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

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 45 страниц)

CHAPTER 19

HE wasn’t doing a damn thing,” Ben said—there was blood all over him and Sal, blood dried on his own hands, Dekker saw, Bird’s, Meg’s, he had no idea. There was too much of it.

“Nothing?” the officer asked.

“Cops had me, dammit, he didn’t need to be there, he wasn’t doing a damn thing, just objected to them grabbing me, and some fool—just—pulled a trigger.”

Dekker stared at the backs of his hands, seeing what he hadn’t been there to see. Seeing Meg in the lift, holding on to Bird.

Sal said, “ Isaw it. They were arming guys straight off leave, some of them still higher than company corruption: green kids, didn’t know shit what they were doing.”

“It was a soldier.”

“Damn right it was a soldier. Marine. Couldn’t have been twenty.”

The Hamilton’spurser clicked off the recorder. “We’ve got that. We’ll send it before we make our burn.”

Dekker said: “How is the fuel situation?”

“Not optimum,” the purser said.

“Shit.” Sal shook her head. The purser left. Ben didn’t say anything, just got a long breath and clasped his hands between his knees.

It was as much information as they’d gotten. The same information as they’d gotten since they’d come aboard. Hadn’t seen Sammy—Sammy had gone offshift, probably in his own bunk asleep or tranked out if he hadn’t gotten the news yet. Sammy—Ford was his last name—had been fairly well shaken up, hadn’t asked for the position he’d been handed—the situation at the dock had gone to hell, the shuttle crew hadn’t answered, the 8-deck group hadn’t answered, they’d suspected their com was being monitored: Mitch had gone next door to use the restaurant’s phone to get contact with his crew and hadn’t come back, arrested or worse, they still hadn’t found out. Sammy wasn’t flight ops, he was the legal affairs liaison, a Shepherd negotiator, for God’s sake, who’d come aboard R2 to deal with management, if the plan had gone right, if the soldiers hadn’t come in…

Sammy’d done all right, Dekker decided. All right, for a guy who’d probably never gotten his hands dirty. Had to tell Meg when she came to. She’d get a laugh out of it.

Another officer, this one straight past them, where they waited in the tight confines of the medstation. Right into the surgery.

Angry voice beyond the door, an answer of some kind.

“Think they’ve got a hurry-up,” Sal muttered.

More voices. Something about paralysis and another thirty minutes. Voice saying, quite clearly, “… doesn’t do her any good if she’s dead, Hank, we haven’t got your thirty minutes. Get your patient prepped, we’re moving.”

Man came back through the door then, looked at them, said, more quietly, “We’ve got your ship free, we’ve got a positional problem and we’re doing a correction burn, about as fast as the EV-team can get in and I can get up to the bridge. Best we can do. You’ve got belts there. Use them. Staff’s got take-holds.”

Bad, then. Dekker clamped his jaw and reached for the belt housed in the side of the seat as Sal and Ben did the same. The officer was out the door and gone.

“Shit-all,” Ben muttered. His hands were shaking. Sal’s were clenched in her lap.

They were in trouble. No question. Headed into the Well, nobody had to say it. “Positional problem” on a Jupiter-bound vector meant only one thing, and a hurry-up like that meant they were on their own, no beam, just the fuel they had left—which wasn’t a big argument against the Well’s gravity slope.

Way Out’swhole mass had had to go—that had been his decision: save Hamiltonthe fuel hauling it, keep Trinidad’smanipulator arm from shearing off at the bolts, or maybe taking the bulkhead with it: but that fuel in Trinidad’stanks had been a big load– bigload, on those bolts. He’d made a split-second judgment call, last move he’d made before he’d gone out. Maybe opening that valve had saved their lives. If that bulkhead had gone they’d have decompressed; but an uncalc’ed mass attached to Hamilton, three-quarters of it dumped without warning a few seconds into the burn… hadn’t helped their situation. Computers had recomped. But their center of mass had changed twice in that accel; and when the arm gearing had fractured—they’d had to lase through the tether ring—they must have swung flat against Hamilton’sframe and that would have changed it again. He’d gone out by the time that had happened. Didn’t know how long they’d pushed, but with a warship moving on them, they’d had to give it a clear choice between chasing them or dealing with R2.

Hamiltoncrew couldn’t be real damn happy with their passengers right now.

The lock hydraulics cycled and stopped. A siren shrieked. A recorded voice said: Take Hold Immediately.

“ All hands prepare for course correction burn. Mark. Repeat—”

“The Bitch won’t give em a beam,” Sal muttered, teeth chattering as she checked her belt. “The Bitch is damn well hoping we’ll all take the deep one. Won’t lift a finger.”

“We’re going to be all right,” he said.

“’Going to be all right,’” Ben said. “’Going to be all right.’ You know if you weren’t a damn spook Bird’d be alive. Meg wouldn’t be in there. We wouldn’t be where we are. This whole damn mess is your fault.”

“Yeah,” he said, on a deep breath. “I know that.”

“His damn fault, too,” Ben muttered. “They weren’t after him, they didn’t know who the hell he was. He was clear, damn him, he was clear. I don’t know what he did it for.”

Engines fired. Hamiltonthrew everything she had into her try at skimming the Well.

He thought, I could just have pulled us off and out. Didn’t haveto go to the Hamilton. Wasn’t thinking of anything else.

They’d have picked us up. But the shooting would have stopped by then. And we wouldn’t be in this mess. Ben’s right.

“Didn’t make sense,” Ben said. “Damn him, he never didmake sense…”

Somebodyhad started shooting. The police swore they were military rounds, and Crayton’s office wanted that information released immediately.

The statement from Crayton’s office said: . . greatly regrets the loss of life…

Morris Bird was a name Payne fervently wished he’d never heard. Thirty-year veteran, oldest miner in the Belt, involved with Pratt and Marks, and popular on the ‘deck—a damn martyr was what they had. Somebody had sprayed BIRD in red paint all along a stretch of 3-deck. BIRD was turning up scratched in paint on 8, and they didn’t need any other word. The hospital was bedding down wounded in the halls, a file named DEKKER was proliferating into places they still hadn’t found and the Shepherd net was broadcasting its own news releases, calling for EC intervention and demanding the resignation of the board and the suspension of martial law.

Now it was vid transmission—a Shepherd captain explaining how the miner ship Trinidadhad made a run for the Hamilton—more names he’d heard all too much about. A pilot who’d had his license pulled as impaired. A crew who’d been with Bird when the shooting happened. The story was growing by the minute—acquiring stranger and stranger angles, and N & E couldn’t get ahead of them by any small measures.

… A spokesman for the company has expressed relief at the safe recovery of theTrinidad and all aboard. The same source has strongly condemned the use of deadly force against unarmed demonstrators and promises a thorough…

The door opened. He blinked, looking at rifles, at two blue-uniformed marines. At a third, who followed them in, and said, “William Payne? This office is under UDC authority, under emergency provisions of the Defense Act, Section 18, Article 2.”

He looked at the rifles, looked at the officer. Tried to think of right procedures. “I need to contact the head office.”

“Go right ahead, Mr. Payne.”

He doubted his safety to do that. He hesitated at picking up the phone, hesitated at pushing the button. “This isAdministration I’m calling. Do you want to be sure of that?”

“Check it out wherever you like, Mr. Payne. Your computer will give you an explanation. Go ahead. Access Administration.”

He took a breath, touched keys, windowed up Executive Access.

It said, Earth Company Executive Order…

It said Charter Provision 28, and Defense Act, Section 18, Article 2.

“We have a press release for you, Mr. Payne.”

“Yes, sir,” he said. No questions. No hesitations. He reached for the datacard the officer put on his desk and put it into the comp.

It said: The UDC has assumed control of ASTEX operations. All workers, independent operators and contractors, and allASTEX employees below management levels will be retained. President Towney is under arrest by civil warrant, charged with misappropriation of funds and tax evasion. Various members of the board are likewise under investigation by the EC. Residents who have information on such cases are directed to deliver that information to the military police, Access 14, on the system.

All residents who report to the UDC office on their decks will have their cards revalidated and will be passed without question or exception under a general amnesty for all non-executive personnel of R2.

The UDC will meet with delegations from the independents, the contractors, and civilian employees to discuss grievances…

“Hell of a mess,” Meg said, propped on pillows in the peculiar kind of gyou got in small installations—still lightheaded, but the fingers could move in the cast, she’d tested that.

“Couldn’t tell you from the sheets when they brought you in.” Sal sat down carefully on the edge of the bed, reached out a dark hand and squeezed her good one. Skins brut sure didn’t match right now, Meg thought, seeing that combination, and then thought about Bird, left adrift in that lift-car. Hell of a thing to do. Bird had deserved better than that. But he’d always been a practical sumbitch, where it counted.

Water trickled from the corner of her left eye. Sal wiped it with her thumb.

“Hell,” she said, and tried to put her arm over her eyes, but every joint she owned was sprained. She blinked and drew a couple of breaths. “They get us out of the dive yet?”

Sal didn’t answer right off. Hadn’t, she thought. Welcome back, Kady. We’re still going to die.

Sal said, “We still got a little vector problem. Where’d you hear it?”

“Meds said. Thought I was out. Are we going in?”

Another hesitation. “Say we’re going in a lot slower. They’re having a discussion with the EC right now. Idea is, deploy the sail to half, see if we can get a line-up with the R2-23, just get a little different tack going.”

“That’d be nice.”

“Listen, ice-for-nerves, we got word the military’s taken over—got Towney under arrest—yeah. And the board. They’ll bring the beams up, they damn well have to. They’re talking deal with helldeck right now—they’re asking for Mitch and Persky and some of the guys to come and talk grievances—”

“It’s a trick.”

“They going to put so’jer-boys to picking rocks? Beaucou’ d’ luck, Kady. First tag they try they’ll be finding bits of some ship clear to Saturn.”

“They’ll deal. Maybe even get us our beam. Wouldn’t be surprised. But it won’t change, Aboujib. Won’t change.”

Sal didn’t say anything for a moment. And she was on a dive of her own. Wasn’t fair to Sal. Sal had real vivid nightmares about gravity wells.

She said to Sal, only bit of optimism she could come up with, “Won’t be Towney in charge, anyhow.”

“They’re sending out this EC manager. Meanwhile it’s the so’jers.”

Not good news for the guys on R2. Long time til the new manager got here. Meanwhile theywere trying their best not to fall into the Well. She wondered how good their options were. Beams going up again, yeah, if the soldiers hadn’t some damn administrative mess-up that was going to wait on authorizations, or if it wasn’t just convenient to the EC to have them gone. Beside which, if they were talking about a bad line, and they were having to use R2-23, they evidently were in one of those vectors where getting a beam was a sincere bitch. R2-23 was a geosync. Geosyncs at the Well were a neverending problem, always screwed, Shepherds futzed them into line and refueled them with robot tugs, and hauled them out of the radiation intense area and fixed them when they’d gotten screwed beyond the usual—useful position, that particular beam, what odd times its computer wasn’t fried—

“Got two nice-looking guys want to see you,” Sal said, looking seriously fragile right now. Doing her best to be cheerful.

“Shit. I got any makeup on?”

“Forgot to pack,” Sal said, squeezed her shoulder and staggered off to the door—hadn’t got her ship-legs yet.

Neither had the boys. They looked like hell. Scrubbed up, at least. But limping and not walking real well, especially Ben. Good time to be horizontal, she decided, sore as she was– Hamiltonwas fair-sized, but her gdifferential still wanted to drop you on your ass, besides which your feet swelled til your body adapted. Went through it all again when you went stationside.

If they ever saw stationside again.

She patted the bedside. “Sit,” she said. They sat down very carefully, one on a side of the footboard.

“Hurt much?” Ben asked. Stupid question.

“I’ve had nicer times in bed. You all right?”

“Fine,” Dekker said. “We’re fine.”

“Yeah,” she said, surveying the bruises. “We’re a set, all right.”

Course correction put them in reach of R2-23, the message from Ops said. That’s their last serious option. Calculations extremely marginal even at this point. Situation with beam goes zero chance at 0828h. We checked out that cap and their fill, and the miner-crafts’ registered mass. Unless they got something from the remaining miner’s tanks, they have nothing left. Cap onAthens indicates zero chance intercept. Dumping the tugs didn’t do it. Athens would put itself in danger. We estimate their continuing on course is only for the negotiators. Our data appended.

Porey tapped the stylus on the desk, called up the figures, considered it, considered a communication from the meeting in the corporate HQ, typed a brief message. Tell their negotiators we’ve calc’edAthens and the chances on the beam go neg at 0828. Tell them we’d be glad to provide them the figures and we’re standing by our offer.

No time for another cause with the miners. Or the Shepherds.

Good PR. Magnanimity. General amnesty, revalidate the cards, put Towney’s arrest on vid, get the beams up again and get the Hamiltonout of its situation.

The minute the Shepherds came to terms.

Breakfast.

Marmalade. Dekker hadn’t tasted it since he was a kid—Ben and Sal never had. Meg said it brought back memories of her smuggling days.

“I used to run this stuff,” Meg said. “Course we’d lose a jar or two now and again.”

Sal made the sign for eavesdroppers, and Dekker felt it in his gut. But Meg said, “Hell, if they got time to worry about us—”

“Kind of sour,” Ben said. “Bitter. Not bad, though.”

“Ben, cher,” Sal said. “Learn to appreciate. Life’s ever-so prettier that way.”

“I appreciate it. It’s bitter. And sour. Isn’t it? What’s the matter with that?”

Meg rolled her eyes.

The door opened. Dekker turned his head.

Officer.

Breakfast stopped.

“Sorry to interrupt you,” the Shepherd said, leaning against the doorframe, arms folded. Afro, one-sided shave job, Shepherd tech insignia and a gold collar-clip on that expensive jacket that meant he was senior-tech-something. “Though you’d appreciate a briefing. We’ve got a rescue coming.”

Dekker replayed that a second. Maybe they all did.

Goodnews?

“Who?” Meg asked.

“That carrier. Moving like a bat.”

“Shee—” Meg held it.

Dekker thought, God, why? But he didn’t ask. He left that to Meg and Sal, who had the credit here—who weren’tthe ones who’d put them in the mess they were in.

“Looks as if we’re getting out of this,” Meg said.

“God,” Ben said after a moment. No yelling and celebrating. You held it that long, doing business as usual as much as possible, and when you got good news you just didn’t know how to take it.

“Where’s the catch?” Sal asked. “They can just overtake and haul us out?”

“Thing was .75 our current vtwo minutes away from R2. They’re not wasting any time.”

Dekker did rough math in his head, thought—God. And us well onto the slope, as we have to be now—

“They’re talking deal,” the Shepherd said. “Seems the Fleet’s figured out they need us. Seems the Association’s said there’s no deal without the freerunners, they’re hanging on to that point—they’ve axed Towney, that’s certain now. Thought you’d want to know. —Mr. Dekker?”

“Sir.”

“The captain wants to see you.”

Another why? But maybe if they were out of their emergency stand-by… the captain wanted to make a serious point with the resident fool. He shrugged, looked back at Meg and Sal and Ben, with: “I’ll seeyou—” Meaning that they could think about later, and being alive day after tomorrow.

God, the shakes had gotten him, too—he didn’t figure what he was scared of now—a dressing-down by a Shepherd captain, good enough, he had it coming: or maybe it was suddenly havinga future, in which he didn’t know what he was going to be doing hereafter. The Shepherd might take Meg and might take Sal—even Ben turned out to have a claim.

But him?

Credit with the Hamiltonmight be real scant about now. Trinidadwas gone, likewise Way Out—nothing like Trinidad‘s velocity when they’d dumped her, but not in R2’s near neighborhood by now, either, and on the same track. If she was catchable at all, the law made her somebody else’s salvage. He had the bank account—but God knew what shape that was in, or what kind of lawsuits might shape up against him—corp-rats were corp-rats, Meg would say, and he had no faith the EC was going to forget him and let him be. Not with people dead and the property damage.

It wasn’t a far walk to Sunderland’s office. The tech-chief showed him in—announced him to a gray-haired, frail-looking man, who offered his hand—not crew-type courtesies, Dekker thought. That in a strange way seemed ominous; Sunderland didn’t look angry, rather worn and worried and, by some strange impression, regretful.

That disturbed him too.

“Mr. Dekker. Coffee?”

“No, sir, thank you. I just had breakfast.”

“Good. you have an appetite—have a seat, there. —I confess mine hasn’t been much the last while.”

He made the chair, sank into it. “I know ‘sorry’ doesn’t cover it. I shouldn’t have dumped the tanks.”

“We wouldn’t have you if you hadn’t; bulkhead wouldn’t have stood it. Tried to tell you to do it. Don’t know if you heard.”

He shook his head. “No, sir.” And thought, Just not enough hands. Not enough time.

“Things were going pretty fast, weren’t they?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Things have been going pretty hot and hard here, too. You know about the ship coming.”

“Yessir.” He felt light-headed– gdifference. Sitting down and standing up could do that.

“Took some talking. But I didn’t seriously figure they were going to let us go down. The EC wouldn’t. R2-23 was an option—best we had without the EC’s help, I’m sure you were following that, and a couple of exotic, chancy possibilities that we really didn’t want to get down to, but when they called us this morning and told us the R2-23 computer was down… I had a good idea that ship was going to move. I had a good idea they had it calc’ed down to the fine figures and they were going to carry it live on vid. Clear to Sol. The EC doesn’t want us in the Well. Badmedia, Mr. Dekker. Bad media with the miners. They’ve resorbed ASTEX, you’ve heard that, Towney’s dismissed… a lot of changes, a lot of them for the better. We can work with the contractors. We can work with the EC. We can work with the UDC. They know that. They just wanted the best deal they could get.”

The captain called him in to talk politics?

Hell. What’s he getting to.

“We’ve got the numbers on the accident,” Sunderland said. “I don’t know how much you’ve been told…”

“I’m told you’d found her weeks before you reported it.” He’d found that out this morning, from Ben, and it was on its way to making him mad. “You didn’t tell us, you let us go clear into prep, didn’t warn us—”

“Didn’t have any idea how you’d react– whetheryou could keep it together and do business as usual. Didn’t know, frankly, whether Aboujib was going to jump our way or not. We thought so. But she’s a hair trigger in a situation like this. And we were pushing for all the time we could, to get at records we needed. We knew about the bumping. We knew there was a miner missing. We were already comparing charts and finding discrepancies when Athensfound your partner. We knew you were going out—quite frankly, we waited because we were still doing the legal prep. Sam Ford—you met Ford—was down there making sure the t’s were crossed and the i’s were dotted: when you go up against the company in a lawsuit, you’d better not have a loophole. We advised Aboujib, we set everything up for a quiet transfer hours before the thing went out over the com, we were going to get you quietly up to the dock, shuttle you aboard where they couldn’t get at you and get some essential changes out of the company—I’m being altogether honest with you now—while we were helping you pursue your case against the company. Unfortunately—”

“I took a walk.”

“Not that it mattered, I’m afraid, at least in the majority of what happened. We factored in the company’s stupidity—we expected the military to involve themselves, but not– not that an EC order to resorb the company was already lying on FleetCommander’s desk, waiting for any legal excuse it could, frankly, arrange. Theywere preparing a general audit of the company, to do it under one provision, but there was an emergency clause in the charter, that had to do with the threat to operations; and there is the Defense Act, that would let the military outright seize control if things were falling apart. And they were ready—ready because of the labor situation, ready because they thought the managers might try to destroy records—”

“They did.”

“They tried. We had one piece. There were others. FleetCommander had that carrier fueled. We’d gotten that rumor. We didn’t like what we were hearing. We knew when we did move we’d be dealing with the Fleet on a legal level—we even expected a confrontation at the dock. But not that they’d be as fast as they were and not that they had the legal documents to take control of the company without a time-lagged information exchange with Earth. That was eight to ten hours we turned out not to have. They had their people on R2, they had weapons on their transport, they turned out and they took the dock and our shuttle crew, and when that happened we were in deep trouble. But it hasshaken out: we didn’t anticipate dealing with the UDC this fast—but we’ve gotten what we were trying to force: we’re dealing directly with the parent corporation, now, and very anxious defense contractors andthe Fleet, all of whom have a budget and absolutely no personnel who can do what we do—efficiently. We can meet their quotas. We. The miners andthe Shepherds. And the ‘drivers, who haveto come into line. Ultimately they have to. That’s where it stands.”

“Morrie Bird’s dead. A lot of people are dead.”

“We regret that. We regret that very sincerely. But we’re not defense experts. We fought with what we had, the best way we knew. People werebeing killed. The way your partner was killed. You understand? ASTEX was killing miners, killing us—ultimately something would have happened. Something possibly with worse loss of life. With one of the refineries going.”

He believed that, at least. He thought about it. Thought about the system the way it was and didn’t believe the military was going to be better. “Bastards could have pulled us back ten hours ago,” he said. “Are they better than Towney?”

“No. But they’re saner.”

“They let us fall for ten hours—”

“Part of the game, Mr. Dekker. We fall toward the Well at a given acceleration… their negotiation team meanwhile meets with ours, they won’t get the beam tracking system working, the EC is hours time-lagged and not talking to us, and everybody pretends they’re not going to reach a compromise. I’ve been through too many years of this to believe it would go any differently than, ultimately, it did. Hair’s gone gray a long time ago—between the Well and the shit from ASTEX. Last few went this morning til we knew that ship was moving. But we were fairly sure. All along, all of us were fairly sure.”

“Yessir,” he said, in Sunderland’s wait for a reaction. Adrenaline was running high, there was no place to send it. He’d gotten the rules by now. They included not expressing opinions to Shepherd captains. He looked somewhere past Sunderland’s shoulder, seeing Meg and that dockside, and the blood floating there. Seeing Bird, in the lift-car. Ben covered with blood.

“I’d like, for the record, Mr. Dekker, to have your version of what happened out there, with Industry.”

“God, I’ve told it. Doesn’t anybodyhave the record?”

“Just in brief. For a record ASTEX hasn’t touched.”

That was understandable, at least. He drew a wider breath, leaned back in the chair, recited it all again. “We found a rock, we went for it, the ‘driver went too, and we figured he was going to try to beat us to it. And maybe muscle us off if he didn’t. So we wanted a sample on our ship before BM told us to get out. But they didn’t do that. They ran us down.”

“Bumped you.”

“No damn bump. Sir.”

“I know that. I know other details, if you want them.”

“All right. Then what the hell were they doing?”

“Trying to stop an independent from the biggest find in years. Trying to keep the company from a major pay-out– that could have made the difference between profit and loss that quarter—”

“God.”

“What you may not know, or may not have thought about—’drivers keep track of miners—they have allthe charts. They are a Base. And you moved, I’m guessing—on your own engines. Maybe you made quite a bit of v, on quite a long run.”

Another piece of memory clicked.

“True?”

He nodded, seeing in his mind all the instruments of a tracking station, a long, long move for a miner, with no request for a beam. Anomaly. Cory’d suspected BM. They hadn’t thought about a ‘driver monitoring what they were doing. BM did. But you could move in a sector without saying… if you could do it on your own engines.

Stupid, he thought, the other side of experience. Fatally stupid. But…

“They could have ordered us off. They could have claimed it on optics.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because—because Cory said they might not log it. They might just claim the ‘driver had it first.”

“Politics. Politics. They didlog it. They gave it a number.”

“Then why didn’t they call us and tell us? We saw them moving. But BM didn’t tell us a damned thing—not ‘They’ve got it,’ not ‘Pull back,’ not—”

“They wantedthat ‘driver to beat you there. Crayton’s office had stepped in and said they shouldn’t have logged it that way, they should undo it because they hadn’t made a policy decision yet. They’d called Legal Affairs and asked for advice. We can’t reconstruct all of it: the military’s sitting on those records—but what I guess is there was a ‘driver damned determined to get there; BM was waffling—trying to figure out how to solve it, finally figuring they were in a situation– nobodybelieves BM. Nobody’d believe you weren’t screwed. It’d be all over the ‘deck at Rl, one opinion in management was afraid it would touch off trouble, another said otherwise—they went ass-backwards into ‘letting the local base handle it’… that’s BM code for the shit’s on the captain. ‘Use your discretion,’ is the way they word it. That means do something illegal.”

He heard the tone of voice, he looked into neutral pale eyes in a lean, aged face and thought: This is a man who’s been put in that position…

“They just hushed it all,” Sunderland said. “They left it to the ‘driver. They didn’t makea policy decision. And hewas under communication blackout, because that’s the way things go when you’re ‘handling it’ for the company. The consensus was you’d spook and run.”

“They didn’t know my partner.”

“Extraordinary young woman, by what I know. Extraordinarily determined. Did you call it on optics? Did you try that?”

(—we just use the fuel, Cory had said. Trusting BM to get them home.)

“We were close enough we could get an assay sample before they got there. They weren’t talking to us. We figured they’d pull something with the records, so it just didn’t damn well matter. We thought they’d brake, that’d give us the time. And if we had the sample aboard—and our log against theirs of when we moved—we could make a case. We knew—we were sure BM knew what was going on. We didn’t expect they’d run right over us.”

“You understand bumpings? You know the game?”

The man thought he was a fool. There was “poor, stupid kids” in his voice. He set his jaw and said, “I’ve heard. I’d heard then.”

“Usual is a low– vnudge, usually near the Refineries. Like a bad dock. Usually it’s their tenders, just give you a scrape, make you spend time checking damage. But this time you’d beat him. You’d outdone his best speed even with a beam-assist. And his ass was on the line with the company. No time for nudges from his tenders. They didn’t want a sample in your hands. If you had it, they wanted it dumped. Radio silence—from his side. Nothing to get on record. So he kept on course—had it all figured, closest pass he dared, bearing in mind you don’t brake those sumbitches by the seat of your pants. Scare hell out of you. Get you so scared you’d do anything he said. But you moved towardhis path, didn’t you? And his Helm hadn’t calc’ed that eventuality.”

“What was I supposedto do?”

“Most would get out of the way.”

“My partner was out there!”

“Some might. Some might run all the way to elsewhere. Maybe just tell BM there’d been an accident. Maybe have a ‘driver tender claim a rescue.”

“Hell!” But he’d known—known it wasn’t quite a collision course. He’d known they were trying to shake him, he’d called their bluff—

They’d called his.

“Damn single correction,” he muttered. “All they had to do. Fire the directionals and brake. Hell, he’d already braked off the beam, he was coming in well inside his maneuvering limits. He was as able to stop as I was.”

“Their Helm was Belter. And that’s a class A ship. Automated to the hilt. You understand me? Didn’t even remotely occur to an Institute cut-rate a move like that was a choice– hewouldn’t, so he didn’t have it laid into his computer in advance. Not the directionals. Without it, running on auto—the jets won’t fire if you don’t take the autopilot off. He hit the jets, all right. With the autopilot on. Nothing. Some projection on the ship hit you.”