Dead Belt: True Tales of the Gasping Frontier

Prelude

There are strange things at play around SAG-A
 Seen by folk who scrap for pay
The Spacer's Rails have their own strange tales
 That would take your breath away;
The Dead Belt's range can seem mighty strange,
 But stranger than you're like to find
Are the stories told by the Belters bold
 Of things in the spaces blind.

In dockside bars or beneath the stars, stories pass across cracklin' links.
They chill your heart as you wrench out parts, while your O2 gauge 'a shrinks.
Space is mighty cold, but a story told can keep the chill and dark at bay;
Cause you ain't the first who's come coerced to make your cred this way.

There's restless dead, and things left unsaid that haunt these floating birds.
There's plenty strange in the Dead Belt's range for which I lack the words.
But I've got the comm, while you drift along as the second watch a'crawls;
Just a crackle and hum like a friendly chum while the work before you sprawls.

No, there ain't much light, under endless night and we don't cast much more out here,
What stories we got, are mighty fraught with weird and powerful fear,
But that's the way, where the Belters play. Pickin' at rotting bones;
You know they say, in their folksome way, "every one of us dies alone."

It's a lonely trade, when your credit's made on the wreck of human pride
And you fill your tanks just to spite the bank and not think of them's that died
But you can't help but think as your O2 sinks of the stories here that played
The small sad tales like coffin nails of them that didn't make the grade

Space is a sea, they say and it seems that way; Spacers see the signs of things
And superstition'll scrap a mission before the klaxon even rings.
But forewarned is armed—not to raise alarms--about the worst that waits out there
So I'll set a spell, and a tale I'll tell, cause I can spare the air.

See, I know a few, and I've heard they're true though I got them second hand
I been on this boat, and on the float, long enough to understand
The way y'all sound missin' solid ground and gravity's trusty grip
They way y'all look, when your mettle's shook, when the scanner shows the blip

Cause you can't explain the things that remain; the wake of a broken bird
Ships once athrum with the reactor's hum, now here in the Belt interred
But no trick of light can a Belter fright: And y'all ain't a fearful host
Out here on the rim, on graves all grim, what else could it be but a ghost?

But your nerves a-frayed is a debt unpaid, and the Belt has its own stern code.
So you bury your doubt and you carry out a dead bird's final load.
In the lonesome night, by the console's light, you turn and burn for home
It's meager pay for a for another day, just a haul of ghosts and chrome.

And the hole in space, like an eyeless face, SAG-A and it's dreadful grip
Holds the birds in sway, as you sail away, already thinking of tomorrow's trip.
Because you're in too deep, as you welcome sleep, breathing air that you gotta buy.
So you scrimp and save, rob another the grave. You keep scrappin', Belter, or you die.

There are strange things at play around SAG-A
 Seen by folk who scrap for pay
The Spacer's Rails have their own strange tales
 That would take your breath away;
The Dead Belt's range can seem mighty strange,
 But stranger than you're like to find
Are the stories told by the Belters bold
 Of things in the spaces blind.

Dead Belt: True Tales of the Gasping Frontier is a space-folk horror anthology podcast of skillful and desperate scavengers picking over the remains of the junked starships caught in the gravity of the supermassive black hole, SAG-A. Here, you'll hear the tales of strange happenings on the fringe of settled space...the kind of thing the Terran Concordat don't much want you to know: Close encounters, weird happenings, narrow escapes, and lonesome deaths far beyond the stars we know. Drawing on old mariner's tales from the oceans of Earth, filk tradition, and the superstition and ghost stories of the American West, Dead Belt is written for those that know that when we push out among the darkness between the stars, sometimes it pushes right on back.

Dead Belt: True Tales of the Gasping Frontier is based on the solo tabletop roleplaying game, Dead Belt. More information is available at A Couple of Drakes dot com.

The audio version of this transcript can be found at https://anchor.fm/dead-belt