Dead Belt: True Tales of the Gasping Frontier

Black Contract

Dead Belt, True Tales of the Gasping Frontier is a Space-Folk Horror Anthology Podcast and as such may not be suited to all audiences. Listener discretion is advised.

Ain't a Belter born and still performing gas-exchange could be called lucky. The most of us are hard-scrabble and perched on the working end of a razor, just a little shifting of the grav away from pitching over one side or the other, or if we ain't said our little prayers or fondled our luckydos in a while, pitching straight forward and falling on both in pieces. It's quicker that way.

Quicker and cleaner, I expect. Because it's a long fall.

Unlucky as we are, we all got our little traditions to keep the dark at bay and the devil off our back. We believe in the power of cast resin insulators hung from our coveralls to ward off shock. We hang an untripped rad-badge over our racks to filter the bad waves while we're dreaming, else the nightmares come and we wake all shook and off our game. We believe in the power of mirrors because they're looking over our shoulders even when we can't spare a glance. Can't nothing bad happen when your own reflection's keeping an eye on you. Or so long as you remembered to keep an alligator clip on your helmet micboom. Those things help you hold it together when everything's falling apart.

We swear on drift and dark and stars and SAG-A. And we don't do it lightly. Because all those things were out here waiting for us long before we learned to ride the Rails. Everything we trust for luck we trust because they were, even if they're silly and fleeting in the face of the vast and unknown that waits for us when we take our brief candles into the hungry dark, made by the work of human hands. And that's comfort among the strange and laughing cosmos.

We are none of us lucky. But we are not Milo Grigg.[intro music: Badboy]

Milo Grigg doesn't talk about his meeting with the Rep, I hear. I don't blame him. Figure if you take the envelope and still want to talk about the sumbitch in the unconvincing human-suit who gave it to you after you read it, it'd say some unkind things about how your head-ware is operating. Folks who know Milo tell me that he ain't that sort, anyhow. Mean to say, he's not any crazier than the most of us. Certainly no crazier than any the folk got their name stencilled on the wall of the Last Call, any road.

Milo, I'm told does not look like a living legend. He stands about five foot six inches, bird-chested and rolled-shouldered. He don't cut much of a figure; shaggy brown hair, sullen dark eyes, and a nose like a bottle-opener. Just another one Came out to the Belt too young and matched vector with some old hat who figured a scrawny apprentice, wouldn't eat too much or breathe too deep would be an asset out pickin' the alloy carcasses for scrap and salvage. Plenty of Void Rats get their start that way, and it wouldn't even bear mentioning had Milo not outlived three, count 'em three, would-be mentors.

Mallory Haight took a long swim through space, blown out through a sucker hole. Ibrahm Dodge lost a gunfight over salvage rights with some black hearted vulture or another. Bobby Hicks burnt to a cinder failing to drain a fuel sump before cutting into it. Bad ways to go, all of them. But Milo kept picking up the pieces. Figure each time you watch a Belter bite it, you learn something and resolve not to make the same old mistakes that have claimed so many of our solitary siblings. Milo sold their ships and saw to their affairs, but it wasn't long before he was out there among the dead birds again.

Milo never saw no one sign with the Rep before, though.

I figure you spend your formative years in this line of work watching Belters die--Belters who'd promised to show you the ropes, dispense their wisdom so long as you agreed to shoulder your share of the salvage and not make a fuss when the going got hard--maybe you come away with a feeling that maybe all these Belters ain't as wise and sagacious as they mean for you to think they are. Mallory and Ibrahm and Bobby, they all told him never sign on with no Corp Reps, because they was all snakes and were lookin' to get you killed, but how had that worked out for them, really? They was dead anyhow. And they hadn't even had a fortune on the line.