Devil to the Belt (novels "Heavy Time" and "Hellburner")

“I’m 35,” Meg said after a moment or two of walking. “I’m an old rab. Eight, nine years ago they shot us down at the doors and the politi-crats in the company’s bed said that good old EC was within their rights, it was self-defense, the rab was breaking the law and endangering a strategic facility, d’ you believe that? Corp-rat HQ is a strategic facility? —Time the miners andthe Shepherds had the guts to tell the whole damn company go to hell, turn the whole operation independent. But where are they, Sal? Where are they? Freeru

“Brut cold,” she said, and put her hands in her pockets, walking step for step with Meg, Meg seeming to have finished her say. Crazy as it sounded, she wondered if the Institute hadcensored the things it didn’t want them to know, on purpose, and when she thought about it, rights damned sure had changed—

Things like abolishing crew share-systems, the way they’d used to be on Shepherd ships. Like the bank refusing to honor cash-chits, the way Shepherds had paid out bonuses, and kept money outside the bank card system.

She thought about the courses she could have sailed through if she’d kissed ass. She thought about her mama and her papa’s friends, Mitch among them, who’d said… You’re a fool, kid. Should have kept your head down til you graduated. We can’t make an issue, you understand? A kid with a reckless endangerment on her record isn’t it…

So she was a fool and the instructors washed her out, told her the same as they’d told Ben: Insufficient Aptitude.

She was learning from Meg—she’d learned more from Meg than she ever let on with the licensing board; and when the time came Meg couldn’t teach her, then she’d go to Mitch a hell of a lot better than Mitch ever thought she was… flight school washout, Attitude problem and all.

But meanwhile her mama’s and her papa’s friends were going grayer and thi

But the company was training new techs fast as they could, and the new head of MamBitch was talking about substituting Institute hours for the experienced Shepherds’ years, requiring re-certifications every five years after you were forty.

The Shepherds had naturally told MamBitch where they’d send the cargoes the hour they did that and the company threatened to pass those re-cert rules if the Shepherds ever did it—but the company didn’t have enough pilots to plug in those slots right now that wouldn’t dump more than cargo into the Well, or fry themselves and their ships by pure accident. Yet.

So Big Mama had had to assign her shiny new tech crews to tend the ‘drivers for now, because Shepherd crews wouldn’t fly with the corp-rat cut-rate talent straight out of ‘accelerated training’—and because the military was hot on Mama’s neck about schedules. But time and the Belt were taking their natural toll and the day was coming, even a dumbass Attitudinal washout could see it ahead, when there’d be just too few of the old guard left to make a ripple in the company’s intentions: someday company was going to pass its New Rules, and she was the right age to be caught in it. She didn’t like Meg’s line of thought at all, and she couldn’t figure how it had much to do with anything present—which was what Meg had promised her.

“So?” she said. “So what’s this leading to? What’s this to do with our problem?”

“If you want to figure Bird,” Meg said, “you seriously need to understand, blue-skyers don’t know what short supply is. They don’t think by the numbers: air’s free and they got nothing but heavy time, so they give it away—they give it away even if they haven’t got it, because that’s their pride, you see? They have to say they can, even if they can’t, because natural folk can, and anything less they won’t admit to.”

“Way to starve,” Sal said. “Way to end up on a company job. That’s pure fool, Kady. And Bird isn’t.”

“Air’s free on Earth. Feet can go.”

“If you don’t mind dirt. And they got laws that say where you can go. I heard Bird say.”

“Yeah, well.” Meg walked a few more steps. Sal remembered then that, old business at Sol Station notwithstanding, Meg was a whole lot closer to blue sky than she ever could be, and she worried that maybe she’d cut Meg off with that zap about dirt.

But Meg went on as if she hadn’t taken offense: “That’s how it is for corp-rat execs, isn’t it? Air’s free wherever they are. Short for them is when they run out of their Chardo

“Venetian?”

“Italiano. Ochin expensiv. Fragil. Minks are fuzzy live crits. You wear their skins.”

Sal looked at her. Sometimes Meg scammed you when she was in a mood. Hard to be sure.

“No shit. I used to freight it. Pearls, fancy woods, stuff like that. If you skimmed that stuff, you could black market it to starships or you could sell it right back to guess where?”

Sal lifted a brow.

“I guess the corp-rat got his apartment furnished,” Meg said. “Or he got a cheaper source. SolCorp didn’t want me going to trial, hell no. They told me I could come here and fly for myself or I could pilot some pusher back and forth off Mars for good old EC if I sincerely didn’t want to go do mining.”

That was half what Meg had said and half what she’d never said—that she had been dealing black market with some exec, and it was that guy who’d blindsided her.

Things you found out, after this many years.

She liked Meg hell and away better than she had those years ago, that was sure—understood a good deal more of her thinking; but not all of it, never all of it, and she wasn’t entirely sure she wanted to know where Meg had been or what Meg had been trained to do. Dive into a planetary well or bring a ship out of one—the thought gave a Shepherd’s daughter the chills.

“So, well, Bird’s got a little ahead at this guy’s expense, he’s short—Bird’s not going to say no, isn’t going to make this guy ask, either. Machismo. Something like. Fact is, I’vebeen where this guy is and it makes me a skosh mad, Sal. It sincerely does.”

“Well, I’d agree with you I don’t like to see the guy screwed, hell, I put it on Mitch, and they’rebizzed about it—but they’re going to do a real fast hands-off after what he did. I’ll tell you the word I don’t like, Kady, it’s what I heard from Persky—the guy yelled out about Bird and Ben knowing a ‘driver was out there—”

“Yeah, well, he was drunk.”

“Doesn’t matter if he was drunk, Kady, dammit, I got very scarce favor points with Mitch—”

“Screw Mitch.”

“Yeah, the hell with Mitch—Mitch’ll give me a choice, get out and away from Bird, that’s what he’ll tell me.”

“Would you do it?”

“It’s all over the damn ‘deck what he said—”

“Tss. They drugged him stupid, Aboujib.”

“We got a live charge here, Kady. We can’t afford this. Theycan’t!”

“All right, I’ll tell you what Bird said to me. This is a confidence. Black-hole it.”

“Go.”

“ ‘Driver’s sitting out there right where the accident happened. Dekker gave ‘em the coordinates. Said he and his partner had found a big rock. Class B. That’s where that thing is sitting, chewing it up and spitting it at the Well, fast as it can. Few more months and it won’t be there.”