THE BELTERS’ WAR

THE BELTERS’ WAR

The beginning of a novel

Christopher Stasheff

CHAPTER 1

The asteroid came hurtling out of space straight at Kit, a pitted chunk of nickel-iron five times her size. She hauled back on the handlebars, kicking the right stirrup for acceleration. The sled’s engine roared beneath the saddle and she howled with glee as her rocket sled shot up, just in time to let the boulder barrel by beneath. She glanced at the rear-view screen, centering the cross hairs on the huge rock, then turned her sled and triggered her tractor beam. On the screen, she saw the huge rock slow and swerve as the beam caught it, then glanced ahead in time to see a rock the size of her head barreling right toward her.

The sled shuddered to the constant rain of micro-meteorite pebbles, striking her force field and losing their velocity to fall away and drift, but something the size of her head might overload the field and collapse it, leaving her exposed for a minute or so. She triggered the other thumb button and a pencil-thin beam of emerald light shot out ahead of her. She dragged a finger across the aiming pad and the beam rose to center on the rock, drilling a hole clear through it. She hit the thumb button again and the laser brightened as its strength increased ten times, blowing the rock apart into gravel. Kit yodeled with delight and tilted the sled upward, kicking her right foot for more acceleration again, but a glow at the edge of her vision caught her eye. She turned to see it once more—the flare of a laser striking ore. She cursed and dodged another boulder, weaving her way toward the glow. No one else from Mr. Trail's would be out here today, and she was only a kilometer or two from Flanagan's sector.

She rounded a boulder twice her size and saw the glow again, this time at the end of a beam of ruby light spearing out from a long-snouted welding laser in the hand of a figure riding a rocket sled like hers, but in Flanagan's colors—orange, black, and tan—carving his logo onto one of Mr. Trail's asteroids! She shouted a curse but left her mic silent—she needed whatever element of surprise she could get. She ducked behind a rock not much bigger than she was, then darted to another and another, kilometer by kilometer, always closer. He never looked up, intent on his work—no wonder; overburns could be tricky. Between asteroids, Kit had time to study the rider—helmet covered in irregular splotches of different shades of green and yellow, a camouflage pattern that worked well in forests back on Earth but only made the drover stand out against the black-and-white background of space and asteroids. Of course, that was the idea—she knew just by the paint job that it was Sam Ollinger, almost as nasty a piece of work as his boss Flanagan.

That made her aim easier. He was one she could be sure it was right to shoot at.

She swerved around a final asteroid and had open space between herself and Ollinger, just as his laser winked out and he turned his sled to aim the tractor beam at the rock. Flanagan's logo glowed with heat, an 8 and an E, overburned on Mr. Trail's 3L. It wasn't all that good, but if you didn't look too close, you wouldn't know.

Kit did. She pulled the body-laser from its holster on her thigh and stabbed the trigger stud. The beam shot out, drawing a zigzag across the 8F. A shout of anger rang inside her helmet from the all-frequencies radio as the sled spun toward her, a shout that turned into words. "You! Get back, Kit Kildare! This rock's for Flanagan now!"

"No!" She activated her transmit function. "Not if it's in Mr. Trail's sector! Back to your own side of the line, Ollinger!"

"The hell you say! If it drifted into Flanagan's sector, it's his!"

"It didn't drift in with his logo on it already."

"Yeah, but only you and I know that." Ollinger's laser stabbed at her.

But Kit was already rolling to the side, behind the asteroid she'd just rounded. Ollinger shouted in anger and, through her earphone, she could hear his rocket roar. She dodged over behind a bigger asteroid, finger on the trigger button, waiting, waiting...

Ollinger came up over the top of the asteroid she'd just left, laser a line of ruby light that would have drilled her if she'd been there. In a rage, she flipped hers to full power and triggered it at him.

He swerved before he could have seen the glow and it only burned off the back tip of one of his runners. Even so, Ollinger bellowed in rage, turning to sweep his laser toward her, but Kit was already diving. Rock boiled behind her as she dodged a figure-eight around a double asteroid, then shot up over the top to see Ollinger down between two others. Grinning, she turned to center her tractor beam on the far one and hit the acceleration pedal. Her sled stayed still for a few seconds, fighting inertia; then the boulder started moving. It was up to forty kilometers per hour by the time she let go and rolled her sled to the right and down—just as a scarlet beam gouged the rock where she’d been.

Ollinger noticed the huge chunk of basalt shooting toward him. He was right between rock and nickel-iron, an even bigger asteroid behind him. With a howl of fear, he shot straight up just in time to clear the collision.

Kit was down behind another asteroid, grappling her sled to it for cover as she darted furious glances around her, trying to find the second shooter.

The shooter found her first, racing over the top of the asteroid and blasting down at Kit with her sled’s laser—much more powerful than the hand laser Kit had been using. Kit recognized the floral pattern on her helmet— Laurel Farrier. She was trying a tricky shot, though, and the ruby beam only scoured the rock next to Kit, who swung away on her sled, veered at a right angle, and shot back at Laurel. Before the woman could trigger her laser, though, Kit took the opportunity to give her another laser-burst and, by good luck, fused the barrel of her sled’s laser. Lucy howled an obscenity, but she knew she was defenseless. Then Ollinger soared overhead, work laser leveled at the younger woman, but Kit hit her trigger stud first. Lucky shot—the beam drilled straight through the man’s helmet. Frozen air jetted out in a plume and Ollinger fell back over his saddle. The sled’s dead-man switch cut its power, staying close to Ollinger, but the older man didn’t move, only floated in space. Maybe Kit had hit his head, maybe she hadn’t, but she hadn’t had much choice—kill or be killed. Ollinger might be dead or he might not, but Kit wasn’t going to mourn him.

Kit turned to check on Laurel, but the twin rocks had caught her in the midriff, and her body was surrounded by mist—air that had escaped her suit before the automatic repair function had patched the hole. She had fallen forward, her body caught on the handlebars, by great good luck pointing to Flanagan’s sector. Her sled moved off toward it under minimum power.

Kit let her go, deciding against a last and definitely mortal shot—not that she was reluctant to kill; she'd done it before when she was threatened. But it was a last-ditch tactic; she would only drill a human being if he were actually attacking her. One who was running, she could laugh at and let go. Still, the town’s peacekeeper might not see it that way.

Flanagan would want revenge, of course, and so would Ollinger and Laurel, if they survived—not very likely; they would drift in space forever unless somebody found them, and with the distance between asteroids, that wasn’t likely. If they beat the odds and lived, she knew they would meet again. Maybe it wasn't smart to let Ollinger go...

She knew she couldn't kill in cold blood, though. She considered hitting the sled’s auto-return switch, which would make the navigation computer retrace the record of its day’s journey and take her back by the most direct route possible. First, though, she watched as the two drovers crossed back over to their own side of the line and knew she didn’t need to hurry to establish an alibi. She was alive! Two riders had tried to kill her, but she was alive and they were dead!

She tried to calm the elation and let the adrenaline ebb, but it was hard not to celebrate survival. When her breathing had slowed to normal, she turned her sled and rocketed back to the asteroid that had started this whole fight. She scoured Flanagan's logo off the side of the rock. She had to track it as it careened through the other asteroids, but she managed to obliterate Flanagan's logo completely. She didn't know she had performed a feat of incredible marksmanship, only that she was doing her job. Pulling the big asteroid in a semi-circle, she turned her sled toward Home Bend, the huge asteroid in the center of Trail's sector, dragging the asteroid with her.

She liked Trail. Too old for her, of course—old enough to be her father—but he was handsome in a rough-cut way, tall and lean and a better rock-catcher than any of his riders. If she'd met him when he was her age...

She shook the thought away. Trail had given her a job when no one else would take a chance on a teenager wanted for murder, a job doing what she loved—dodging asteroids while she looked for ones big enough to bring in; that was all she needed of him.

Space-going mountains were kilometers apart, but the asteroid belt were wasn't completely free of space junk, so she had plenty of time to dodge and weave around the big rocks, and had a clear field to blow up three more too big for her force-shield but too small and fast to dodge. Then the Mr. Trail’s main asteroid, Home Bend, swelled in her forward viewscreen and she slid the handlebars forward, pressing her left foot against the stirrup to brake as her sled arced down toward the minor mountain under the glittering bubble of its force field. On the far side, she could see another sled homing, its rider visible through the force-field dome; she knew him by the buff of his space suit blending into the leopard spots painted on his helmet—Charlie, handsome and brawny, whose eyes turned hot whenever he looked at her, making her melt inside.

Hands off, she told herself sternly. Maybe a year or two from now, after she turned twenty-one—but for now, the boy who had romanced her beneath the moons of Mars and spurned her when she wouldn't go all the way, was all she needed from men.

What are you waiting for? she asked herself, but she zoomed in her helmet's viewer for a close look at Charlie's face and knew it wasn't him. Might be fun, but not the magic she'd heard about from the other girls. Wait for the right one.

Still, she had painted her own helmet in zebra stripes, partly because she'd been issued a white space suit, partly as a challenge to the leopard—might as well give it something tasty to chase.

"Coming in, Kit?" Skurly's voice asked from her helmet's earphones.

"Coming in with a big fish," Kit confirmed. "Not the biggest, maybe, but worth keeping." Actually, the boulder was almost the limit; much bigger would have been too much for a rocket sled to haul.

"So I see." A section of the forcefield pen on the near side of the huge asteroid stopped glittering, then disappeared completely. Kit braked until she was barely drifting toward the air lock.

The boulder behind her cleared the hatch, and the force field strengthened its glitter again. Kit braked the sled to a halt and turned it toward the asteroid as she pressed the button to lower her sled's force field and drew her welding laser to carve another number 3 and capital L in its other flank.

"Why 3L, Mr. Trail?" she had asked on her first day of work.

The tanned, lined face smiled down at her. "You play poker, Ms. Kit?"

"Of course," Kit grinned. "Everybody does."

"Okay," Trail said. "What do poker players call a three?"

"A trey." Kit frowned; then her face lit up as she put the sounds together. "Trey - L. Trail!"

Trail nodded, smiling, pleased. "Easy when you think of it, isn't it, Ms. Kit?"

"Just ‘Kit,’ Mr. Trail."

But nobody ever called Trail by his first name. She wasn't sure he had one.

Now there he stood, waiting inside the transparent door of the airlock. Good, he was back from Ceres, where he’d been signing that contract with the steel company—good, because the force-field pen was almost full of asteroids, and it was time for a drive. Turning away, Kit gave the rocket a short burst, just enough to take it to the rack by the door, and dismounted, swinging her leg over the barrel of the engine, then pulled the sled into its bay. Wheels weren’t much use on the rocky, uneven surface of an asteroid, but the runners skidded nicely over the high groves, especially on the ice boulders. She nudged the sled up against the stanchion and the bar fell to lock the right front runner and keep the sled from drifting off into space. Then she grabbed the hand rail and stepped off to float down to the surface of Home Bend, though she had to pull on the pole some to do it—not much gravity on an asteroid—and hit the button to open the airlock door.

The hatch swung open before her, then shut behind her as air hissed in. When the pressure gauge was up to "safe," she took off her helmet and shook her hair out to float in an auburn cloud around her. The level in the gauge kept rising until the hiss of air cut off and the inner door swung open. She stepped through, and the artificial gravity of Home Bend hit as the air lock swung shut behind her.

She felt leaden, as though lifting a foot was hard work. She'd get used to it in a few minutes, she knew, and reminded herself that fighting gravity was what made you strong.

But who was this handsome stranger next to Trail? She stared, then remembered her manners. "Sorry, mister—we don't get many new faces around here."

"Hope it's not a face you'll mind seeing." The stranger grinned and held out a hand. "I'm Spindrift."

Kit took his hand and felt a jolt of electricity surge up her arm. She shook once and let go, alarmed, but her hand still tingled, and staring into Spindrift’s eyes, she felt that inside melting begin again, only much worse than with Charlie.

He wasn't all that handsome, was he? Wavy blond hair, strong jaw, full lips in an easy smile, big blue eyes... Yes, he was all that handsome, though maybe he didn't know it—there was something bashful about him, almost shy. He was maybe five years older than Kit—mid-twenties, and she knew without question that he was the one.

Didn't look like he knew it about her, though.

"Pleased to meet you, Ms. Kit." His voice was rich and warm.

"Y - you too," she answered, and cursed her face for growing hot.

"Mr. Spindrift's been telling me that he wants to buy a sector of his own," Trail said.

Kit looked up at the young man in surprise. He was too young to have earned that much money on his own. Must have rich parents.

Then she realized that with a sector, Spindrift would need drovers to harvest the asteroids. She glanced at Trail; he gave her a tiny nod—permission to leave him and work for Spindrift. She turned back to the young man with a grin. "Sure you know what you're getting into, mister?"

Spindrift laughed. "I drove asteroids on the other side of the Belt for a year, Ms. Kit. I don't think it's all that different here."

"Kit," she said automatically, "No Ms," while her mind raced. If he really had been a drover, he had some idea of the work involved. But there was such an air of innocence about him! How could he really know what it took to run a sector?

Protective instincts rose with a suddenness that shook Kit, protective instincts she hadn't known she had. Not just to help—somebody was going to have to take care of him.

The airlock hissed behind her, and she jumped aside to let Charlie in. Big and solid with a strong jaw and wide-set brown eyes under dark unruly hair—handsome, but looking somehow rough and crude next to Spindrift. He didn't seem to realize it, though, for he took Spindrift's hand as Trail introduced them and chatted with him about droving. He moved aside easily as the airlock hissed and Jessie came in, her yellow hair tumbling about her shoulders under the sudden pull of gravity.

Spindrift looked, then looked again. Jessie's space suit didn't show her figure at all, but her ivory complexion, retrousse nose, and full lips were all he needed, and Kit was instantly jealous.

It didn't help that Jessie's big blue eyes were burning with rage, making her even more vivid. She threw her helmet onto the rack. "Flanagan! He oughta be tied over a rocket's mouth and blasted!"

Spindrift's head snapped up; he stared. So the name "Flanagan" meant something to him, did it?

"What did Flanagan do now?" Trail asked, with an understanding smile.

"Same as he does every time," Jessie said. "I picked out a nice big rock, twelve feet across and almost a globe—but halfway there, I saw McCann shooting toward it."

Trail gave her a sardonic nod and told Spindrift, "McCann's one of Flanagan's men." To Jessie, he said, "He got there before you?"

"Yes, and you told me if a rock didn't have our insignia on it yet, we couldn't stop them."

"That's right—you can't."

"But he was inside our sector!" Jessie cried.

"Still, the law says if he has it, he keeps it," Trail said. "No way to prove he took it from our sector... or maybe there is." He looked out through the dome at the tumbling asteroids a moment, then nodded. "Cameras. On your sleds."

The drovers looked at one another, amazed. Then Charlie said, "We shoulda thought of that before!"

"Three-sixty degree cameras," Trail explained, "so the picture will show the stars as well as what's in front of you. We'll get 'em with an extra circuit built in, to log the tracking satellites above the Belt. That way, we'll be able to prove the Flanagan boys were still in our sector when they were taking the asteroids."

"Beautiful!" Kit grinned. "When did you think of this, Mr. Trail?"

"I didn't." Trail said, amused. "I've been talking with a lawyer back on Mars Colony. He's out of school two years, working in a big firm and ready to strike out on his own—so I invited him to hang out his shingle in the Belt."

Charlie laughed and slapped his thigh. "Catching the thieves on video for a lawyer to show in court! That oughta give us a case and a half against Flanagan and his 'miracle sector.'"

Spindrift frowned. "What's a 'miracle sector?'"

"Let's go tell you over dinner," Trail said, and led the way to the dining room. "Mr. Spindrift, this is Jessie."

Spindrift turned and took Jessie's hand with a light in his eyes that hadn't been there when he shook Kit's. She fought to keep her anger from showing and realized that she'd have to find a way to make sure Jessie didn't hire on with Spindrift.

Behind them, the airlock hissed again as more of the drovers

came home. Soon they were all gathered around the table—Trail, Spindrift, and the dozen drovers: tall Lucky, with his shock of corn-colored hair; Scurly, a broad-shouldered boy who was fun for wrestling; Agatha, who was fond of reminding everybody that her name meant "good;" and half a dozen others who were good friends, but not likely to join Spindrift. Kit looked down the table at the five who were. They were getting restless, as she was; wrangling rocks wasn't enough challenge any more.

"Pass the spuds," Kit told Spindrift, then caught Mr. Trail's eye on her and added, "Please."

"Please me it would," Spindrift said with a smile, and held out the bowl. Kit managed to take it in such a way that her hand brushed his. She felt the shiver all the way up her arm and into her chest and decided that Spindrift was in her bed already—he just didn't know it yet.

Spindrift turned back to Trail to reach for the roast. "Now, what's this about a 'miracle sector'?”

The drovers glowered at the term, and some of them grumbled.

"Flanagan's sector," Trail explained to him, "right next to one of mine—and no matter how many asteroids he takes to Ceres and sells to the steel company, he still has just as many left."

Spindrift frowned, trying to puzzle out the riddle, and Kit was tempted to tell—but somebody chuckled, and Spindrift's face cleared. "Oh! Because he steals yours."

"That's right." Trail nodded, his face showing no emotion.

Kit looked at Spindrift with concern. The man seemed sweet, but he really did need somebody to take care of him.

Like, say, maybe—her.

"Mr. Spindrift's already met Flanagan," Trail explained to the drovers, "right in front of the claims office. Tried to sell him a sector three degrees over."

"Fellow was most persistent, too." Spindrift made a face. "Wouldn't take 'no' for an answer. I told him I’d think about it overnight and discuss it with him in the morning, but he described the riches of its asteroids to me and claimed that I should buy it before someone else does. Chap was most insistent."

"He was at that," Trail agreed. "By good luck, I happened by and explained the facts of life to him."

Kit grinned. She'd seen Trail explain the facts to Flanagan once, and the shorter, grizzled man had fussed and sputtered and ranted, cussing like the ex-sailor he was, and finally started making threats, while Trail just stood there listening, now and then pointing out the falseness of Flanagan's claims without quite calling him an outright liar. Some day Flanagan was going to haul off and swing at Trail, and Kit sure hoped she'd be there to see it.

"The fellow stormed off after roundly abusing us both," Spindrift said. "I was hard put to keep my temper. I'm amazed that Mr. Trail did—he absorbed the bulk of Flanagan's calumnies."

"I’ll have my revenge," Trail said easily, "when we go into the claims office and check the title on that sector."

"I was quite fortunate," Spindrift told them. "Mr. Trail owns several sectors and was willing to part with one of them."

Kit looked up, surprised. "Which one, Mr. Trail?"

"Thirty-two degrees east," Trail said.

Kit opened her mouth to say, But that's the one right next to Flanagan's, then closed it again—if Mr. Trail was going to make Spindrift neighbor to the lowest man in the Belt, he must have a good reason. Good for Spindrift, that was. Well, okay, good for Trail, too—but her boss wouldn't profit at Spindrift's expense.

"He'll need drovers, ones with good aim," Trail said. "Any volunteers?"

Lucky, Jessie, Agatha, Charlie, and Skurly started to raise their hands, fire in their eyes, then hesitated. Kit went ahead and raised hers. "Hate to leave you, Mr. Trail," Jessie said.

"Oh, I'll still be here, Ms. Jessie," Trail said, "close by Mr. Spindrift and the six of you."

Then the hands went up. The other six didn't look all that interested—not as many scores to settle with Flanagan's drovers. Yet.

"We'll have to go to Port Alice tomorrow, to register the transfer," Trail said

"If the funds have arrived," Spindrift said.

So she'd been right—he hadn't earned the money, just came from a rich family. That explained the touch of class about him, but it also made her wonder why his family had let him go out to the Belt. Rich people could afford a much safer business, back on Mars—or maybe even old Earth itself.

Maybe they didn't want him around?

Kit banished the thought, angry at herself. She shouldn't be disloyal to her lover, even if he didn't know that's what he was yet.

"We'll meet my new lawyer, too," Trail said "if the liner from Mars has come in."

"It is scheduled," Spindrift said.

"That's so, but we can't always count on schedules in the Belt, Mr. Spindrift." Trail looked down the table. "Who wants to come along?"

A day on Port Alice? The biggest asteroid in the sector, and the closest thing it had to a town? Not a city, like Ceres, the belt capitol, but big enough to have two taverns and an assay office. Everyone volunteered at once.

Laughing a little, Trail said, "Somebody has to stay and watch the sector. Agatha, Skurly, Lucky—you need the trip. Kit, Charlie, Jessie—you three have been here longest without a break. You come along."

The six whooped. The others glared, but not too hard—they knew their turns would come again.

* * *

It was a two-day trip to Port Alice, with the two bosses riding in Trail’s burro-boat and the three riders pacing the craft in a triangle around its mid-line. The burro was a tubby little craft, only fifty feet long and fifteen wide, but it held all the necessities for living—kitchen, bathroom with shower, bunks, closet, table and chair—and had force-field screens that could fend off anything smaller than it was, or fend the burro boat off from anything larger. It might have been small, but it had far more muscle than its size suggested. Its tractor and pressor beams could hold and haul twice it own mass, and of course it could process ice into hydrogen, oxygen, and purified water for drinking.

They stayed the night at a big ice asteroid named Berg. It had been bigger, but travelers kept chipping off chunks for their tanks. Charlie and Kit chiseled out two head-sized blocks and took them back to Trail's burro boat,

As they came up, Kit saw Jessie talking with Spindrift and laughing, and was jealous all over again—not that there was much they could do in space suits.

Trail opened the hatch for the chute to the reactor, and Charlie tossed in his two chunks. Kit added hers, and Trail closed the hatch. "That should give us a full tank by morning. Nobody home in the igloo, so I guess we have it for the night."

That wasn't the world's best news, because you could take off your space suit inside the igloo, and it had four separate rooms. On the other hand, Spindrift could take off his suit for her as well as for Jessie—though Kit wasn't sure she was ready for that tonight. Besides, it was wiser to sleep in your space suit in case another asteroid collided with Berg. After all, it might even hit the igloo itself.

They had to double over to go through the little airlock tunnel at the front and Kit wondered for the eighth time who had made this ice-house. Probably the first pioneers in the Belt, two hundred years before. Not much chance it would melt so far from the sun.

It was good the igloo was empty, because the sleds were too small for sleeping, and the burro boat would have been awfully crowded with all five of them in there. They'd moored it tight, of course, and chained the sleds to it, but someone had to stay in it just in case it broke loose anyway, and Charlie, grumbling, drew the duty. That left Jessie and Kit in a flirting contest, so Spindrift had a really great evening while Trail looked on with a fond smile. Agatha, one of the other drovers who had decided to come along, knew she was plain as a board, so she joined the conversation but didn’t try to flirt. Kit's liking for Spindrift grew even worse when she saw how evenly he parceled out his attention to all three women, and they all went to sleep unsatisfied but happy.

* * *

An electronic hooting blared through the igloo. The drovers rolled out of their bunks, locking their helmets into place and catching up their lasers as they crouched, looking around for the threat. Everything was intact. Then what...

"The burro boat!" Charlie shouted. "They're trying to steal it!"

The drovers shouted in fury and raced to the airlock.

Love it? Hate it? Comment in the Forum!

show counter