Chapter 278 - Article Nine

"Outer space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means."

—Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Article II, 1967

The kid had been cutting for forty minutes when Carl saw him hesitate on the feed.

Carl was in the left seat with his boots up on the console and his coffee mug velcroed to the armrest. The mug had a chip on the lip from a year ago, from a joke he and Tomás had both forgotten. The chip dug into his lip every time he drank, yet he never replaced it.

The video feed from the kid's helmet camera showed a clean angled cut three meters long, the beam splitting the surface in a slow line. Where the beam hit, the rock came apart in a slow drifting cloud of red-glowing debris, droplets cooling into glass beads as they floated off, because there was nothing for them to fall toward. The kid had paid for the new swivel mount out of his first quarter's share and hadn't stopped showing it off since.

The hesitation came in the middle of the cut. The kid pulled the beam back, paused, then resumed.

Carl watched as he reset the Energy Mining Beam. "Hey," he said into the bridge mic.

"Yeah, boss, I got you. Sorry." The kid's voice came back through the helmet, a little tight.

"You see something?"

"Nah. Nah, it ain't nothin'. The new swivel mount throws the shadow off the cut line. I'm readin' it wrong."

"Reading it wrong, how?"

"Just wrong. The old rig had the focus further out. I ain't calibrated for nothing right yet."

"You bought the new rig two months ago, kid."

"I know when I bought it, Carl."

Carl drank his coffee. The chip on the mug caught his lip. He waited.

"I'm good."

"All right."

He stayed on the feed anyway. The kid was nineteen and six months into the gig. Hesitation usually meant a problem, and a problem in vacuum was how you put a beam through your own leg.

Across the bridge, Yvette had her boots off and her computer open, one foot hooked under the brace bar at the base of her seat. "Carl. Tell him to breathe. The swivel mount ain't gonna bite him," she said in the Brooklyn-Kreyòl mix that came out when she wasn't paying attention.

Yvette and Claire had grown up in a Haitian corner of Brooklyn. He'd met them when the world turned to shit nearly five years ago, dragging their mother out of a crater.

"He's fine."

"He's holding his breath. You can read it on the bio monitor."

"How?"

"Because his rebreather's recycling like he's asleep, and he is not asleep. Look at the line."

Carl looked at the readout and saw that Yvette was right. The kid's was holding his breath. Carl keyed the channel.

"Kid."

"Yeah."

"Breathe."

There was a pause.

"Copy."

"And stop apologizing on the cut channel," Yvette said over Carl's shoulder, still not looking up from her tablet. "The rock doesn't care."

"I wasn't apologizing to nobody."

"You said sorry, kid. It was on the open band. We all heard it."

The kid did not answer. Carl muted his side of the channel and went back to his coffee.

Claire was in her seat with three bands open and one earpiece in.

"Genesis is calling the foundry slot for nineteen hundred. We're slot three."

"Three is fine."

"It is fine if we leave the rock at sixteen hundred."

"We'll leave at sixteen hundred."

Yvette opened a feed on her computer. "Lunar feed. Marisol Vintar's running the licensing board on Tuesday. My brother's going to lose his mind."

"Your brother lost his mind in February."

"Different mind."

Carl drank his coffee. Henri ran a small hostel out of the moon habitat for independent teams, and Henri was independent the way a tree was independent in a storm.

"Tell him to hang in there."

The kid came off EVA at the two-hour mark, hung his cutter to the wall mount, drank a liter of water in one pull, and went to his bunk. Tomás came up four minutes later, mid-sentence and gesturing at nobody in particular.

"...so my primo, right, he's got this chick on the platform, and she don't know he's got the other one in Tranquillitatis—"

"You're up in twenty."

"Going. You used to like my stories, Carl."

"I never liked your stories."

Tomás had primos everywhere, from the Heights to Tranquillitatis, and half his stories started with one.

Carl watched the EVA prep cam through the seal check. Tomás put on his suit, locked his rifle on the side mount, and stepped into the airlock. Every miner went out armed now. The outer door opened and Tomás kicked off toward the rock with his cutter already powered.

Carl watched until Tomás was clear of the lock, and then he watched a little longer. Best cutter or not, Carl had lived this long by assuming people would be stupid.

"Claire," Carl said.

"There's an IFC corvette on patrol grid bravo. Another Hyeon dropship heading toward a new portal... and the UER liaison is hailing the IFC grid every twelve hours, same as yesterday."

"Same as yesterday?"

"Same script."

Carl drank his coffee. The UER didn't have ships in the Belt yet. All they had was a relay and a bored operator in Mare Tranquillitatis whose job was to hail every Genesis-registered ship and recite the new yield framework.

The Belt was unowned space. Carl was mining in unowned space, same thing he'd been doing for the last four years. He was contracted out to Genesis because Genesis ran the foundries and the registry. The operator back in the moon hailed every twelve hours anyway. Back in the Bronx, at least the people leaning on you had the decency to stand on your stoop. When the UER finally put ships in the vacuum out here, it was going to be a different conversation.

Tomás was twenty minutes into the deep cut when Claire sat up in her workstation.

"Thermal gradient," Claire said.

"On the rock?"

"Right there," she pointed.

Carl looked at the feed. The rock was a city block of iron-nickel and silicate. Carl and his crew had been working it for six days.

The shimmer was on the far side, well clear of where Tomás was cutting. It looked like heat haze, except there was no atmosphere to make heat haze, and the rock was a vacuum-cold piece of metal and silicate that should not have been generating its own thermal gradient.

Carl closed his eyes for one second. He did not say anything, because saying it would not change anything, and Tomás was forty meters from it and going to need clear comms.

"Fucking critters," he said, anyway.

Claire was already on the channel.

"Tomás, hold the cut."

"Holding. What is it?"

"You see the shimmer on the rotation side?"

A long pause. Tomás's helmet camera turned. The shimmer would be visibile to him now, the way the surface of a pond looked from underneath right before something broke the top.

"Yeah," Tomás said, and his voice had dropped half an octave. "Sí. I see it."

"Pack the cutter," Carl said. "Come home."

"How wide is it?"

"Wide enough."

"Carl, I am at ninety percent. I have twenty minutes of cut left and it'll split. Let me finish."

"You can finish tomorrow."

"Tomorrow it belongs to whoever gets here first."

"Carl," Claire interrupted. "The gradient is climbing."

"How fast?"

"Faster than the last one we logged."

Carl muted his side. Yvette was already looking at him.

"Fuck."

"Ninety percent is forty meters from a portal that wasn't there twenty minutes ago."

Carl unmuted.

"Tomás. Pack the cutter and come home. We'll come back for the ore. The payload will still be here."

"Carl, twenty more minutes and I am clean. We need this."

"You want the cut more than your legs?"

"I want the cut more than I want to come back out here next week and find some other crew sitting on it."

"There's no claim if you're dead, Tomás."

A pause. Tomás said something in Spanish that wasn't for Carl.

"Pack it."

"Cabrón."

"Pack it."

The cutter beam cut out on the feed.

"Beam's down," Claire said.

"He's packing."

"Yvette, back us off the rock."

"Already prepping."

Tomás packed and drifted back to the ship. Claire was already on the Genesis channel.

"Genesis dispatch, this is the Asteroid Queen, reporting a new portal anchor on claim Bravo-Four-Niner, asteroid designation seven-four-three-two-eight, low-mass body. Visual confirmation. Requesting logging and IFC notification."

The reply came back fast.

"Asteroid Queen, Genesis dispatch, copy your portal report. Logging now. IFC Watchman inbound, ETA forty minutes. You are the eleventh report this week. Recommend you stand off and clear the operating zone until the corvette arrives."

"Copy four-zero minutes," Claire said. "Eleventh this week, dispatch?"

"Eleventh this week within the Koronis," the dispatcher said. "Twenty-three the week before. Off-world's been spawning since the Planetary Tower went up."

"Copy. Standing off."

Claire closed the channel and looked at Carl.

"Eleventh this week," she said. "On the Crown claims alone. Belt-wide must be thousands. Nobody has eyes on half the rocks. Nobody knows the real number."

"I heard, Claire."

"You're hearing with your jaw clenched."

"That's how I hear."

Tomás came through the airlock breathing hard. He hung his cutter and his rifle and floated up to the bridge in the rest of his suit.

"Forty meters," he muttered.

"It opened twenty minutes before you saw it. That shimmer is the cooldown. You weren't going to beat it. You were standing in it."

Tomás stopped. The line between his eyebrows went deep.

"Claire was watching the heat on the rock climb the whole time you were on it. Between when she flagged it and when you packed, it went up by half."

"You should have said something."

"I was not putting that on the channel with your hand on a beam."

Tomás swore in Spanish and pushed off toward the bunks.

"Buen trabajo."

"Vete a la mierda, Carl."

He conceded.

The UER liaison hailed them at the eight-minute mark.

The report had cleared the relay and hit the public bands, which meant the lunar desk would have seen it minutes ago. The hail came in exactly when Carl expected it.

The hail came through with the stutter of the long-distance relay.

"Asteroid Queen, this is the UER Liaison Office at Mare Tranquillitatis, requesting acknowledgment."

Carl looked at Claire. Claire looked at Carl and he took the mic.

"UER Liaison, Asteroid Queen, go ahead."

"Captain, we have your ship logged at asteroid seven-four-three-two-eight with a portal anchor reported eight minutes ago. Under the post-unification yield framework adopted by the United Earth Republic three weeks ago, any portal anchor in solar space requires notification to the UER within sixty minutes of detection, and any clear is subject to yield reporting and assessed taxes. We have not received your notification."

"You're not in receipt because there is nothing to send. This is unowned space."

"This is solar space, Captain, and solar space is the territory of the United Earth Republic under the post-Tower framework."

"Solar space has never been the territory of any government, ma'am. Not the UN's, not the United States', not the UER's. The Outer Space Treaty said so for sixty years. Your republic isn't even five years old."

"The treaty is superseded by the framework, Captain."

There was a long pause.

"Captain, the framework requires portal yield reporting and an assessed taxes on extraction."

"I know what the framework requires, ma'am. I read it the day it dropped."

"And."

"And I am a Belt operator banked through the Genesis Platform. Genesis is a foundry and a registry, ma'am. Nobody out here pays tax to anybody, because there is nobody out here to pay tax to and no services rendered with said tax."

"I am logging the non-compliance, Captain."

"You do that."

The liaison paused a second time.

"Stand by, Captain."

The channel went quiet.

Yvette watched Carl with one eyebrow lifted. Claire had the IFC band open. The IFC corvette had been silent so far, the captain content to let Carl swing in the wind.

The IFC corvette broke in at the next sixty seconds.

"UER Liaison, this is the IFC Watchman, on patrol grid bravo. The Asteroid Queen is a Genesis-registered operator on a Genesis-registered claim. The portal is open. We are inbound to protect the operator and the claim, ETA thirty-two minutes. Clear the channel."

The liaison came back flat, reading the same script she had been reading for three weeks.

"Watchman, UER Liaison. The post-unification framework places solar space under UER jurisdiction. We are logging IFC's non-acknowledgment."

"Log what you need to, Liaison. The portal is open and the wave is coming. The Watchman will be on station in thirty-two minutes to protect our crew and our rock. Nairobi can rule on the paperwork when they get around to it. Watchman out."

The channel cleared.

Carl let out a breath and looked at Yvette. Yvette looked back.

"Thirty-two minutes," she said.

"Thirty-two minutes."

"Claire has the heat on the rock climbing by half. Four hours is the generous read. We will not have four hours."

"Carl?"

"I know what you're going to say."

"The Watchman is half an hour out. They'll have a delve team that does this for a living, ready to go. When they arrive, the portal is theirs and so is the yield."

"You going to gamble it, man?"

"Six days we've been cutting this rock, Yvette. I am not handing it to a corvette captain who showed up at minute thirty-three."

"You are gambling six days of clean cuts against a Level 60 portal. For loot we might not bring out."

"For loot that could pay our upkeep for a year."

Yvette was quiet.

"So?"

"So."

Carl set the mug back in the velcro holder, looked at the rock one more time, and cracked the knuckles of his right hand against the heel of his left palm.

He thought about Athan's older boy. Somewhere past the Solar System by now, on a ship Carl had watched leave a docking port a year ago with the kid flying scared. Twenty, maybe, the boy had looked. Could have been older. Out there in the black for two years. When he came back, half the things Carl was arguing with the UER about today were going to be settled one way or the other, and Carl's half was going to have been settled in his absence.

"Claire. Get me Athan. Not the dispatch desk. Athan."

"On it," she replied as she worked the controls to establish a connection. "He's on the line."

Carl keyed in. "Athan? Carl here. Portal anchor on Bravo-Four-Niner, already open, Watchman thirty-two out. I'm delving it before they arrive. Operator's prerogative, Article Nine, on-site response to imminent hazard. Yield logged to my ship, rock cleared by the Asteroid Queen, foundry slot held until I'm back. I am telling you so you hear it from me and not from the IFC."

There was a pause from the other end. Then a single word in Athan's voice.

"Acknowledged."

The channel closed.

Claire looked at him for one full second before her hands moved.

Yvette had not moved. She looked at him for a long moment, then pulled her foot out from under her thigh and started locking down the bridge for boarding posture.

Carl pushed off toward the locker and pulled out his TL8 [Energy Sledge]. Tomás was already there, suit half on, rifle clipped to the side mount. He did not look up when Carl came in. The kid was in the corridor, snapping on his [Mimas Reinforced Enforcer Vest] around his chest.

"Boss."

"Kid."

The kid waited.

"Suit up."

The three of them in vacuum gear, the Asteroid Queen at standoff, the Watchman thirty-two minutes out. The hit could wait.