Bird said, “Don’t you try anything.”
Ben said yeah and left.
Maybe he should have warned the gals about bugs. Probably they were chewing up him and Ben right now. But maybe it was better they did talk in the room, make whoever might be bugging the place think that they didn’t suspect a thing. They knew about the ship, all right. But they didn’t know what else there was to worry about.
Like that ’driver sitting out there where that ship had come from.
’Driver chewing away at what miners found—extracting and sorting and sending bucketloads to old Jupiter, who slowed it down again so the Shepherds could bring it in to be sheet and foam and such. Mama always assigned sectors according to the ’drivers’ work patterns, so you knew there was one somewhere by, but between you and the Well, with its business end pointed the other way. Anytime you thought about going near a ’driver’s actual fire-path, you had to think about how big it was and how small you were and how what it threw came so fast you’d never know what hit you. ’Driver paths were the one item of information Mama gave out for five or so sectors away, not even regarding the line that divided Rl work zone from R2. Every firing of the ’drivers had to be logged and reported to Mama as to exact time. You couldn’t move a ’driver without Mama’s permission. You sure couldn’t hide one.
So Mama just forgot to put a ’driver on Dekker’s charts? It had been on the ones Mama dumped to Trinidad—right where Dekker had given them the coordinates for the accident.
Damn, you didn’t want to have thoughts like that.
Lot of pressure on Mama lately—a lot of crazy behaviors out of ASTEX’s upper echelons—like mandatory overtime in the factories, like trying to revise the contract with the Shepherds, to let them install a few company-trained crew members on Shepherd ships—a fool could see where that was heading. None of the Big Shakeups had ever made sense, but damn-all anybody could do if the Earth Company got behind it. They could change the rules, they could change the laws if there was one in their way. The EC had so many senators in its pocket and the EC was so many people’s meal ticket in one way or another, especially with this ship construction boom; and there were so many blue-skyers bone ignorant about space and politics—
Living down at the bottom of the motherwell like his own brother did, writing him once a year about the wife and the kids and two pages at Earth to Belt mail rates about how he was putting in green beans this spring. God. Did people still think about things like that?
“Just sign this,” they said, and shoved a slate under Dekker’s hand—they had raised the bed up, propped him with pillows, but the trank was still thick and he could hardly focus. It was heavy g this time. It felt hard to breathe.
“What is this?” he asked, because he hadn’t gotten cooperation out of anybody in this place and he didn’t trust any of them. It might be a consent for them to go cutting on him, or giving him God knew what drug, and damned if he was going to sign it unread, in this place heavy as 1-deck.
They said—the they who came and went sometimes, cops, doctors, orderlies, he wasn’t clear enough to figure that at the moment—“It’s just so you can get out of here. You want to get out of here, don’t you?”
“Go away,” he mumbled, sick at his stomach.
“Don’t you want to leave?” He had dropped the stylus. They put it back in his fingers.
He tried to get a look at it, then. It took a lot of work to make out the letters out of the general haze. But it said: AFFIDAVIT. Legal stuff. He worked some more at it. Finally he saw it was an accident report.
Accident. Hell.
He threw the thing. Maybe he broke it. It hit the wall and fell with a clatter like broken plastic. He thought, It wouldn’t do that upstairs.
He said, “I’m not signing anything without a lawyer.”
Hell of a mess they’d left. Meg was maddest about the jewelry. She sat there untangling earrings and swearing. “Ought to say we’re missing something. Serve the cops right.”
And Sal, sorting through the stubs of makeup pencils: “Blunted every damn point. Corp-rat pigs.”
“We haven’t done anything.” It took some thinking, but that was the case. Meg unwound tiny chains and felt an upset at the pit of her stomach. “Sons of bitches why the hell’d they toss everything together…”
Sal came over and leaned on her fist on the bed. Signed, fast and sharp, Careful. Which didn’t help the feeling in Meg’s stomach at all. If they were bugged, and the way things were going she’d believe it, they could make those bugs vid as well as audio.
They didn’t need this trouble. They wanted a chance at that ship, but they sure didn’t need this trouble, and trouble for the guys was what it smelled like.
They could move out. There were sleeperies besides the Hole. They could kiss Ben and Bird off and go find another lease after all; but if that second ship did come Bird’s way—
Then they’d want to cut their throats, was what. Bird and Ben were the best operation they had a chance with: no chance for her in the company. Not much for Sal either: with a police record you could work as a freerunner, but you didn’t get any favors and you didn’t fly for the company, and if anything went wrong on the deck you were on, you were first on the cops’ list.
Just about time something went right for a change. There’d been enough bad breaks.
Like the sector they’d just drawn, which got them a nice lot of ice and rock, in which Mama wasn’t keenly interested, no, thank you. That was the kind of allotments lease crews got lately: there were thin spots in the Belt, they were passing through one, and the ship owners took the good ones if they had to break health and safety regs to get out again.
Well, hell, you hung on. You stuck it. You skimmed when you had to and you did your damnedest. Meg Kady swore one thing: she wasn’t going to die broke and she wasn’t going to be spooked by any company cop throwing her stuff around.
Her hands got real steady with the little chains. She felt her mouth take on this little smile. Fa-mil-iar territory. Amen. “Cops on Sol are higher class,” she said to Sal, right cheerfully. “These shiz don’t take any courses in neat, do they?”
“Sloppy,” Sal said. “Severely sloppy.”
Salvatore sank into his chair, shoved a stack of somebody’s problems aside, and took his inhaler from the desk drawer and breathed deeply of the vapors—enough to set himself at some distance. He took a deeper breath. The drug hit his lungs and his bloodstream with an expanding rush, reached his nerves and told him to take it easy. He hated scenes. Hated them. Hated young fools handing Security more problems and doctors who invoked privilege.
Most of all he hated finding out that there was more to a case than Administration had been telling him.
The phone beeped. He took another deep breath, let it go: his secretary would get it; and he hoped to hell—
“Mr. Salvatore,” his secretary said via the intercom. “Mr. Payne.”
Third call from PI that day. This was not one Salvatore wanted, and he knew what Payne had heard. God, he wasn’t ready for this.
He punched in, said, “Mr. Payne, sir.”
“I’m told we have a problem,” the young voice on his phone said: Salvatore’s office didn’t have vidphones—he was glad not to have. Payne was junior, a bright young man in the executive, V. E in charge of Public Information and PR, directly under Crayton, who was directly under Towney himself, and there was absolutely no doubt somebody else had been chewing on his tail—recently, Salvatore decided. So Payne passed the grief down his chain of command, to Security. “That damned fool is going to keep on til we have a corporate liability. This isn’t going to help anyone, Salvatore.”