Heavy Time (41 page)

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
they
were 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—
Hamilton
was fair-sized, but her
g
differential 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 on
Athens
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’ed
Athens
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
Hamilton
out 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.

Good
news?

“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’t
the 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
v
two 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
see
you—” 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
having
a 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
Hamilton
might be real scant about now.
Trinidad
was 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—
g
difference. 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.
Bad
media, 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—
whether
you 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
Athens
found 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.

They
were 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
has
shaken 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
and
the 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
and
the Shepherds. And the ’drivers, who
have
to 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
were
being 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
.”