C. J. Cherryh - Company Wars 01 - Heavy Time

Heavy Time

Caroline J Cherryh

[Alliance-Union 01]

EBook Design Group digital back-up edition v1 HTML

May 1, 2003

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CONTENTS

1| 2| 3| 4| 5| 6| 7| 8| 9| 10| 11| 12| 13| 14| 15| 16| 17| 18| 19|

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 soul: 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.

So when they’d advised Base they wanted to move out of their assigned sector

on a possible ship in distress, Mama had taken a nervous long time about giving

them that permission. BM—Belt Management—was a sullen bitch at best, and you

never tried to tell Mama you were doing something purely Al-truistic. Mama didn’t,

in principle, believe that, no’m. Mama was suspicious and Mama took time to check

the records of one Morris Bird and Benjamin Pollard and the miner ship Trinidad to

find out if Trinidad or either of her present crew had demonstrated any odd

behaviors or made any odd investments in the recent past.

They could use their radio meanwhile to talk to the beep. Mama would permit

that.

And evidently Mama finally believed what they heard—a ’driver ship fire-path

crossed the charts she sent, which might well explain an accident out there, and that

could make a body a little less anxious to go chasing that signal, but it seemed a little

late now to beg off: they had the charts, they’d seen the situation, they couldn’t back

down with lives at stake, and Mama had set all the machinery in motion to have them

check It out.

Right.

Mama couldn’t do a thing for them if it did turn out to be some kind of trouble.

Mama had indicated she had no information to give them on anybody overdue or off

course, and that was damned odd. The natural next thought was the military—they

asked Mama about that, but Mama just said Negative from Fleet Command.

Meanwhile that beep went on.

So Mama redirected a beam off the R2-8 relay, boosted them up along what

Mama’s charts assured them was a good safe course, and they chased the signal

with the new charts Mama fed them, using the ’scope on all sides for rocks or

non-rocks along the way—there was a good reward if you could prove a flaw in

Mama’s charts; if you had the charts legally, then you could work on them: that was

the Rule.

At this speed you just prayed God the flaw didn’t turn up directly in your path.

But as sectors went it was the Big Empty out here, nothing but a couple of

company tags and one freerunner’s for a long, long trip. Mama’s charts were

stultifyingly accurate… except the source of the beep, which seemed to be a weak

signal. That was Mama’s considered current opinion.

Meaning it was close.

Fourteen nervous days of this, all the while knowing you could make a big, bright

fireball with depressingly little warning.

Naturally in the middle of supper/breakfast and shift change, the radar finally went

blip! on something not on its chart, and Bird scalded himself with coffee.

The blip, when they saw it on the scope, did match the signal source.

“Advise Mama?” Ben said.

Bird bit his lip, thinking about lives, Mama’s notoriously slow decisions, and

mulling over the regulations that might apply. “Let’s just get the optics fined down.

No, we got no real news yet. We’re doing what Mama told us to do. Looks like we

can brake without her help. No great differential. And I seriously don’t want Mama’s

advice while we’re working that mother. That’s going to be a bitch as is.”

“You got it,” Ben said with a nervous little exhalation. Ben set his fingers on the

keys and started figuring.

“Looks like it caught a rock,” Bird said, pointing out that deep shadow in the

middle of what ought to be the number one external tank.

“Looks.” Ben had been cheerful ever since optics had confirmed the shape as a

miner craft. “Sure doesn’t look healthy.”

“It sure doesn’t look good. Let’s try for another still, see if we can process up a

serial number on that poor sod.”

“You got it,” Ben said.

They crept up on it. They put a steady hail on ship-to-ship—having that

permission—and kept getting nothing but that tumble-modulated beep.

It was no pretty picture when they finally had it lit up in their spots.

“One hell of an impact,” Ben muttered. “Maybe a high-v rock.”

“Could be. God, both tanks are blown, right there, see? That one’s got it right

along the side.”

“Those guys had no luck.”

“Sudden. Bad angle. Lot of g’s.”

“Bash on one side. Explosion on the other. Maybe it threw them into a rock.”

“Dunno. Either one alone—God help ’em—maybe 10 real sudden g’s.”

“Real sudden acquaintance with the bulkhead. Rearrange your face real good.”

“Wouldn’t know what hit ’em.”

“Suppose that ’driver did bump a pebble out?”

“Could be. Cosmic bad luck, in all this empty. Talk about having your name on it.

What do they say the odds are?”

“Hundred percent for these guys.”

Another image capture. White glared across the cameras, a blur of reflected light,

painted serial designation.

“Shit, that’s a One’er number! One’er Eighty-four Zebra…”

Not from their Base. Outside their zone. Strangers from across the line.

The tumble carried the lock access toward their lights. Bird said, “Hatch looks all

right.”

“You got no notion to be going in there.”

“Yep.”

“Bird, love of God, there’s no answer.”

“Maybe their receiver’s out. Maybe they lost their radio altogether. Maybe they’re

too banged up to answer.”

“Maybe they’re dead. You don’t need to go in there!”

“Yep. But I’m going to.”

“I’m not.”

“Salvage rights, Ben-me-lad. I thought we were partners.”

“Shit.”

It was a routine operation for a miner to stop a spin: and most rocks did

tumble—but the tumble of a spindle-shaped object their own size and, except the

ruptured tanks, their own mass, was one real touchy bitch.

It was out with the arm and the brusher, and just keep contacting the thing til you

got one and the other motion off it, while the gyros handled the yaw and the

pitch—bleeding money with every burst of the jets. But you did this uncounted times

for thirty-odd years, and you learned a certain touch. A trailing cable whacked them

and scared Ben to hell, and it was a long sweaty time later before they had the

motion off the thing, a longer time yet til they had the white bullseye beside the

stranger’s hatch centered in their docking sight.

But after all the difficulty before, it was a gentle touch.

Grapples clicked and banged.

“That’s it,” Bird said. “That’s got it.”

A long breath. Ben said reverently: “She’s ours.”

“We don’t know that.”

“Hell, she’s salvage!”

“Right behind the bank.”

“Uh-uh. Even if it’s pure company we got a 50/50 split.”

“Unless somebody’s still in control over there.”

“Well, hell, somebody sure doesn’t look it.”

“Won’t know til we check it out, will we?”

“Come on, Bird,—shit, we don’t have to go in there, do we? This is damn

stupid.”

“Yep. And yep.” Bird unbelted, shoved himself gently out of his station, touched

a toe on the turn-pad and sailed back to the locker. “Coming?”

Ben sullenly undipped and drifted over, while Bird hauled the suits out and started

dressing.

Ben kept bitching under his breath. Bird concentrated on his equipment. Bird

always concentrated on his equipment, not where he was going, not the unpleasant

thing he was likely to find the other side of that airlock.

And most of all he didn’t let himself think what the salvage would bring on the

market.

“Five on ten she’s a dead ship,” Ben said. “Bets?”

“Could’ve knocked their transmission out. Could be a whole lot of things, Ben,

just put a small hold on that enthusiasm. Don’t go spending any money before it’s

ours.”

“It’s going to be a damn mess in there. God knows how old it is. It could even be

one of the Nouri wrecks.”

“The transmitter’s still going.”

“Transmitters can go that long.”

“Not if the lifesupport’s drawing. Six months tops. Besides, power cells and fuel

were what Nouri stripped for sure.”

Ben’s helmet drifted between them. Ben snagged it. “I’m taking the pry-bar.

We’re going to need it getting in. Lay you bets?”

Bird picked his helmet out of the air beside him and put it on: smell of old plastics

and disinfectant. Smell of a lot of hours and a lot of nasty cold moments.

This might be the start of one, the two of them squeezing into the wider than deep

airlock, which was claustrophobic enough for the one occupant it was designed for.

It truly didn’t make sense, maybe, insisting both of them get rigged up. It might

even be dangerous, putting shut locks between them both and operable systems; but

you chased a ghost signal through the Belt for days on end, you had nightmares

about some poor lost sods you’d no idea who, and you remembered all your own

close calls—well, then, you had to see it with your own eyes to exorcise your

ghosts. If you were going to be telling it to your friends back at Base (and you

would), then you wanted the feel of it and you wanted your partner able to swear to

it.

Most of all, maybe you got a little nervous when your partner started getting that

excited about money and insisting they owned that ship.

Most especially since Nouri and the crackdown, and since the company had

gotten so nitpicking touchy—you wanted witnesses able to swear in court what

you’d touched and what you’d done aboard somebody else’s ship.

Bird shut the inside hatch and pushed the buttons that started the lock cycling.

The red light came on, saying DEPRESSURIZATION, and the readout started

spieling down toward zero.

“Sal-vage,” Ben said, tinny-sounding over the suit-com. “Maybe she’ll still pitch,

do you think? If those tanks are the most of the damage, hell, they’re cans, is all.

Can’t be that expensive. We could put a mortgage on her, fix her up—the bank’ll

take a fixable ship for collateral, what do you think?”

“I think we better pay attention to where we are. We got one accident here, let’s

not make it two.”

The readout said PRESSURE EQUALIZED. Ben was doing this anxious little

bounce with his foot braced, back and forth between the two walls of the lock. But

you never rushed opening. Oxygen cost. Water cost. Out here, even with all the

working machinery aboard, heat cost. You treated those pumps and those seals like

they were made of gold, and while the safety interlocks might take almost-zero for an

answer and let you open on override, it was money flowing out when you did. You

remembered it when you saw your bills at next servicing, damn right, you did.

The readout ticked down past 5 mb toward hard vacuum, close as the

compressor could send it. Ben pushed the OUTER HATCH OPEN button, the lock

unsealed and retracted the doors and showed them the scarred, dust-darkened face

of the opposing lock. The derelict’s inside pressure gauge was dusted over. Bird

cleared it with his glove. “760 mb. She’s up full. At least it didn’t hole her.”

Ben banged soundlessly on the hatch with the steel bar and put his helmet up

against the door.

“Nada,” Ben said. “Dead in there, Bird, I’m telling you.”

“We’ll see.” Bird borrowed the bar and pried up the safety cover on the External

Access handle.

No action. No power in the ship’s auxiliary systems.

“No luck for them,” Ben said cheerfully. “Pure dead.”

Bird jimmied the derelict’s external leech panel open. “Get ours, will you?”

“Oh, shit, Bird.”

“Nerves?”

Ben didn’t answer. Ben shoved off to their own lock wall to haul the leech cord

out of its housing. It snaked in the light as he drifted back. Bird caught the collared

plug and pushed it into the derelict’s leech socket. The hull bumped and vibrated

under his glove. “She’s working,” he said.

“Sal-vage,” Ben said, on hissed breaths.

“Don’t spend it yet.”

Rhythmic hiss of breath over suit-coms, while the metal vibrated with the pump

inside. “Hey, Bird. What’s a whole ship worth?”

A man tried to be sane and sensible. A man tried to think about the poor sods

inside, an honest man broke off his prospecting and ran long, expensive risky days

for a will-of-the-wisp signal, and tried to concentrate on saving lives, not on how

much metal was in this ship or whether she was sound, or how a second ship would

set him and Ben up for life. The waiting list for leases at Refinery Two meant no ship

sat idle longer than its servicing required.

“130 mb. 70. 30. 10.” The pressure gauge ticked down. The vibration under his

hand changed. The valves parted.

Ice crystals spun and twinkled in front of them, against the sullen glow of

borrowed power. Ice formed and glistened on the inner lock surfaces—moisture

where it didn’t belong.

“Doesn’t look prosperous,” Ben said.

Bird pushed with his toe, caught a handhold next to the inner valves. His glove

skidded on ice. Ben arrived beside him, said, “Clear,” and Bird hit the HATCH

CLOSE toggle.

“Going to be slow.” He looked high in the faceplate for the 360° view, watching

the derelict’s outer doors labor shut at their backs.

“You sure about that battery?” Ben asked.

Bird hit CYCLE 2. The pumps vibrated. “Hell of a time to ask.”

“Are you sure?”

“Thirty years at this, damn right I checked.—Whoa, there.”

The HUD in the faceplate suddenly showed a yellow flasher and a dataflow

glowing green. The one on the airlock wall glowed a sullen red.

“CONTAMINANTS.” Ben let go a shaky hiss of pent breath. “It’s not going to

be pretty in there.—Bird, do we have to go through with this? There’s nothing alive

inside.”

“We’re already there. Can you sleep without knowing?”

“Damn right I’ll sleep, I’ll sleep just fine.—I don’t want to see this, Bird. Why in

hell do I got to see this?”

“Hey, we all end up the same. Carbon and nitrogen, a lot of H2O…”

“Cut it out, Bird!”

“Earth to earth. Dust to dust.” The indicators said 740/741 mb. and PRESSURE

EQUALIZED. “Lousy compressor,” Bird said, pushed the INNER HATCH OPEN

button. Air whistled, rushing past the pressure differential and an uneven seal. The

doors ground slowly back. External audio heard it. 10° C, his HUD said about the

ambient. Not quite balmy. “Heater’s going down. Heater’s always next to

last.—You do know what’s last, don’t you, Ben-me-lad?”

“The damn beeper.” Ben’s teeth were chattering—nothing wrong with Ben’s suit

heater, Bird was sure. Ben’s breath hissed raggedly over the suit-com. “So Mama

can find the salvage. Only this time we got it, Bird, come on, I don’t like this. What

if that leech pulls out?”

“Plug won’t pull out.”

“Hell, Bird!”

Inner doors labored to halfway open. Bird caught the door edge and shoved

himself and his backpack through into the faintly lit inside.

A helmetless hardsuit, trailing cables and hose, drifted slowly in front of them,

spinning in a loose, cocoon of its attachments. A cable went from its battery pack to

the panel, last sad resort: the occupants had had time to know they were in trouble,

time to drain the main batteries and the leech unit, and finally resort to this one.

Bits and pieces of gear drifted in the dimmed light, sparked bright in their

suit-spots, cords, clips—everything a tumble could knock free. Fluids made small

moons and planets.

“Mess,” Ben’s voice said. “Isn’t it?”

Bird caught the hose, tugged gently to pull the suit out of his way, and checked

the suit locker. “One suit’s missing.”

“I’m cutting that damn beeper,” Ben said. “All right?”

“Fine by me.”

Stuff everywhere. Cables. A small meteor swarm of utility clips flashed in the

light. Globules of fluid shone both oily-dark and amber. A sweater and a single

slipper danced and turned in unison like a ghost.

“Lifesupport’s flat gone,” Ben said. A locker banged in the external audio, while

Bird was checking the spinner cylinders for occupants. Empty. Likewise the shower.

A power cell floated past. Dead spare, one from the lock, one guessed.

A globule of fluid impacted Bird’s visor, leaving a chain of dark red beads.

“Come on, Bird. Let’s seal up. Let’s get out of here. They’re gone. Dead ship,

that’s all. Don’t ask what this slop is that’s floating. The ’cyclers are shot.”

C. J. Cherryh - Company Wars 01 - Heavy Time

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