Devil to the Belt

  “I’m damned good!”

  “Then listen to me: it’s the same as filling in the forms back there. Don’t give real answers to deskpilots. The whole key to forms or tests is never give an answer smarter than the person who checks the questions.”

  He took in a breath, expecting Ben to have insulted him. He couldn’t figure how Ben had.

  “We can get you through that shit,” Ben said, with a flip of his hand. “But first let’s see if you’re worth anything in ops.”

  He didn’t want to owe Ben anything. He told himself that Ben had probably figured out a new way to screw him—and if there was any hope at all, it was that Ben’s way of screwing him happened to involve his getting his license restored.

  Slave labor for him and Bird, maybe: that was all right, from where he was. Do anything they wanted—as long as it got him that permit and got him licensed again.

  He thought about that til the Trans came to their stop, at the lift. They got out together, punched up for the core, and waited for the car. He tucked his hands into his pockets and tried not to think ahead, not to tests, not to the docks, not to what the ship was going to look like—

  Everything was going to be all right, he wasn’t going to panic, wasn’t going to heave up his guts when he went null-g, it was just going to be damned cold up there, bitter cold: that was why he was shivering when he walked into the lift.

  He propped himself against the wall and took a deathgrip on the safety bar while the lift made the core transit: increased g at the first and none at the end—enough to do for a stomach in itself. The car stopped, let them out in the mast Security Zone, and they shoved their cards in the slot.

  The null-g here at least didn’t bother him—it only felt—

  —felt as if he was back in a familiar place, and wasn’t, as if he were timetripping again: in his head he knew R2’s mast wasn’t anywhere he’d been before when he was cognizant—he kept Bird in sight to keep himself anchored, hooked on and rode the hand-line between Ben and Bird—

  The booming racket, the activity, the smell of oil and cold and machinery—all of it could have been Rl. Here and now, he kept telling himself, and by the time he reached Way Out’s berth in Refit, his stomach might have been upset, but he could reason his way toward a kind of numbness.

  Even entering the ship wasn’t the jolt he’d thought it would be, following Bird and Ben through the lock. Bird turned the lights up and the ship seemed—ordinary again. It smelled of disinfectant, fresh glue, and oil. He touched Way Out’s panels with cold-numbed fingers and looked around him. Everything around him was the way it had been, as if the wreck had never happened. Same name as she’d had—Cory’s joke, actually—but they’d given her a new number, and she wasn’t his and Cory’s anymore.

  Most of all there was no sense of Cory’s existence here. That had been wiped out too. And maybe it was that presence he’d been most afraid to deal with.

  “We’ve got the tanks replaced,” Bird was saying, reorienting toward him. “We’re stalled on one lousy part we’re trying to organize on the exchange market—but we’re closing in on finished.”

  “How does she look?” Ben asked, point blank, and he could say, calmly, without his teeth chattering, “You’ve done a lot of work with her.”

  “Want to get the feel of the boards?” Bird asked. “Main system’s hooked in. Want to run a check?”

  He knew then what they were up to, bringing him up here: they were running their own ops test. They wanted to see on their own whether he was missing pieces of his mind—just a simple thing, bring the boards up. Run a check…

  He took a breath of the bitter cold, he hauled down and fastened in at the main boards, uncapped switches and pushed buttons—didn’t have to think about them, didn’t think about them, until he realized he’d just keyed beyond the simple board circuit tests: memory flooded up, fingers had keyed the standard config-queries and he could breathe again, didn’t damn well know where he was going, didn’t know exactly at what point he was going to make himself terminate or whether they wanted him to run real checkouts that fed data onto the log—

  —Number 4 trim jet wasn’t firing—he caught the board anomaly in the numbers streaming past, the rapid scroll of portside drift; he compensated with a quick fade on 2 and kicked the bow brakes to fend off before the yaw could carry him further—not by the book—he knew it a heartbeat after he’d done it.

  The screen went black. The examiner said: “Been a cargo pusher, haven’t you?”

  He said, trying not to let the shakes get started, “Yeah. Once.” The examiner understood, then, what he’d done. And why.

  The examiner—he was a man, and old—punched a button. Numbers came up, two columns. Graphs followed.

  “You’re a re-cert,” the examiner said.

  “Trying to be,” he said. He kept his breath even, watched as the examiner punched another set of buttons.

  “You can take your card out.”

  “Did I pass?”

  “D-class vessel, class 3 permit with licensed observer.” The examiner keyed out. “Valid for a year.—You in the Institute?”

  “Private,” he said, and the examiner gave him a second look.

  “Who with?”

  “Morrie Bird. Trinidad.”

  “Mmmn.”

  He wished he dared ask what that meant. But examiners in his experience didn’t say what your score was, they didn’t discuss the test, they rarely asked questions. This one made him nervous, but he thanked God the man was more than a button-pusher, he must be.

  He left the simulator room with his card in hand, took the B-spoke core-lift down to the ECSAA office, feeling the shakes finally hit him while he was at the Certifications desk getting the license, shakes so bad he had to put his hands in his pockets for fear the office staff might see it.

  Damn warning light had failed in the sim—or he’d flat failed to see it til it showed in the numbers. You never knew which. An alarm might have been blinking, he might have missed it, he might have just timed out—it felt like that, that time wasn’t moving right when those numbers started going off, when he’d had to do a fast and dirty calc and just thought… thought it was a tight-in situation, he had no idea why, his brain just told him it was and he’d imagined impact where there wasn’t any such thing in the simulation—

  No, dammit, the sim had increased g sharply and for one sick moment he’d hallucinated that the engines were firing.

  Maybe it was just his nerves. He wasn’t sure anymore. Maybe that was the problem.

  “Uh-oh,” Meg said, seeing Dekker come out and down the Admin strip. They’d taken time out of the shop to shepherd Dek back… in case it’s bad news, she’d said, and Sal had agreed.

  So knowing he was already nervous they hadn’t told him they were close by, hadn’t come down with him—just called and asked a Certification office secretary how long a D3 permit exam might take, and they’d come down from the 3-deck shop to be here—in case.

  “Doesn’t look good,” Sal said; and Meg had a moment of misgivings, whether they shouldn’t just duck back and try to blend with the Transstop traffic—not easy in her case and not easy in Sal’s. So there was no chance for cowardice. She waved.

  Or maybe on second thought they might make it away unseen. Dekker was walking along looking at his feet, off in some different universe.

  She said, as he came close, “Dek? How’d it go?”

  He looked up, looked dazed, as if he couldn’t figure them being there, or he hadn’t really heard the question.

  “How’d it go?” Sal asked.

  “All right,” he said.

  “So did you get the permit?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, bravo, jeune rab!” Sal clapped an arm around him and gave him a squeeze. “We said, didn’t we?”

  He was dead white. He looked scared—and a little zee-d. “I said I’d call up to the ship—tell Bird how it came out. I need a phone.”

  Deep-space
d, Meg thought uneasily. Got himself through the test in one piece and just gone out. God hope they hadn’t spotted it in the office. She linked her arm through his, protective custody. “Come on. Phone and lunch. In that order.”

  He went with them. They found a public phone near the Transstation, and she punched through to Bird. Bird said, “Good,” when he heard, and Ben said, in the background, “So what’s the fuss?”

  Break that man’s neck someday, Meg thought. With my own bare hands.

  Another damned breakdown in D-28, and a pump-connection had blown out in the mast at dockside—spraying 800 liters of hydraulic fluid into free-fall toward the rotating core surface. The super swore it was worker sabotage and Salvatore, with three more cases on his desk, had a headache.

  He put a tech specialist on the investigation, poured himself a cup of coffee and told himself he had to clear his desk: the stacks of datacards in the bin had reached critical mass, Admin was having a fit over the quarterly reports being a week late, it had a Fleet Lieutenant on its lap bitching about a schedule shortfall, and he couldn’t find the cards the current flags referenced.

  Flag on Walker. The guy had card use near an office break-in, had no business there—no apparent relation to the crime, merely a presence that didn’t make sense. Flag on Kermidge: every sign of resuming bad associations. Flags on Dekker: blew hell out of the sims.

  He keyed up the subfile.

  Wills’ voice said, out of the comp, “Dekker passed his D3 ops. Score shot straight to the Chief Examiner. Word is the sims jumped out of D class and ran clear up in C before the examiner terminated the test—standard if there’s an overrun: the Certifications office suspects a suspension at a higher grade—started searching court records, potential inquiries to Sol—”

  Oh, shit!

  “I intercepted it, told them let the license stand at a D3, pending inquiry with this office: I hope that was all right.”

  Thank God.

  “I did check the examiner’s record in the files: retired pilot, ECI training,, Sol based, good record, three years in his present position, et cetera. He’s clean.

  “But here’s another interesting development: Bird and Pollard, the ones who brought him in, that got his ship on salvage, that’re staying in the same sleepery? They’ve filed to run pairs, refit shakedown run with Dekker’s former ship leased to one Kady and Aboujib. Dekker’s on that application as a D3 wanting board time.

  “Here’s the catch. Aboujib and Kady have records—Kady’s, as long as your arm. Smuggling, rab agitator—SolCorp background, opted here on an EC transfer. Aboujib’s an AIP dishonorable discharge, reckless endangerment with a spacecraft, Shepherd background, small-time morals charges, one assault, bashed some guy with a bottle. Allocations hasn’t ruled yet. Deny or let-pass?”

  Salvatore hit Pause, sat there with his elbows on the desk, reached for his inhaler, thinking: Son of a bitch…

  Not about Wills. Wills had done a good job—so far as it went. The business with the examiner jangled little alarms, no less than the immaculate Bird’s shadowy associations.

  Report that finding to Payne’s office? Payne had said: We don’t need to drag this out. The report to the ECSAA said mechanical failure, no fault of the pilot…

  Payne wanted the case closed; but, dammit, it kept resurfacing in the flags, and now with Wills’ information came the niggling worry that where there were anomalies in official records there might also be management secrets. Salazar’s threatened lawsuit, contractor disputes, the rash of incidents on the dock and in the plants—the military making demands to install Security personnel on R2—some kind of “readiness survey” involving their contracts, which was, one could suspect, strongly tied to schedule slowdowns, and, dammit, an implication of blame for his department—it was the whisper in the company washrooms that the Fleet was putting heavy pressure on ASTEX management, the Earth Company was worried about sabotage and slowdowns, possibly sympathizer activity—the labor agitators were looking for the right moment to embarrass the company; and damned right the radical fringes of all sorts were looking for a way to get control of the labor movement—radical fringe elements ASTEX had more than its share of, thanks to the EC’s policy of letting malcontents and malefactors transfer out here—sans trial, sans publicity that might catch media attention in the motherwell, where strikes and welfare riots and lunatic religions fed on the airwaves. This Kady was probably a prime example, but monetary rather than political. That was no problem. Shepherd connections? Shepherds had more kids than they could find slots for. Reckless endangerment? An ECSAA violation. Not this office’s province and any shift on helldeck could provide three and four assaults and a few cases for the medics.

  ASTEX Security had a damn sight more on its mind than a couple of small-time malcontents and a disputed miner craft. Dekker was a watch-it, but Dekker had so far done nothing worse than show up an anomaly on a simulation—better than average. Meanwhile management had a ship over at that classified facility way behind schedule and sabotage in a plastics plant that had no damned reason except a fool of a manager.

  Hell, no, it wasn’t the ASTEX board that was going to take the damage: boards were never to blame—ASTEX management wasn’t to blame: dump it on Security, dump it on Salvatore’s desk—

  So what had he got, but a missing kid with a mother on MarsCorp board, whose lawyers were threatening a negligence suit against the mechanic at Rl and trying to get those records opened. Dekker had had one incident, making wild charges against the company—but he had been quiet since then, had spent money on clothes, on food—his only current sin was applying for a re-cert in D class when he might—he read through Wills’ report—have rated higher.

  You did have to wonder about some ringer thrown in at higher levels, somebody working for some investigatory office, even—in these nervous days—something that should come to the attention of MI.

  Blow the Dekker case wide and he could kiss his career goodbye; but if he failed to report a problem, and let something slip, his competence was at issue. Hell of a crack to be in. In his most paranoid moments he was moved to ask had there ever been a Cory Salazar—

  But there was no doubt about Dekker on any level he could assess; the various departments over at Rl had his background from two years back; and no clandestine operator would be so stupid as to ring bells on a test: it didn’t in any wise smell like an EC probe or a security problem.

  Hell, Dekker had had his Dl from back in ‘20, he’d had working experience since, and very possibly he’d been dogging it back in ‘20, lying low from the military recruiters: that behavior was an epidemic among draft-age males. With that medical against him, he’d put out everything he had—and very nearly brought himself back to Ms. Salazar’s attention: thank God Wills had put the stop on that.

  So Dekker wanted to go back to space. It didn’t seem a bad place to have him right now. You couldn’t be quieter than out in the deep Belt, with no communication with anybody but BM. Alyce Salazar’s lawyers couldn’t serve him a summons there without a damned long arm.

  Memo the doctor on Dekker’s case to sign the medical release and satisfy the meddling clerk with the ECSAA rule book, get Dekker out and off the daily flags, and if Dekker went psycho out there and slash-murdered Bird and Pollard, they should have known what they were getting into. Only hope he got Kady and Aboujib with them. They didn’t need the tag end of the rab acting up.

  So with the push of a few keys, that was one problem off his desk for three months—a fix good the minute that ship cleared dock. Flag its return, flag—God!—Bird and Pollard, Aboujib and Kady, have Wills’ office run down all the datatrails they might have left, at leisure. In a situation that could blow up again, on any whim of Salazar’s lawyers, upper echelons could come down demanding complete files.

  Pity, Salvatore thought, he couldn’t sign up a few other problems for a three-month cruise in the belt…

  Like the manager of D-28, with his dress codes and his inspection
s and his damned constant memos about sexual conduct off the job and his rules about mustaches, God, he’d like to memo Payne that Department Manager Collin R. Sabich had a private problem with kink vids, but owning the vids wasn’t illegal and the fact wasn’t relevant to anything but the fact Sabich was a slime. Admin knew that. Admin had already promoted him sideways three times and evidently couldn’t find anywhere less critical to put him. What else could you do with a sonuvabitch with a kink and an Institute degree in Plant Management?

  God knew, maybe they’d give him an administrative office to run.

  CHAPTER 15

  ONE thing had started going right, Dekker thought, God, and another thing followed: a message turned up in the bar’s mail-file at breakfast, addressed to Mr. M. Bird, from Belt Management: special permit granted for 2 ship operations in the same sector—launch permit and all, usual permits for loading and charging, et cetera, et cetera. They had a sector assignment, they’d get that and the charts when they boarded, they had a launch date, September 18th, four days from now—Bird had shaken his head over that, one of those damned do-it-now decisions from BM, no different at R2 than at Rl. You expected a delay, you applied early, and you got a go-yesterday.

  First the offer from Bird, then a piece of his license back, and Ben turning downright civil: now BM approved a joint run—and still nothing fell apart: Dekker sat holding his coffee cup, listening to the regulars in the bar congratulate Bird on BM’s good behavior with the recollection that the last time in his life things were going this right—

  But he didn’t let himself think about that. He just stared at where he was and told himself that the letter had to be a sign his luck had turned, or maybe a signal from BM that management had decided to dog somebody else for a while. Who knew? Maybe somebody had slipped up and nobody had noticed he was on the crew. Maybe BM was signaling it would drop its feud with him and let him pick up his life if he just kept his mouth shut.

  Don’t worry about might-be’s, was the way Meg put it. Just keep your head, don’t make noise. MamBitch has a real shortterm crisis sense. There’ll be some new sod on her grief list next week, and she’ll forget all about you.