Free Heavy Time by C. J. Cherryh Page B

real easy to stop,” he had said to Bird, among other things.
    “We could brake,” Bird had said.
    And he: “Yeah, yeah, and we’re carrying more mass than those cables are rated for.”
    “Won’t happen,” Bird said.
    Thinking like that infuriated him. The thought of the rigging failing, the thought of, at best, a walk outside for repairs, at worst, the whole sail failing beyond repair—
    Trinidad taking, at this heading, the long, long fall into the Well—made him crazy.
    He was already holding on to his temper with his fingernails and Bird came out with It won’t happen .
    He had fantasies of killing Dekker.
    Maybe Bird.
    But that was as crazy as Dekker was. . He kept feeding in the information. He kept building and refining his portable record. He ignored Dekker as much as possible. Thing about null-g, you couldn’t get your finger to stay in your ear. Not easily. He thought about his earplugs, over in the cabinet, but those worked too well for his peace of mind.
    He cast a glance askance at Bird sleeping so quiet in his net, where they had strung it between the galley and the number one workstation, Dekker being just too close to the spin cylinders. Dekker might have been crazy long before this—and Bird just might be soft enough to let the guy loose on his watch. That was all it took, let Dekker near a wrench or, God forbid, get his hands on something sharp.
    All that blood in the ship, all those little red splatters on the suits—did a cut on the forehead bleed like that?
    He had to have it agreed with Bird. They had to keep that guy confined—somehow, someway. They couldn’t sleep in nets for a month, they needed the spinners: and the idea of being blind and tucked in a spinner for six hours wondering what Dekker was doing on Bird’s watch already upset his stomach.
    And, damn, he intended to keep every move logged, everything they did, everything this Dekker did, every spate of What time is it?
    Dekker would get the time, all right. Logged on and logged off.
    He’d get the expenses written down, too, exactly the way he knew how to do it in a record Management would accept—because Benjamin J. Pollard wasn’t letting an old man’s softheadedness rob them of a break like this. Hell. No.

CHAPTER 4
    « ^ »
    REFINERY Two was only slightly prettier than a rock, but it did come welcome—that k-plus wide sooty ring that you only caught sight of on camera—and most to Bird’s knowledge were eager to see it, and did turn the optics on, long before it was regulation that you had to get visual contact. There she hung, magnified in the long lens, spinning with a manic vengeance, with her masts stuck up like spindles and her stationary mast surfaces bristling with knobby bits that were pushers and tenders, and shuttles from the Shepherds and such. A few, hardly more than ten or so at any one time, counting company rigs waiting crew change, were ships a lot like Trinidad , a whole lot like Trinidad , if you took plan B on your outfitting, and opted for green in the shower.
    A lot of the fitting inside Refinery Two was a lot like Trinidad , too, except, one supposed, if you got down to corporate residence levels, and there was about the same chance of freerunners seeing that in person as getting a guided tour of the company bunker on Mimas.
    Belters lived and Belters died and Refinery Two just rolled on, this big factory-hearted ring which was the only close to g-1 place miners and tenders in R2
    zone ever got back to. She swallowed down what the Shepherds gathered in, she hiccuped methane and she shat ingots and beams and sheet and foam steel. She used her own plastics and textiles or she spat them at Mars, in this year when Jupiter was as convenient to that world as Sol Station was. But nobody knew what went to Mimas. Some said what was down there repaired itself and had more heart than any company exec—but that was rumor and you didn’t want to know. Some said it wasn’t really the ops center it was