“Well, first of all, we don’t have any revolvers. And second, I’m not a very good shot. In fact, I’m a horribly bad shot.”

  “How bad?”

  “Once, a group of three of us were held up by robbers. I pulled my gun and tried to shoot them. I missed, and shot my boss instead.”

  “You shot your boss?”

  “It was an accident.”

  “Well, these thugs don’t know that.”

  “Nadine is probably telling them right now.”

  Riley narrowed her eyes. “I figured you would be no use at all, Jake.”

  “Well, I can’t shoot, that’s for sure,” Jake agreed.

  “You’re not much for getting things done, are you?”

  “Well, I got you released from that engineering hold on-station.”

  “That’s true.”

  “And I did figure out that you were smuggling stolen food to some sort of secret place.”

  “It’s not stolen,” Riley said.

  “Yes it is. I have the records in my comm. And don’t bother to deny it. You knew something was wrong with this whole deal.”

  “Okay, I did think there was something wrong with that. But Dad kept denying it. What was I supposed to do?”

  “And I figured out how to get onto your ship without you knowing.”

  “True. But what about these guys with guns now?”

  “I’m a bit scared of them. But I’m mostly angry. But I have learned that when somebody points a gun at you, the best thing is to be patient. I just waited, and then when I met Mack, I convinced him to let us fix the docking.”

  “Wait, you convinced Mack to let us help? I thought he came up with that himself,” Riley said.

  “No, I talked him into it. He wanted to talk to me about something, but I told him what needed to be done, and convinced him to let us do it,” Jake said.

  “I didn’t know that. He never said. He just asked us to help. You didn’t say anything till now.”

  “Well, I am now. I’m useful. I’m not good with guns, or fighting. But I can figure things out. And I figure now that these guys don’t want to kill us. Or even bother us. They were surprised that we saw the workers, so they had to do something different. I think they’re regretting it now.”

  “I see.”

  “In fact, I predict that, if we wait, they’ll offer us jobs. Good jobs, well paid. Spacer jobs.”

  “You do, huh? Interesting.”

  “We just have to be patient.”

  “How long do we have to wait?”

  “Just until their guys nearly kill us again.”

  Chapter 21

  “Cheers! Let’s toast this suspicious meeting,” Mack said, holding his glass forward. Mack, Jake, Nadine, Rick, Riley, and one of Mack’s guys sat at the lounge table. Mack had just poured shots from a metal flask.

  Rick had raised his glass, but paused, then looked at Mack. “Suspicious meeting?”

  “It is a word meaning ‘conducive to success,’” Mack said.

  Rick looked at the others. They all looked puzzled except for Jake. “Auspicious,” he said.

  Mack glared at him. “Suspicious, like I said.”

  Jake held his glass up. “We toast differently in the Belt, Mack. We say, ‘Free trades,’ or ‘Lucky strikes.’”

  The four spacers pushed their glasses together, and the metal clanked. “Lucky strikes,” they chorused, and then Mack followed suit.

  Rick, Jake, Riley, and Nadine sat at one side of the lounge table. Mack and one of his guys, the biggest one—Jack, or Jim, or something like that—sat on the other. He had said ‘Call me JJ,’ so Jake had stuck with that. The six of them were eating dinner. Jake poked at his food. It was just trays, but at least some of the more interesting ones. This one had sliced radish in one foil packet.

  “I have been told all you Belters did talk different. Now I know some Belter lingo.” He took a drink from his glass. “I think you’ll all like this. It’s triple-distilled vodka. Very expensive stuff. The extra distilling makes it much smoother than normal vodka. I’ll bet you’ve never tasted anything like this.”

  Nadine swallowed hers in one shot and held out her glass for more. “This is very smooth. How do they do it?”

  “It’s very pure. They have to concentrate the potatoes over three times. That’s why it becomes so expensive. All the extra power. Jake, I’ll bet you’ve never had vodka this pure in the crap-hole station you come from.”

  Jake sipped the vodka. He’d had problems with drinking too much before. “No, we had no problem purifying it. We’d get 100 percent pure vodka all the time, easy. Distillation wasn’t the expensive part.”

  Mack mouthed Jake’s last sentence before responding. “The distillerification wasn’t expensive?”

  Jake blinked, then nodded. “Not at all. We vacuum-distilled. Plenty of vacuum out there. We could purify all we wanted—just set up a rig, bring it outside, and bleed off atmo till the boiling point of the liquid dropped where you wanted. That was easy. What was hard was getting the potatoes way out there.”

  Nadine smiled at Jake. “Mack, Jake’s very good at that sort of thing. All sorts of useless knowledge.”

  “Not that useless,” Riley said. “Not if you want good vodka.” She drank her shot down and held out her glass hand for more. Mack unscrewed the metal cap and refilled everyone’s glasses.

  “I never would have thought of that. Using vacuum to distillerate something,” Mack said.

  “It’s pretty common knowledge if you spend a lot of time in orbit, Mack,” Riley said.

  “I am not an orbital person,” Mack said. “My expertise lies within elsewhere.”

  “So, Mack, why are we here?” Nadine asked.

  Mack turned to the big man to his right. “JJ, time to go and watch on the bridge.”

  JJ had been silently spooning his tray clean. “Not my watch right now, Mack.”

  Mack stopped smiling. He blinked once, then held JJ’s gaze and spoke slowly. “I say, ‘JJ, it’s time to go on the bridge.’ You say, ‘Right away, boss.’ That is all what I expect to hear. Go now. Go right now.” He kept his stare on JJ, and JJ nodded.

  “Right away, boss,” he said and slid back from the table and scampered off.

  Mack turned back to the group. He smiled again. “They forget who is in charge sometimes. I remind them. Now, Jake, maybe that sort of space thing is commonly known where you come from, but that’s not my area of things. I’ve got a good crew here, good people. Tough. Hard people. You don’t want to mess with them, and they don’t want to mess with me, so that means that nobody messes with me.”

  He smiled again and tossed his vodka down. Then he poured himself another shot.

  “But the thing is, peoples, that we lack certain skills. Jake knows about vacuum, and can fix mechanical things, like his door. Yes, Jake, I found out about that. And the two of you,” Mack pointed at Nadine and Riley, “you two can pilot ships. Pilot them without the computers. And you know about things like cargo winches, and lines, and magnetic boots and things like that. Most of my people do not know of those things.”

  “What do your people know, Mack?” Nadine asked.

  “They are good with guns. And hurting people. Very good at that. I have some small skill in that area as well.”

  “Then why are we having dinner with you?” Nadine asked.

  Mack smiled at her. “You are a direct one, aren’t you?”

  Nadine smiled back. “Ms. Direct, that’s me. In fact, I’m the queen of mis-direction.”

  Mack dropped his smile and hunched forward. “Well, I’ll be frank, peoples. Let me irradiate the problem. I have a contract to run a mining asteroid. I’ve been told it is pretty rich in ore, at least the people who hire me say so, and from what I’ve been able to make work, it seems to be true. But we have all sorts of things breaking—we don’t have enough people to run the systems on the stations, and fixing things that break is a problem. It stops us from making money. I don’t like that. My employers don’t like that. I need some special workers. And I think you four could help me out with that.”

  Mack took another sip of vodka and smiled at the group.

  “Doing what, exactly?” Nadine asked.

  “I need maintenance and production bosses, people who understand station systems like electrical, life support, and such like. Somebody who can monitor a fusion plant. I’ve been told that ship systems and station systems are the same, is that true?”

  The four spacers nodded.

  “Good. I need that, and I also need folks who understand cargo and containers, and people who can dock a ship. I don’t need them every day, but we need to move more cargo and more ore out. You four seem like you know these things. Now, we may have had a somewhat irregular introduction, but I am in a hiring mode. You could be my asphyxiates.”

  The four looked at each other. Nadine got it first. “We could be your associates? What does that pay?”

  He named a pay rate that was about triple what an experienced spacer could make, and a bonus system that was even more lucrative. All they had to do was help him run a station.

  Nadine didn’t need to be convinced. “Mack, for that much money, I’m happy to be your asphyxiate. I’m in.”

  Jake cleared his throat. “Mack, how long will we have to do this for?”

  “Until we’re finished.”

  “How long will that be?”

  “At least six months. Possibly longer. Possibly a year.”

  “What type of off-station breaks do we get?”

  Mack smiled, and it wasn’t a nice smile. “Sorry, Jake, no rest for our peoples. Full steam till the end.”

  “Where is it?”

  “That’s not important. We’re taking you there. As you have already figured, our pilots are not great at some maneuvers, but they can punch a course into a computer and get us to the outer Belt. You don’t need to know where we are going.”

  “What about those other guys—the ones from the container?” Riley asked.

  “They agreed to work at a different station for a year. We’re keeping the year, just changing the destination.”

  “Do they know that?”

  Mack shrugged and gave a kind of ‘what can you do?’ shoulder roll. “We’ll pay them the same. Why do they care?”

  “Can they help you with this?” Jake asked.

  “Nope.” Mack took a swig of his drink. “They can work the mining equipment and do some basic work, but none of them have any advanced electrical or mechanical knowledge. They were all field hands for GG—worked where the robot harvesters couldn’t reach.”

  “What if we don’t want to do this, Mack?” Jake asked.

  “Well, if I cannot subsidize your skills, I will have to use my own modest skills.”

  Mack regarded the metal bottle in his hand, and then banged it savagely against the table. Everybody jumped. Mack lifted the bottle up, and showed the large dent in the side. “I only do a few things, but I do them very well.”

  Jake relaxed in his couch as the Sidecar ran under thrust. He, Nadine, Riley, and twenty indentured workers—or ‘indents,’ as Mack called them—filled up the passenger sections of the shuttle. The R&R followed behind, with a full load of freight. Rick had just slaved his board to the Sidecar and gone for a nap.

  Jake had a room to himself, as the usual occupants were over babysitting Rick. After signing on with Mack, they all had full computer access, including comm, but Mack had warned he would shoot anybody who caused trouble. He might have been joking. He probably wasn’t. Jake was supposed to report to Dashi on a regular basis, but he didn’t see the need to send a message right now. So, it wasn’t a problem.

  There was a security lock between him and the bridge, and he needed a code for that, which he didn’t have. But otherwise, he ranged freely around the ship, even to engineering. “Make yourself useful,” Mack had said. “If there is anything that needs to be fixed, let me know, then go fix it.” Jake had fixed an electrical panel and a storage tank. The regular crew seemed clueless on repairs, and Mack either didn’t know or didn’t care how much trouble Jake could cause him with a few minutes in the environmental plant.

  The door bonged.

  “Come in,” Jake said.

  Nadine stepped through the door. “Hi, Jakey.”

  “Hello, Nadine. What do you want?”

  “Always so direct.”

  “I have to be. I need to make sure I don’t irritate you or you’ll shoot me.”

  “They took all my guns, Jake.”

  “Not all of them,” Jake said.

  Nadine looked at him. “No, not all of them. Did you tell them?”

  “Nope,” Jake said.

  Nadine twirled her fingers in her long blonde hair. “Now, why wouldn’t you do that? I thought you were trying to suck up to them.”

  “A little. But I don’t entirely trust them.”

  “And you trust me more than them.”

  Jake thought about that for a moment. “I do, yes.”

  “Why?”

  “The interests of our employers—mine and whoever yours are this week—appear to be aligned on this. They asked me to find out a few things about these food shipments.”

  “They asked you to stow away on the R&R?”

  “Not exactly. I decided to use my initiative. It seems to have worked out.”

  “Jake Stewart, are you saying you didn’t follow orders? Did you break the rules?”

  “A little. But I wanted to find out more about what was going on.”

  “And that pretty redheaded girl had nothing to do with it?”

  “She is very pretty,” Jake said.

  “You rebel, you.” Nadine sauntered over and flopped onto the end of his couch. Her hips just touched Jake’s leg. “This is a new Jake Stewart. I think I like him better than the old Jake Stewart.”

  “Thanks, but I’m still the same guy.”

  “No, you seem much more fun now.” She leaned over and draped herself over his legs, and smiled at him. “So, tell me, Jake, what’s going on here. Why these people, and why all this food? Why the bad gangster routine?”

  Jake cleared his throat. She was close enough that he could smell her.

  “You smell good. What is it?”

  “Perfume. Orange. Do you like it?” Nadine sat up and leaned closer. “It’s in my shampoo as well.” She dangled her hair over his face.

  Jake did smell it. “It smells great.” She smelled great. She felt very hot on his legs, and the hair tickled.

  “It makes my hair very soft. Where do you think we are going?”

  “A high station. Something with a very eccentric orbit. A big mine. Not on the regular routes. They have only a short window to meet the lower stations and trade goods, then they’re too far away.”

  “That’s interesting, Jake. Do you like it when I do this?” She waved her hair over him again.

  “Um, hmmm.”

  “So, why did they make us come with them?”

  “They are heading away from Delta. The orbit will take them high for a few weeks or months. They’re loading as much cargo as they can, ‘cause they won’t be able to for a while.”

  “That’s interesting. Why the indentured workers?” She brushed her hair across his face again.

  “Regular workers won’t sign on for that long a passage without a break. And the high-eccentricity stations are dangerous—if something goes wrong, they’re too fast and too far for rescue. That’s why they have to offer bonuses, or take on people who are more desperate. Um. Nadine?”

  “Yes, Jake?” Nadine said. She began to run her fingernails up and down his arm.

  “Can I ask you to do something for me?”

  “Of course, Jake, what would you like me to do?” Nadine ran her fingernails along him again.

  “Tell me why you are here.”

  “In your cabin? Isn’t it obvious?”

  Jake laughed out loud. “Not really, Nadine. You haven’t shown any interest in me before. I know you want something. I’m just not sure what. But I’m enjoying the effort a lot.”

  “Maybe I just want to see you?”

  “Maybe you are collecting information to send back to your bosses.”

  The door dinged.

  “Nadine,” Jake said. “Did you lock the door behind you?”

  “No, why?” Nadine asked.

  The door slipped open and Riley walked in. She was looking down at a bottle in her hands.

  “Hi, Jake, I’ve been thinking. I wanted to tell you how sweet I thought it was that you stowed away and— Oh.” Riley stopped. “Am I interrupting?”

  Jake took a good look at her. Tight skinsuit. Collar and wrist ruffles. Stylish headband. She had dressed up.

  “No, no,” Jake said, sitting up and pushing Nadine off him. “Nadine and I were just talking about stuff, that’s all.”

  Nadine smiled brightly at Riley. “Yes, talking. About. Stuff.” She grabbed Jake’s arm again.

  Riley looked at Nadine, then Jake. “Jake, I thought … oh.” Riley reddened. Redheads really did blush a lot.

  “Riley, it’s not what you think. Thanks for coming. Nadine was just leaving.”

  “I was?” Nadine asked. “I didn’t know that. We still have some ‘stuff’ to talk about, right, Jakey?” She smiled at Riley. “Don’t worry, Riley, it won’t take long. Jake is always concise in thought and deed. Finishes things quickly.”

  Riley reddened even more. She put the bottle on the desk. “Jake this is from me— From Dad— From Dad and I, to welcome you to the crew, and thanks for helping out. We’re— We’re looking forward to working together. Goodbye.” She turned around and walked out. The door slid shut behind her.

  Jake glared at Nadine. She started to laugh. “Bitch,” Jake said, but without much heat.

  Nadine laughed even harder. “Agreed. But you knew that anyway.”

  “What do you really want, Nadine?”

  “Where are we going, who are these people, and what are they doing?”

  “Well, we’ll find out in about fifty hours, if I read the course plot right. We’ll be where we’re going then. I guess you’ll have to wait till then.”

  “I’m not very patient, Jake.”