Devil to the Belt

CHAPTER 13

HE’D spent money he didn’t want to spend, that sliced deep into all he had to live on for the next sixty days; he had Meg on one arm and Sal on the other both telling him he looked fine, and maybe he did, but he wasn’t sure his legs would hold him—wasn’t sure he wasn’t going to fall in a faint—the white noise of the ‘deck, the echoes, the crashes, rang around his skull and left him navigating blind.

Sal kept a tight grip on his left arm, Meg on the right, Sal saying in the general echoing racket that he looked severely done; and Meg, that they shouldn’t have pushed him so hard.

“We can stop in and get a bite,” Meg said.

“I just want to get home,” he said. They had his packages, they kept him on his feet—he had no idea where he was, and he looked at a company cop, just standing by a storefront, remembering the cop that had stopped him outside the hospital, the fact he was weaving—a fall now and they’d have him back in hospital, with Pranh shooting him full of trank and telling him he was crazy.

God, he wanted his room and his bed. He wanted not to have been the fool he’d been going with these people—he wanted not to have spent any money, and when he finally saw familiar territory and saw The Hole’s flashing sign, he could only think of getting through the door and through the bar and through the back door, that was all he asked.

It was dimmer inside, light was fuzzing and unfuzzing as he walked, only trying to remember what pocket he’d put his key in, and praying God he hadn’t left it in the coveralls back at that shop—

But Bird and Ben were sitting at the table they’d had at breakfast, right by the back door. Meg and Sal steered him around to their inspection and Ben looked him up and down as if he’d seen something oozing across the floor.

“ Well.”

Bird said: “Sit down, Dek.”

“I’m just going back to my room.”

“ Hisroom, it is, now,” Ben said; and Meg, with a deathgrip on his arm:

“Ease off. Man’s severely worn down. He’s been shopping.”

“Yeah.” Ben pulled a chair back. “It looks as if.—Sit down, Dekker.”

His knees were going. But Ben suddenly took as civil a tone as Ben had ever used with him, walking out on him didn’t seem a good idea, and he was afraid to turn down their overtures, for whatever they were worth—there damned sure weren’t any others. He sank into the offered chair, Meg and Sal pulled up a couple of others, and he gave up defending himself—if they wanted something, all right, anything. Ben would only beat hell out of him, that was all, and Ben didn’t look as if he was going to do that immediately, for whatever reasons. The owner—Mike—came over to get his drink order—Bird and Ben were eating supper, and Bird suggested through the general ringing in his ears that he should do the same, but it was already too late: he couldn’t get up and stand in the line over there and he wasn’t sure his stomach could handle the grease and heavy spices right now. He remembered the chips. He said, “Beer and chips.”

“Out of chips. Pretzels.”

“Yeah,” he said, “thanks. Pretzels is fine.” Maybe pretzels were a little more like food, he had no idea; and beer was more like food than rum was. Anything at this point. God.

“That all you’re going to eat?” Bird asked.

Ben nudged him in the ribs and said, “Must be flush today. Who’s buying the pretzels, Dekker?”

Meg said, “Ease off, Ben. He’s seriously zee’d.”

“That’s nothing new,” Ben said, and Bird:

“Ben.”

“I just asked who’s buying the pretzels.”

“I am,” Dekker said. “If you want any, speak up and say please.”

Ben whistled, raised a mock defense. “Oh, well, now, yeah, don’t mind if I do. God, you’re touchy.”

He’d have come off the chair and gone for Ben, under better circumstances. He didn’t have it. It wasn’t smart. But something took over then and made him say, with a set of his jaw: “I didn’t hear please.”

“Oh. Please.” An airy wave of Ben’s hand. “Passing charity around, are we, now? Paying off our debts? Did finance come in?”

“Not yet. But it will. You want my card?” He pulled it out of his pocket, tossed it onto the table. “Go check it out, Pollard. Take whatever you think I owe you.”

Ben looked at him, and Bird turned his head and called out, “Mike, get those beers right over here, Ben’s had his foot in his mouth.—Excuse him, son. You want to get the pretzels, we’ll get the drinks.”

“I’ll pay my own tab,” he said. Too harshly. He was dizzy. He wished the drinks would hurry. He wished he was safe in his room and he wished he knew how to get there before he got into it with Ben. Mistake, he told himself, serious mistake.

“We mentioned to him about the board-time,” Meg said. “He says he wants to think about it.”

“What ‘think’?” Ben said. “He’s got no bloody choice.”

“Ben,” Sal said, sounding exasperated, “shut up.”

“Well, there isn’t.” Ben was quieter, scowling. “Try to help a guy—”

“Ben,” Bird said.

“We’re buying his effin’ drink!”

“Ben,” Meg said, and slammed her palm on the table, bang, a hand with massive rings on each finger. “We talked about the lease, and the jeune fils is thinking it over, that’s his privilege. Meanwhile he’s offeredto pay his own tab, all right? So don’t carp.—Don’t pay him any mind, Dek. Sometimes you seriously got to translate Ben. He means to say Trez bon you’re on your legs again and mercy ever-so for the pretzels.”

The beer and the pretzels came. Dek picked his card off the table and shoved it at Mike, said, “Put it all on mine,” and tried not to think what his account must look like now.

Bird said: “You don’t have to do that, son.”

“It’s fine,” he said. He picked up his beer and felt Ben’s hand land heavily on his shoulder, the way Ben had done on the ship when Ben was threatening to kill him. Ben squeezed his shoulder, leaned close to touch glasses with him.

“No hard feelings,” Ben said.

He didn’t trust Ben any further than he could see both his hands. His stomach was upset, he was all but shaking as was, and the glass Ben had touched the rim of suddenly seemed like poison to him, but he sat still and took the requisite polite sip of his beer.

Ben said, “So do you want the board time?”

He looked at Bird, asking without saying anything whether this was Bird’s idea too. Bird didn’t deny it.

“Yeah,” he said.

“So there’s strings to be pulled,” Ben said. “Short as the time is, we have to expedite, as is, or you won’t get the ops test before we’re out of here—and if you don’t do those forms right, they’re not going through. Now, as happens, I know the people you need. You do the work in the shop—”

“What work?”

“Thought you’d talked to him,” Bird said.

“I said we’d mentioned it,” Meg said. “We didn’t exactly get down to that point.”

“Well, now we have,” Ben said. “There’s no other way to do it, Dek-boy. Only deal going. So you’ve agreed. We’re waiting to hear how you’re going to pay for it. Time? Or money? Or the pleasure of your company?”

They were coming at him from all sides. He wasn’t sure there wasn’t a moment missing there—his ears were ringing, they were all looking at him, Ben with his hand on his chair back—he lost things, the meds said he did; and he sat here surrounded by these people who as good as had a gun to his head. If they helped him he might have a chance—but if they figured out he did forget things, the word would get around and it was all over, he’d never get reinstated, he’d end up doing refinery work…

“You any good as a mechanic?” Bird asked.

“I kept Way Outworking.”

“As a pilot?”

“I was good.” He didn’t expect Bird would believe him. He added, self-consciously, “We weren’t broke.” Bird had seemed the best of them, Bird had kept him alive and argued for him with these people. He was desperate for Bird to take his side now. And if they robbed him, there were worse alternatives. “Cory and I had 47 k in the bank. Not counting the ship free and clear. Rl bank’s sending it, but I can’t draw on it for another fifty, sixty days.”

“47 k,” Ben jeered. “Come on, Dekker.”

He didn’t look at Ben. He looked at Bird and Sal, clasped his hands around the wet chill of the beer glass. “Cory’s mom was pretty well set. Cory had her own account—trust funds. The hour she turned 18, she took it and she called me and bought my ticket and hers. She came out from Mars, I came from Sol—we met out here and we bought the ship. Paid a hundred fifty-eight k for her. Another 40 in parts. We made a few mistakes. We hadn’t made many runs—only been out here two years. But Cory knew what she was doing. She nearly had her degree in Belt Dynamics. 28 of that 47 k we didn’t have when we came out here. We were doing pretty well.”

“Damned well.” Bird said.

“College girl,” Ben said, “come on, the company’d have snapped her up.”

“She didn’t admit to it. She didn’t want a company slot.”

“With that kind of money? She was a fool.”

“Ben,” Bird said.

“Well, she was.”

He set his jaw, madehimself patient. “She just didn’t want it. The fact is, she wanted a share in a starship.”

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Ben said.

“She wanted into the merchanters. You have to buy in. Her trust fund wasn’t enough—wasn’t enough for both of us. And she had this idea, it was all she’d listen to.”

“Why?” Sal leaned forward, chin on clasped, many-ringed hands, neon sparking fire on her metal-beaded braids. “Why, if she was rich?”

“Because,” was all the answer he could manage. There was a knot in his throat and he thought if Ben opened his mouth he’d lose it. Cory had been so damned private. Cory didn’t tell people her reasons. But they went on listening, waiting for him, so he shrugged and said, “Because she hated planets. Because her father was a deep-spacer—her mother wanted a kid, she didn’t want a husband and she didn’t want anybody in Mars Base to have that kind of claim on Cory. Cory was a solo project. Cory was her mother’s doing, start to—”

—finish. That word wouldn’t come out. He said, watching condensation trickle on the beer glass: “Didn’t even know his name. Cory sort of built on her own ideas. Stars were all she talked about. Wanted to do tech training. Her mother wouldn’t have it. So she studied astrophysics. She had the whole thing planned—getting the money, coming out here—getting us both out.”

Ben said, quietly, “Hell, if she could buy a ship, she could have gotten it faster working for the company. What’s the rate? Eighty, ninety thou to get your tax debt bought?”

And her mother there, he thought, her mother on MarsCorp board to pull strings, get her broke and get her back. But he didn’t say that. He said: “They’d have drafted me if I’d stayed at Sol. That was part of her reason. We were going together. That was the plan.”

“That crazy about you, was she?”

“Ben,” Meg said, “shut up…”

“I don’t know why everybody’s telling me to shut up. It wasn’tthe damn brightest thing she could have done. She could have gotten to Sol Station, probably bought straight into a ship with what she had—she expected to make it rich here freerunning?”

“Her mother,” he said, “wanted Cory back in college. Wanted—God only.” His stomach hurt. He had a sip of the beer to make his throat work. “She was under age. Couldn’t get an exit visa over her mother’s objection. This was as far as she could get. Til she was twenty-one.”

“The ship and 47 k in the bank,” Ben began. “What dothose sons of bitches want for a buy-in, anyway?”

“Maybe a couple hundred k apiece. With the ship, we had it for one of us, tax debt to get the visa, you’ve got to pay that off to the government before you ever get down to paying the ship share—and Cory’s was high: she had a degree. Another 70 k each to get back to Sol. I told her get out—I saw on our first run it was no good. We didn’t know how hard it was out here. We wouldn’thave done it this way—but by then we’d sunk so much into the ship… and just buying passage to Sol would eat up everything she had…”

He’d yelled at her the night before their last run, he’d said, The war’s getting crazier. They’ve got these damn exit charges, God knows when they’re going to jack them higher—if you don’t go now, there’s no telling what they’ll do next, there’s no guarantee you can getout…

He’d begged: Just leave me what’s left over. I’ll buy in on some other ship, work a few years—whatever ship you’re on will come back here. I’ll join you then—

He’d been lying about the last. She’d known he was, she’d known he didn’t want to go. And she’d known he was right, that both of them weren’t going to make it. She’d known she was going alone, sooner or later, or they were going to do what every freerunner ultimately did do—go into debt. That was why the shouting. That was why she’d burst into tears…

“—And she said?” Meg asked.

He’d lost the thread. He blinked at Meg, confused. He honestly couldn’t remember what he’d been telling them. He picked a pretzel out of the bowl, ate it without looking at them. Or answering.

Bird said, “The lad’s tired.”

“Yeah,” he said, remembered that he was behind on his medicine, remembered that the company management were all sons of bitches and theywere the ones that handed out the licenses. Even that was in their hands.

Bird reached out, thumped a grease-edged fingernail against his mug. “Want another round? A beer? On us? To sleep on?”

“You’re right,” he said. “I’m pretty tired.” He thought about his room. He thought about the bed and the medicine he was supposed to take.

All those sleeping pills…

Meg hung a hand on his right shoulder, leaned close and said, “We better get you to bed.”

He couldn’t answer. He shoved her hand off and got up and left.

“Man’s in severe pain,” Meg said under her breath, looking over her shoulder.

“Looked all right to me,” Ben said. “Looked perfectly fine, out spending money like there was no tomorrow.”

She muttered, “Yeah, add it up, Ben.” Across the table Bird looked mad. She figured Bird had somewhat to say and she shut up for several sips of beer.

Bird didn’t say anything. Ben set his elbows on the table in an attitude that said he knew he was on Bird’s bad side, but he looked mad too.

Things were going to hell fast, they were.

“Excuse us,” she said, and got up and took a pinch of Sal’s sleeve. Sal read a full scale alert and came with her over to the end of the bar where the guys couldn’t lip-read. “Aboujib, we got a severe problem.”

“Yeah. Men!”

“Easy, easy. We got a partner/partner problem developing here.”

“You know Ben’s a good lay. But he’s being a lizard.”

“I sincerely wasn’t going to say that.”

“I don’t mind saying it. I’ll bust his ass if Bird doesn’t. I toldBen what I’d carve off him if he got too forward with me. And Bird damnsure won’t take it.”

“Bird can handle him.”

“Yeah,” Sal said and got a breath. “With a wrench. I tell you, I’m not putting up with this act. And I’m not standing in the fire zone either. I vote we go out to a show, leave the boys to one room.”

Sometimes Sal made real good sense. “Yeah,” Meg said. “Sounds good.”

“I got a serious concern,” Bird said.

“Yeah, well,” Ben said, looking at the table. “Sorry about that, Bird.”

“Why’d you push on him?”

“Hell if I know,” Ben said, and didn’t know, actually. Meg and Sal came back to say they were leaving: “You guys work it out,” Sal said. And that made him madder. He watched them walk out. He had no notion where they were going, but he felt the ice on all sides of him.

“I don’t know what the hell it is,” he said without really looking at Bird. “I don’t know what it is that the guy’s got, but it seems to get in the way of people’s good sense.” He hadn’t liked this partners idea from the time Sal had showed up at the 3 deck shop telling him how dealing with Dekker was going to set them all up rich, how it was such a good idea, Dekker getting his license back and all—and he’d liked it less than that when pretty-boy came sauntering in here all manicured and looking like trouble.

Bird didn’t say anything for a while after that. Finally: “Maybe some people can’t figure out why you got it in for him.”

“Because he’s crazy!” Ben said. “Because we’re going to take this loony out there where he can get his ship back—cut the girls’ throats and run that ship back over the line…”

“You’ve been seeing those lurid vids again. What in hell’s he going to say about two more missing persons over at Rl? ‘Excuse me, they took a walk together’?”

“He doesn’t have to have a good excuse! He’s crazy! Crazy people don’t have reasons for what they do, that’s why they’re crazy!”

“They still have to explain it to Belt Management.”

“It doesn’t do Meg and Sal any fuckin’ good!”

“My money’d be on Meg and Sal.”

“Don’t be funny, Bird, it’s not funny.”

“I think it’s damned funny. We got a 95 k mortgage on Way Outwith the bank, we got nothing but dock charges on Trinidadfor the last several months, we still aren’t past inspection on the refit and we still got a filing to go before we can think about getting out of here. In case you haven’t noticed, Ben-me-lad, we could seriously use another pair of hands here. We’re bleeding money, with two ships sitting at dock.”

“Meg and Sal do just fine. We don’tknow about this guy. And we’d have had twopair of hands today if Meg and Sal weren’t out spending money on this guy. He’s trouble, Bird, he’s been trouble from the first we laid eyes on him.”

“We can always say no, if he turns out to be trouble. We got time yet at least to find it out. Let’s just put him to work, see how he gets along.”

“You can’tsay no, Bird, you got this severe problem with saying no. You crawl ass-backwards into what’s going to cost you money. If I didn’t—”

“I can say no real good, Ben, if you recall. I said no to Meg and I said no to quite a few would-be’s before I took you on. Now, you and me being partners, I give you a lot I wouldn’t give just anybody—but being partners goes both ways. And right now I’m asking you to just give me a little more line.”

“To do what? Wait until his money comes through? Then he’ll pay for his own bills? That’s real convenient, Bird, that’s real damned convenient. He doesn’t get to pay anything, he doesn’t do anything, and we’re buying his meals!”

“Ben,—”

“I don’t know why you believe him over me, that’s all!”

“Ben,—I dunno whether the gals are right about this deal: they could be. Here I am trying to figure whether I trust Dekker, and you’re acting so damn crazy I end up defending him. I can’t hardly take yourside, without having him off down the ‘deck in a fit now, can I?”

“It’d be good riddance!”

“Yeah, and what if the gals are right and this guy’s a good steady prospect?”

“Steady, hell! Bird, whoare we going to get to go out with Dekker? ‘What time is it? What time is it?’ Who’s going to put up with that?”

“The guy really got to you out there, didn’t he?”

He hatedbeing patronized. “He didn’t getto me.”

“Good,” Bird said. “Good.”

“Dammit, don’t—”

“—don’t what?”

Cut me off like that, Ben thought blackly. But what he said was, “All right, all right. We’ll see how he does the next week or so.” He took a pretzel out of the bowl. “Guy didn’t take ‘em.” Wasteful habit. It was like somebody who had money, who was used to having it. And on the thought of the 47 k Dekker claimed to have: “If he’s got the funds he claims, he’s a damned walking bank. Where’d he get it, except this rich college girl? He had a lot to gain by her dying, you know.”

“Yeah, looked like he was having a real good time out there, didn’t it?”

He hated it when Bird got surly with him. It made him figure maybe he wasn’t being reasonable.

Bird said: “The Nouri thing, you know, changed a lot. Cops with warrants to do anything they wanted, the news full of friends informing on friends… I don’t think there was half the under the table stuff going on that the company claimed—like we were some major leak in the company accounts. We weren’t. We were making it. You understand? People used to help each other, that’s what was going on, then. If you got in trouble and you needed a part, you didn’t go to the bank, you went to a friend. You could borrow under bank rates, if you kept your promises, if you ran a good operation and paid your debts—and damn sure people knew if you did. We were making it, and the company wasn’t. Now you tell me who’s the better businessmen.” Bird lifted a shoulder and took a sip of a dying beer. “Now we’ve got a generation coming off Earth with the Attitudes. We got a generation coming out of the Institute that never heard of Shakespeare—”

“God, so give me a tape, Bird! I swear I’ll listen to the sumbitch.”

Bird looked at him oddly, then reached across the table, took hold of his hand, man/woman-like, which was odder still, scarily odd, coming from Bird, from the guy he shared a ship with. Bird said, “Ben, you’re a good guy. You really are. Staythat way.”

Ben rescued his hand, shaken. “What’s that mean?”

Bird only said, in that same peculiar way, “Ben-me-lad, I’ll look you up that tape.”

Dekker stared at the ceiling and thought about a sleeping pill, thought about the whole damned bottle—but hell if he’d give the company the satisfaction.

Ben wasn’t going to let him alone. That was the way it was, that was the way it was going to be. Ben didn’t like him, and with Belters, that well could be the final word on it. Ben had taken his ship and now Ben had him down as trouble—that was the way it was going to be, too.

He didn’t know why Ben set him off like that. He didn’t know why he’d said what he had, he didn’t know why he’d talked about Cory’s business, or whether he had a chance left with them, under any terms now he’d walked out—and he didn’t know what Bird might be thinking.

If nothing else—that he and Ben together were a problem: he had no question which way Bird would go if Ben wanted him out.

And Ben talked about getting his license back, with no dollar figure on it. Everything he had, he was sure— ifthey still took him after the blow-up out there. Ben thought he was crazy, Ben thought he’d crack if he got out there again, and, honestly speaking, he wasn’t sure of himself. The deep Belt was no place to discover you’d grown scared of the dark; and handling a ship making a tag was no time to have a memory lapse, to find the next move wasn’t there—or not to remember where you were in a sequence or what you’d already done. You didn’t get other chances. The Belt didn’t give them.

He didn’t know himself what would happen when the hatch shut behind him, whether he’d panic, whether he’d be all right—whether he’d think he was all right and, the longer he was out in that ship, slowly unravel between past and present, the way he had in the shower— thatshower, the same surroundings, nothing but his current partners’ presence to anchor him in time.

Everybody seemed to be asking him to collect himself, get on with his life as if nothing had happened. It seemed to be the way everybody got by—they numbed themselves to feeling, made themselves deaf and blind to what the company got away with, just kept their mouths shut, chased what money they could get, and got used to seeing a lying sonuvabitch in the mirror every morning, because that was the only kind that had a chance in this place.

He didn’t know whether he could do that. He didn’t even know whether he could keep out of that pill drawer and stay alive tonight, or whether the gain was even worth it anymore.

Cory, he’d said that time they’d had the argument, maybe I don’t want to go. What in hell am I going to do on a starship? I failed math. I failed physics. I don’t have your brains, Cory, it was your idea all along. They won’t have work for me, I’ll be dead mass, the rest of my life, Cory. What kind of life is that?

She’d set him down, told him plain as plain he hadn’t any chance in staying, she’d told him the company was crooked, the company was screwing the freerunners, screwing the pilots, screwing everybody that worked for them. Cory had handled big money, she knew how banks worked with the big operations. She’d told him what ASTEX was doing with their electronic datacards and their policies on finds. She’d tried to explain to him exactly what that direct-deduct stuff on LOSes did to accounts and interest, and how they were skimming on the freerunners in ways that had nothing to do with rocks.

She’d said, Dek, don’t be a fool, you’ve no future here. They’re killing the freerunners, they’ll get the Shepherds in not too many years—there’s no hope here.

She’d said, Don’t ever think I’ll leave you behind…

Sal sipped her drink in the blue neon of Scorpio’s—the vid had been not-too-bad, chop and slash, the way Meg said, but not a long one, and as she had put it, it was way too early to chance walking in on the boys, besides which she had a word to drop on some friends next door. It was her favorite lounge—Shepherd territory, right next to the Association club—pricey, spif: you got the usual traffic of office types who went anywhere au courant on the edge of helldeck, but the Shepherd relationship with Scorpio’s was longstanding: Shepherds got the tables in the nook past the glass pillars, and Shepherd glasses came filled to the brim, no shorting and no extra water, either.

Not a place they could afford as a steady habit, damn sure, not unless they picked up some guys with Shepherd-level finance, and they weren’t shopping to do that this time.

No danger of walk-up offers this side of those pillars either, thank God: the women to men ratio on helldeck meant Shepherds were used to being courted, not the other way around, and two women who weren’t signaling didn’t get the pests that made sane conversation impossible in a lot of the cheaper bars, God, you got ‘em in restaurants, in vid show doorways—this shift some R&R bunch was in from the shipyard, and the soldier-boys on leave down at the vid were the damn-all worst. They’d had a glut of male fools for the last few hours and Scorpio’s was a refuge worth the tab, in her own considered opinion.

“I tell you,” she said over an absolutely genuine margarit, “my instinct would be to take this Dek a tour before we go out, you know, personal, just friendly. Rattle him and see what shakes. I think that’s a serious safety question. But we got Ben in the gears, damn ‘im.”

“You want my opinion, Aboujib?”

“Po-sess-ive?”

“Vir-gin, Aboujib. You’re probably the first that ever asked him.”

“Hell, he’s that way with Bird!”

“Yeah.”

She saw what Meg was saying, then. “That way about a lot of things, isn’t he?”

Meg stirred her drink with the little plastic straw. “Man’s got a serious problem. Hasn’t cost us yet. But it’s to worry about. Ni-kulturny, what he pulled on Bird tonight.”

“Ochin,” Sal agreed with an uncomfortable twitch of her shoulders, sipping her margarit, thinking how they weren’t doing as ordinaire with Ben, how if it was anybody else but the best numbers man on R2, she’d have handed him off to Meg—switch and dump, the old disconnection technique. But, dammit, Ben was special, the absolute best, and Meg with Ben didn’t do them any good. Meg didn’t know the right questions and she didn’t do the calc as well.

Besides which it wasn’t Meg who made Ben crazy enough to show her things the Institute hadn’t, that he’dfigured, that he wouldn’t hand out to anybody. She’d never met a case like Ben—you felt simpatico with him one minute and the next you wanted to break his neck. She’d never met anybody she trustedthe way she did Ben—except Meg and Bird; Ben was the only one but Meg and Bird she’d feel safe going EV with—and, counting his crazy behavior, she couldn’t figure that out.

At least he wasn’t like the greasy sumbitch who’d threatened not to let her back in the ship unless she did him special favors. Numbers men were always at a disadvantage, always got the problems until you were as good as Ben, that nobody wanted to lose. Meg had never been through that particular trouble—a numbers man didn’t dare antagonize his pilot, if he had any sense; and he didn’t send his pilot walkabout either—but a numbers man definitely could get out with some severely strange people in this business; and if you had some few partners you were sure of, you didn’t let them go—didn’t try to run their lives for them, not if you wanted all your fingers back, but hell if you wouldn’t go to any length to hold on to them, to keep things the way they were.

Kill somebody? If it came to it, if you ever would—then you would. And trying to keep two tallish young guys from killing each other out there…

“What are we going to do, Kady?”

Meg pursed her lips. “Just what we’re doing. Let Bird handle it.”

Someone brushed by their table. Touched her shoulder. “Aboujib?”

God. A walk-up? Meg’s frown was instant. Sal looked around and up an expensive jacket at a Shepherd—one of Sunderland’s crew, friend of Mitch’s—she didn’t know the name. He said, very quickly, slipping something into her pocket, “That question you left?”

“Yeah,” she said—different problem. Sameproblem. She held her breath. Felt something flat and round and plastic in her pocket, her heart going doubletime.

“This is Kady?”

“Yeah,” she said. “You can say.”

“Word is, problem’s gone major. You’re tagged with it. Go with it the way you said. Time’s welcome. But when you get your launch date… you let us know. Very seriously.”

The guy walked off then.

God.

“What the hell?” Meg asked.

“I dunno,” she said, thinking about a shadowy ‘driver sitting out there spitting chunks at the Well. And MamBitch, who prepared the charts andtheir courses, and shoved them up to vand braked them. “I dunno.” Her stomach felt, of a sudden, as if she’d swallowed something very cold.

“Is that what I think I heard?” Meg asked. “They think we could be in some kind of danger?”

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, God, great!”

“Let’s not panic.”

“Of course let’s not panic. I don’t effin’ like the stakes all of a sudden.”

She leaned forward on the table, pitched her voice as low as would still carry. “Meg. They’re not going to let us run into trouble.”

“Yeah,” Meg whispered back. “Let’s not hear ‘run into.’ I don’t like the words I’m hearing. I don’t like this ‘Go with it.’ Maybe I want a little more information than we’re getting into.”

“They’re saying we’re doing the right thing—”

“Yeah, doing the right thing. We can be fuckin’ martyrs out there, is that what they want?”

She reached across the table and grabbed Meg’s hand, scared Meg would bolt on her. “We got a real chance here—”

“What real chance? Chance your high and mighty friends are going to hold us a nice funeral? Chance we can collect the karma and they stay clean?”

“Meg, I can get you in.”

“Screw that.” Meg jerked her hand back. “I don’t take their charity.”

“Meg. For God’s sake don’t blow it.”

Meg set her jaw. Took several slow breaths, the way she would when she was mad. “What’s their guarantee? Shit, we could be bugged here—”

Sal took the flat plastic out of her coat pocket, which had a little green light showing. Palmed it, fast.

“God,” Meg groaned.

“They’re ahead of the game. They’re not going to let us walk into it.”

“Oh, you’ve got a lot of faith in them. That’s contraband, dammit!”

“Meg, they’re not fools.”

“They must think we are.”

“We made them an offer, Meg, they’re sayingthey’re agreeing. They’re warning us.”

“Yeah,’tagged with him.’ I like that. I really like that.”

“Meg.” She couldn’t lay it out better than Meg already knew it. Meg looked like murder.

But Meg said finally: “So we’re tagged with him.—Are we talking about giving up that lease?”

The answer was yes. Meg knew it. Meg knew it upside and down.

“Shit,” Meg said.

“We’ve got what they want. They wanthim. They paid their debts. That’s what they’re saying. They’re asking us take a risk, and we’re in, Meg, they’re making us an offer. If we screw ‘em on this—or if we back out now—”

She was down to begging. There were pulls in too many directions if Meg skitted out on this one. God, everything she wanted, everything. “A Shepherd berth, Meg. One last run. We get Dek out in the big quiet for a few months and that’s it. Ben and Bird set up with those ships. Karma paid. We’re getting outof here, Meg. A chance at a realship. Both of us.”

Thatscored with Meg. Only thing that could. Meg’s face got madder. Finally Meg said: “Hell if. Wake up, Aboujib.”

“Hell if not. This is big, Meg, dammit, this is it.”

Meg shook her head. But it meant yes. All right. We’re going to be fools.

“You better be right, Aboujib.—And that jeune fils damn well better get his bearings. Fast. If they’re going to make a case on him—he sincerely better not be crazy.”