Belters

Chapter 11:-1

Chapter 11:AD 2100 Inner Belt – Ceres Station

Reo’s sleep hadn’t improved. Each time he closed his eyes, his dreams dragged him back to the stone room and his two traveling companions. Having a good idea what was happening to him didn’t help. He was lost in the woods without a canoe or a river.

In one of the dreams, Tian, out of character, finally shouted, “We are never going to leave this place without our missing party member.”

Reo had no good interpretation of the bizarre dreams. He was a reader, not a seer. From his limited experience with the rare set of skills, the future might manifest itself in any number of ways. From his research, dreams were reported as one of the most common.

The problem was they often didn’t give straightforward information. Most times, it was left up to the seer to interpret the damned dreams. Any information he found online proved useless. Written by dubious sources, Reo made assumptions with no firsthand knowledge of the process.

With no manual and little research into the skills, Reo was left up to his own devices to figure out what the universe was trying to tell him.

All this assumed he wasn’t simply going insane. Stories of insane agents snaked their way through the ranks of ESPers like thieves in the night. Radiation from space travel slowly ate away his frontal cortex or, worse, some unknown force had latched on to his brain, and the dreams were his way of coping with the brain worm infestation. He really needed to stop watching so many horror movies. They weren’t good for his sanity.

The transfer ship had docked at Ceres Station. The umbilical unit had been attached. Now they only needed to walk from the ship onto the station while the cargo offloaded in the adjacent tube. In space, as on Earth, time was money. The Conveyor would shortly be turned around and headed back to earth with a different crew. The only time the ship stopped was for repairs that couldn’t be completed while flying. Working a transfer ship provided a hard, dangerous life, one Reo never expected to experience.

What Reo really wanted was a long hot shower. Better yet, a long soak in a hot tub. The fine mist provided on the transfer ship’s shower unit was anything but refreshing. At least he didn’t need to work his way through immigration like the rest of the plebes.

Rather than wait in line, he walked straight through the interior offices without question. All he needed was a flash of travel papers, and he cleared entry into the station. Now he was about to meet the last great love of his life. He wondered if she even remembered him.

Right outside the exit, she waited for him. He recognized her despite the chrome smart glasses that hid her eyes. She stood with the same condescending posture he remembered so well.

I hate my life.

AD 2100 Inner Belt – Ceres Station

Ceres Station was just as Lea remembered it. An insane madhouse of different cultures and corporations all mashed together on a rock less than a fifth the size of Earth’s moon.

With a diameter of less than five hundred and sixty miles, technically the whole of the asteroid could fit nicely into the boundaries of the Texican Republic in North America.

The people who called Ceres home didn’t bother with the surface of the dwarf planet. Rather, the whole of the colony burrowed deep into the crust. Started as a mine, it wasn’t long before the tunnels filled up with all sorts of red necks, belters, prospectors, wildcatters… The list of names grew too numerous to know them all. Each with a little clique and set of bars they called home. Everyone working Ceres was on a quest to strike it rich. Unfortunately, many found their way to the station and never earned enough coin to provide for themselves. It was human nature for one human to think of ways to separate the dimwitted from their hard-earned cash.

The worst of the robber barons were the company stores. The huge markup for even basic necessities drained the unsuspecting travelers. The merchants always had the ready-made excuse. It cost a lot to live in space. Not like shoppers had a choice of sellers.

The three corporations that made up the Ceres cartel weren’t known for sharing the profits with the independent operators. They had a cut of every dollar, yen, bitcoin, or euro made on the station. Space had no common currency.

The station was operated by an unholy alliance of two mining companies, Bakshi-Corp and Takahashi Heavy Industry, and the service provider Holly and Burnt. Other corps rented space from the two large mining corporations. Holly and Burnt provided the muscle to keep the peace. There were representatives from most Earth governments, but they had little influence over the day-to-day operations. The highest bidder took what they wanted. Those with the biggest guns kept what was theirs. The courts of Earth worked hard to provide oversight and control of the corporations, but when the corporations bought and sold those in power, there was little chance for the disenfranchised to gain ground.

There was little the governments from Earth could do to enforce their will outside the orbit. None of the countries bothered constructing a fleet of ships capable of direct confrontation with the corporations. The cost and risk of space had been abandoned to the rich. Surely, somewhere in the marble halls of governmental power that ruled the remnants of Earth a few voices cried, sounding the alarm, but they were quickly silenced by the power that could be bought with cash flowing from the belt.

Like most of history, the civilians had the government they deserved, all bought and paid for by the elite few in charge. The men and women of the boards. The ultra-powerful continued their climb, all on the backs of the worker.

The transport ship docked by itself. Just one of the ships scheduled for the day. All done by autopilot, there was little need for a crew on the bridge of the modern ship. The busy port of Ceres always had some manner of craft in transition. There was no hangar for the ships to fly into. The gravity was light enough for most ships to set down on the surface. Adjustable skids provided support when needed.

A sterile umbilical tube connected the Conveyor stationside. The first experience of the station resembled an Earthside office building more than a colony buried deep in a rock, orbiting more than twice the distance from the sun than Earth.

Rather than pull strings or bribe her way on to the station, Lea followed the other migrants. There was no reason to stand out any more than need be. Chances were good her biosignature was tracked to Ceres before she cleared the gravity of Earth, but if she escaped cleanly, the few extra days of peace would be nice.

Customs and immigration were a matter of answering a few questions and a facial recognition scan. Few people traveled with luggage. The cost of carrying more than a small carry-on kept weight low. Lea had never heard of any travelers being turned around at the incoming processing. Strong hands were always needed in the belt. If a person made it to Ceres, even a hardened criminal could start a new life for themselves. Papers could be forged for anyone willing to pay. Past indiscretions waived for a price. With enough coin, anything could be bought out in the dark.

A kaleidoscope of sights and sounds greeted Lea as she left the space dock and stepped into the cavern that made up the Ceres arrival hall. Not so much a secured area but a location for the most desperate of Ceres’s citizens to ply their wares. It was aptly named Ceres Circus.

After the calm beige of the Conveyor interior, flashing colored lights of different tempos and colors created a seizure-inducing atmosphere. The music from a hundred different speakers blared out at least a hundred different songs, not loud enough to distinguish from each other. The chaos blended into a curious mix with an electronic dance music feel, only more chaotic.

Crammed between the watering holes and flophouses were used shipping containers that had been commandeered as combination homes and shops for the lucky who had something to sell. Floor space cost money, so most owners slept on the floor of their shop.

Outside, women and men of different sexualities plied their wares, all in order to survive. The Circus was only a slight step above the worst Earth had to offer. Few people died in the gutter here. Mainly because there wasn’t any gutter to find. Everything in space was collected and recycled. Any unsolved deaths were normally handled quickly and quietly by security forces. The bodies were recycled in the bowels of the station.

Life in space was hard. Civilians made the journey into space over seventy-five years earlier, yet only a handful of the people working the Circus had gray hair, and most of those were probably due to radiation exposure. There was no plan for the aged on the station. Few survived past sixty.

Those first settlers in space died young so future generations could better learn how to survive. Cancer and genetic mutations were still a major concern for anyone who lived outside Earth’s magnetic field. No matter how much rock they built under, the cosmic rays found a way in. Like the dark ages, life expectancies remained short in space.

Earthers might not want to bring their children off-planet, but belters seemed to pop them out as fast as possible. Not long after the first civilians headed into space, babies started being born. For the thousands now born in space, they would never be able to return to Mother Earth. The gravity would crush them.

On Earth, the birth rates of the developed nations continued to fall. Not low enough to lift the burden of overpopulation on the planet, but if they kept falling, professionals who worried about such things calculated the population would level off soon at around sixteen billion.

That number didn’t count the children born in space. Dubbed ETs, they looked more alien than human. The shortest of them topped over two meters, and they had slender bodies with little muscle mass. In space, the need for a balance between large families and the strain on resources was a constant battle. Most free traders were family ships. Made up of extended families, they shared in an equal slice of a payoff. These family ships rarely took on unrelated crew.

Lea knew there were kids on Ceres. She’d seen them before, but today children were absent at the Circus. That seemed out of place. Normally, several hands waited for the generosity of people as they stumbled out of processing. The outpost ran 24/7, so there was always something or someone to do. Schooling, work, life, all ran on shifts of eight to twelve hours apiece. Even the beggars worked in shifts.

Not too far from the exit, the company man Reo waved his arms at a dark-haired woman wearing the bright international orange coveralls of FlyRight Corp. Her eyes and the majority of her expressions were hidden by the reflective smart glasses she wore.

Lea assumed the woman was Asian. The few words she caught were an unfamiliar language. The young woman wore the orange outfit like a spacer, with a relaxed fit—easy to get in and out of. But her body language screamed her Earth origins. Before Lea parted ways with Tian, Reo all but pulled the new woman up to the pair.

“These are the ones…” Reo said without an introduction. His body language seemed more agitated, twitchy, than recent memory served her.

Lea bit her tongue. The last thing she needed was a scene with some corporate woman on her first meeting at a strange station. Technically she was in hiding and on the run from FlyRight or one of their subsidiaries.

The smart glasses hid any emotion when the new woman spoke. “Tian Lee, you have failed to meet procedures. You have unopened communications from headquarters.” Sharp would have been a polite description of the stranger’s tone.