CHAPTER 1
IT was a lonely place, this remote deep of the Belt, a place where, if things went wrong, they went seriously wrong. And the loneliest sound of all was that thin, slow beep that meant a ship in distress.
It showed up sometimes, sometimes missed its beat, “She’s rolling,” Ben said when he first heard it, but Morrie Bird thought: Tumbling; and when Ben had plugged in the likely config of the object and asked the computer, that was what it said. It said it in numbers. Bird saw it in his mind. You spent thirty years tagging rocks and listening to the thin numerical voices of tags and beacons and faint, far ships, and you knew things like that. You could just about figure the pattern before the computer built it.
“Got to be dead,” Ben Pollard said. Ben’s face had that sharp, eager look it got when Ben was calculating something he especially wanted.
Nervous man, Ben Pollard. Twenty-four and hungry, a Belter kid only two years out of ASTEX Institute when he’d come to Bird with a 20 k check in hand—no easy trick, give or take his mother’s insurance must have paid his keep and his schooling. Ben had bought in on Trinidad’s outfitting and signed on as his numbers man; and in a day when a lot of the new help had a bad case of the Attitudes and expected something for nothing, damned if Ben didn’t wear an old man out with his One More Try and his: Bird, I Got an Angle—
Regarding this distress signal it wasn’t hard at all to figure Ben’s personal numbers. Ben was asking himself the same questions an old man was asking at the bottom of his mortgaged souclass="underline" How far is it? Who’s in trouble out there? Are they alive? And… What’s the law on salvage?
So they called Base and told Mama they had a Mayday, had she heard?
Base hadn’t heard it. That was moderately odd. Geosyncs over the Well hadn’t heard it and ECSAA insystem hadn’t picked it out of all the beeps and echoes of tags and ships in the Belt. Base took a while to think, approved a course and dumped them new sector charts, with which Mama was exceedingly stingy: Mama said Cleared for radio use, and: Proceed With Caution. Good luck, Two Twenty-nine Tango.
Spooky, that Base hadn’t heard that signal—that she claimed that was a vacant sector. So somebody was way off course. You lay awake and thought of all the names you knew, people who could be out here right now—good friends among them; and you asked yourself what could have happened and when. Rocks could echo a signal. Lost ships could get very lost. That transmitter should be the standard 5 watts, but a dying one could trick you—and, committed, boosted up to a truly scary v, about which you could also have second thoughts, you had a lot of things on your mind.
The rule was that Base kept track of everything that moved out here. If your radio died you Maydayed on your emergency beeper and you waited til Mama gave you clear instructions how she was going to get you out of it—you didn’t expect anybody to come in after you. Nowadays nobody went any damn where out of his assigned sector without Mama confirming course and nobody used a radio for long-distance chatter with friends. You get lost in the dark, spacer-kids, you go strictly by the regulations and you yell for Mama’s attention.
That ghosty signal was doing that, all right, but Mama hadn’t heard… and by all rights she should have. Mama said it could be a real weak signal—they were running calculations on the dopplering to try to figure it… Mama claimed she didn’t hear it except with their relay, and that argued for close.
Or, Mama said, her reception could have a technical problem, which at a wild guess meant some glitch in the software on the big dishes, but Mama didn’t talk about things like that with miners.
Mama didn’t talk about a lot else with poor sod miners.
“You remember those jackers?” Ben asked, waking up in the middle of Bird’s watch.
“Yep,” Bird said, working maintenance on a servo motor; he tightened a screw and added, then: “I knew Karl Nouri.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Only twenty years back. Hell, I drank with him. Nice guy. Him and his partner.”
That got Ben, for sure. Ben slid back into his g-1 spinner and started it up again. But after a while Ben stopped, got out, hauled on his stimsuit and his coveralls and had breakfast, unshaven and shadow-eyed.
A man felt ashamed of himself, disturbing the young fellow’s rest.
But the remembrance of Nouri went on to upset Bird’s sleep too.
No one was currently hijacking in the Belt—the company had wiped out Nouri and his partners, blown two of them to the hell they’d deserved, luring help in with a fake distress signal, killing crews, stripping logs for valuable finds and ships for usable parts—
Nouri’s operation had worked, for a while—until people got suspicious and started asking how Nouri and his friends were so lucky, always coming in with a find, their equipment never breaking down, their ships real light on the fuel use.
Careful maintenance, Nouri had insisted. They did their own. They were good at their work.
But a suspicious company cop had checked part numbers on Nouri’s ship and found a condenser, Bird recollected, a damn 50-dollar condenser, with a serial number that traced it to poor Wally Leavitt’s ship.
They’d shipped Nouri and five of his alleged partners back to trial on Earth, was what they said, company rules, though there’d been a good many would have seen Nouri himself take a walk above the Well.
But worse than the fear in the deep Belt in those days, was the way everybody had looked at everybody else back at Base, thinking: Are you one of Them? or… Do you think Z could be?
One thing Belters still argued about was whether Jidda Pratt and Dave Marks had been guilty with the rest.
But the company had said they were. The company claimed they had solid evidence, and wrote down personable young Pratt and Marks in the same book as Nouri.
After that, hell, freerunning miners and tenders hadn’t any rights. The company had never liked dealing with the independents in the first place: the company had made things increasingly difficult for independent operators once it had gotten its use from them, and the Nouri affair had been the turning point. No more wildcatting. Nowadays you documented every sneeze, you told Big Mama exactly what you’d found with your assay, they metal-scanned you when you went through customs, and you kept meticulous log records in case you got accused of Misconduct, let alone, God help you, Illicit Operations or Illicit Trading. If you helped out a buddy, if you traded a battery or a tag or a transponder back at Base, you logged the date and the time and you filled out the forms, damn right you did: you asked your buddy to sign for a 50-cent clip, if it had a serial number on it, and the running unfunny joke was that the company was trying to think up a special form for exchange of toilet paper.
Nowadays it was illegal to keep your sector charts once you’d docked: Mama’s agents came aboard and wiped your mag storage, customs could strip-search you for contraband datacards if it took the notion, and you didn’t get any choice about the sector you drew when you went out again, either—’drivers moved, by the nature of what they were, you had mandated heavy time, no exceptions, and Mama didn’t send you to anything near the same area. It was illegal to hail a neighbor on a run. You spent three months breathing each other’s sweat, two guys in a crew space five meters long and three meters at the widest, so tight and so lonely you could hear each other’s thoughts echo off the walls, but if one freerunner tried to call another a sector away from him, he and his partner went up on Illegal Trading charges faster than he could think about it, it being illegal now to trade tips even with no money or equipment changing hands: the company reserved the right to that information, claiming miners had sold it that data and it had a proprietary right to assign it to interests of its own—meaning the company-owned miners: to no one’s great surprise the courts had sided with the company. So it was also, by the company’s interpretation of that ruling, illegal to hail another ship and share a bottle or trade foodstuffs or any of the other friendly deals the Nouri crackdown had put a stop to.