going to run that last batch up to Bird, and if he tries to give us another lot, we’ll say sorry, the shop’s closed. You and I can get cleared out of here and turn the keys in. I’m going to pick up a few things at Ward’s, maybe stop for coffee…”

  He shook his head. “I’ve got gym time to do.” It was the only escape he could think of. He couldn’t take Meg’s company right now, couldn’t risk timing out with her if that was what he had just done. He left: he didn’t even realize how stupid the excuse had been until in the lift down he remembered he’d left Meg with a heavy tool case to carry to the rental office.

  By then it was too late to go back and catch her, and he had no idea what to do with himself but go to the gym. Nothing seemed solid of a sudden, nothing of his life was in order—time worried him—he was freefalling, too scared to admit just now he’d been on autopilot and didn’t know it—scared that a hatch shutting behind him was going to start him unraveling—

  The blip was still moving. No question.

  Cory argued with him: “It’s the biggest chance we’ll ever have—”

  A piece of memory clicked in, quietly, just there of a sudden with that sense of frightened foolishness—he’d realized the danger in the ‘driver—and he’d folded the argument, folded the way he’d folded with Sal up there. He’d had the ship completely in his hands—but he’d been afraid to be afraid, he’d let Cory’s college education convince him she was right when his gut was telling him a silent, advancing ‘driver the company charts didn’t show wasn’t playing by the rules she understood—

  Cory, who knew MarsCorp inside and out, had said, We’re going to call their bluff; they’re in contact with BM every damn minute… and he’d frozen. He couldn’t say, Cory, this scares hell out of me. He’d been too scared of Cory’s education to say, Cory, this is just damned stupid—

  She’d say, now, if she were here to say it, Well, I really blew that one, didn’t I?

  And he wouldn’t. He couldn’t—couldn’t talk, couldn’t get his words straight when he thought he could sound like a fool—

  So he’d protected his damned soft spot. And Cory had died.

  He bumped into someone. He mumbled an apology and kept walking, playing that moment over and over in his mind.

  They’d been invulnerable—then. Nothing was going to turn out wrong. She’d made a bad choice, but rocks were her department, the ship was his. The company was crooked as hell, but he could call their bluff. He could make that ship listen—

  He’d backed a wrong call. He’d known it and he’d done it. That was what he had to look at and look at til it burned its way into his brain.

  CHAPTER 16

  THEY waited and they waited in the bar—they’d talked Bird, practically manhandled Bird, out of Trinidad and into the idea of a fancy dinner, best clothes, rezzes at the Europa, a bit of bar-hopping afterward—and now Dekker went missing. Ben was mad, Sal was a nervous wreck—Dekker had been acting strange all day, Meg reminded herself glumly, and spent her own money calling the gym he reasonably should have gone to hours ago.

  Of course he hadn’t.

  Damn.

  “So, look,” Bird said when she reported that fact back to the table, “we just leave word with Mike. Mike can give him directions when he shows up. He’ll find us.”

  “Leave that guy loose on the ‘deck?” Ben groaned—not the way she’d have put it, but it was another worrisome side of it. “Let’s just give it a little while.”

  “He’s a big boy,” Bird said. “He’s found his way around the Belt, for God’s sake, he’s not lost. He may not have understood it was a date.”

  “He understood,” Meg said, and was about to say she agreed with Ben, they should give it another little while, when Mike at the bar signaled they had a call.

  She stood up to take it, but Mike indicated Sal specifically, to her acute disappointment. She slid back into her chair while Sal went to take the call—probably some friend come onto R2, she decided: Dekker might call her if he was in a funk and he might call Bird, but Dekker asking for Sal was hardly likely.

  “Probably in some bar,” Ben said. “Probably drinking his way to tomorrow. Or zee’d on pills.—Dammit, Meg, think of another place.”

  “Pacific,” Bird said.

  “So let’s call there,” Ben said, and something else, but Meg lost it. Sal hung up on her call and flashed her a come-here signal, looking seriously worried.

  “Excuse me,” she murmured and got up and met Sal by the phone. Sal said, head ducked and voice low, “That was Mitch. He said meet him out front. Now.”

  She felt a little chill. And puzzlement. “Seriously nonreg. He say anything?”

  “No. Just that.” Sal looked truly scared. Terrified. “Cover me with Bird. I don’t know how long this may take.”

  “God,” Meg said. “Yeah. All right.”

  Sal went for the door and she went back to the table.

  “What was that?” Ben asked.

  “Friend with a problem.”

  “Dekker?”

  “No.”

  “God, this isn’t getting any more organized. We’re all over the damn ‘deck!”

  “I think we ought to make that call to The Pacific.”

  “Do that,” Bird said, so she pulled out her card and went for the phone again.

  “No,” The Pacific said. “… Yeah, I know him. No, he hasn’t been here.”

  Another try gone nowhere. Sal was off. Dekker was missing. Bird was as apt to go off next. Ben was right. She said to Mike, “Another round.”

  “Sal coming back?”

  “I wish I knew,” she said. “Skosh nervous day, Mike.”

  Mike gave a little shake of his head. “A lot wouldn’t have the patience.”

  “Yeah,” she said and went back to the table.

  “Well?” Ben asked.

  She shook her head.

  “God, I don’t know why we’re putting up with this!”

  “The lad’s probably sorting out a few things,” Bird said. “I’m not real surprised.”

  “Yeah, sorting out a few things… For all we know, the cops have got him.”

  “Look,” Bird said. “Let’s just put in a few phone calls. There’s eight more gyms.”

  Sal came back, not looking like good news. She came up to the table and leaned against it with her hands. “Trouble,” she said, very low. “They just found Dek’s partner.”

  “Alive?” Meg asked.

  “Neg. Shepherd found her drifting. At the Well.”

  Some things y
ou heard and they just didn’t make any kind of sense. A fool kid got killed in the far interface of the refinery zones, back sometime in March, and turned up a couple of hundred million k away in September, in a Shepherd recovery path?

  “No way,” Ben said.

  “We have any word yet,” Sal asked, “where Dek is?”

  “No,” Meg said, and leaned back as Mike brought the drinks.

  “On my tab,” Bird said to Mike, all business, and Mike cleverly made himself absent.

  Ben hissed, “What do you mean, drifting at the Well? What in hell’s going on?”

  Sal shook her head, glitter and rattle of metal-tipped braids. “They don’t know. Word’s out on their net—code-com, to every Shepherd out there… you didn’t hear that. They don’t know if MamBitch can crack it, she gets mad as hell when they do it—but we got a seriously deviated ‘driver out there.”

  “Fired a body at the Well?” Ben said. “God, somebody’s stark crazy!”

  “Worry what else they might do,” Meg said. “If a general message is going out on the Shepherd net, that ‘driver’s going to hear the transmission, going to know the time and the PO, going to have an idea what that message was, even if they can’t crack the code.”

  “They’re not going to tell MamBitch anything,” Sal said. Her voice was shaking. “But the question is how long the Shepherds can hold this quiet. This is a seriously bad time for Dek to go missing.”

  “If the cops haven’t got him,” Bird said. “Question is—does Mama know what’s in that transmission? They’ll pick him up.”

  Sal pulled two datacards from her pocket and laid them on the table. “That’s from a couple of friends. We’re them. They’re real high Access. The word is Find Dek. Get him to the club next to Scorpio’s, and don’t use our cards or his.”

  Ben whispered, “Dammit, we got a launch tomorrow!”

  “He may not make it.”

  We may not make it, Meg thought. The cards lay there—seriously illegal, what the Shepherds were doing and what they were risking. One kid was dead. Good chance there could be another.