Dead Belt: True Tales of the Gasping Frontier

Last Call

Dead Belt: True Tales of the Gasping Frontier is a space-folk horror anthology podcast and thus may include material not suitable for all audiences. Listener discretion is advised.

Getting a signal through is a tricky proposition out this far from the bright shining center of the Terran Concordat. There's so much between us and civilization--and that's a capital C, there y'hear-- that even were we not on the cusp of an honest to god hole in space and ringed all 'round with the anodized bones and nanocarbon skins of a forgotten legion of the hulks and vessels which brought us to the brink of this precipice, we'd be hard pressed to hear the sound of life carrying on back the way we came. But time being what it is and space being how is may be, we would only hear their words of warnings as echoes across the yawning gulf of history. So we don't listen much. What needs saying comes by word of mouth, and anything worth listening to is local.

Even local chatter's not without it's problems though. Signals bounce. Even the laser arrays, the tight beam photon transfer links, they fade and fritz and fizzle. They're absorbed by the radiation coatings on warscarred hulks. They're attenuated, broken across polarized glass and failing photovoltaics of a reef of settlers and prospectors, haulers and tugs, hoppers and jammers and tankers and...yeah, even scrappers. Once you're in the Belt proper, can't no one get a signal to you. Least, that's the way it's supposed to be.

See, every so often something cuts through the static; that omnipresent background hum which is the final desperate scream of the light plunging over the lip of the event horizon and into darkness unknowable. And we call it the Last Call.

[intro music: Bad Boy]

Let's just say you're new in town, fresh to this corner of the starry sea and looking to make your way out among the wrecks and ruins around SAG-A. Maybe you just heard that there was opportunity out this way and didn't look to hard at what kind it might be. Maybe, like the most of us, you're on the run from something much worse back homeward--though that'c be hard enough to fathom. But let's just say. When you pass through the atrium on Brinkly Station or Hubwell or Reachback, and you look out the observation bay and you see the Belt arrayed like the tantrum-crushed bath toys of a giant circling the great cosmic drain of SAG-A, you might wonder how --why--so many old wrecks end up out here. Space is wide, and vast, and mostly empty. Some of those birds still have meat on their bones, certainly someone could salvage those, right?

That ain't how it works. Don't you misunderstand me now, because it probably should. But it /ain't./

Following the dust-up between the Independence League and the Terran Concordat about ten years back, and the fever-pitch of expansion that led up to it, there were more ships on the float--busted, destroyed, dangerous--than anyone really knew what to do with. The Concordat, as victors in the struggle put the onus of dealing with the hazardous new particulate radiating through the vaccuum and threatening galactic stability, firmly on the already-broken shoulders of the Independence League as one of the various terms of the armistice which brought the Consolidation, the great war in heaven to a close. To the victor goes the spoils, and to the vanquished a bill and the responsibility to clean up the broken toys.

Now I don't know what the Concordat thought was like to happen. Most of the Indies fleets, such as they were, had been blown into that self-same scrap. Anyone could turn a bolt or slick a rivet or ice a plate or run a bead or cut a cable had already had their fill of getting birds back to limping through the shooting. There was no money in refitting. Most of the warships and rockhoppers would cost more to refit than just build anew. But the Concordat was already turning back Homeward the lights of their drives just another constellation of winking stars in the velvet of all night's falling, and trusting the Indies to figure it out.