Air Debt

The beeping came at 0340 station time, which Irma Byrne had learned over eleven years on Meridian-7 was the hour the station liked to deliver its worst news. She was forty-five years old, a corporate lawyer with a corner hab unit she'd paid too much for, and she had been dreaming about nothing in particular when the comm panel started shrieking.

She rolled over and slapped it. "Byrne."

"It's Arlo." The voice was low and fast, and there was a scraping sound behind it, metal on metal, like a man dragging himself somewhere he shouldn't fit. "Irma, I need a favor and I need it in the next four minutes."

She sat up in the dark. Arlo Peabody was the mechanic two units down the ring, a big slow-moving man of fifty-one who had fixed her life-support regulator last quarter for nothing she could ever repay, and he had never once called her at 0340. He had never once called her at all, come to think of it. He just showed up at her door with tools and a coffee bulb and a way of talking that made even bad news sound like small talk.

"What favor," she said.

"There's three men coming down the D-ring service shaft and they're looking for me. I'm in a crawlspace about forty meters past the junction, and it's a dead end, Irma. It's a dead end and I got no place to go."

The scraping stopped. She heard him breathing, and she heard something else too, farther off, boots on grating.

"Which junction," she said, already out of bed and pulling her robe on with one hand while she keyed her terminal with the other.

"Nineteen-D. The one with the coolant leak everybody ignores."

"Stay on the line."

She was a lawyer. That meant people assumed she knew rules, and the truth was she did, she just also knew that every rule on Meridian-7 had a code buried behind it, and every code had a lock that would open for a senior counsel's override if the counsel was willing to explain it later to a review board. She had signed off on airlock maintenance waivers a hundred times. She had never signed one at 0342 with a man breathing hard into her comm.

"The service airlock at nineteen-D is showing seal fault," the terminal told her. "Manual release requires maintenance tier three or legal override."

"Byrne, counsel tier two, override seven-seven-two-alpha," she said. "Log it as emergency access, ventilation inspection."

"Override accepted. Seal release in ten seconds."

The terminal didn't say anything about a man's life being attached to the other side of that door. The terminal never did. She grabbed the emergency kit from beside her bed and went out into the corridor in her robe, bare feet on cold deck plate, moving fast the way she hadn't moved since she'd done track in her twenties.

The airlock was already sighing open when she got there. What came through it first was the smell of the crawlspace, grease and old coolant and sweat, and then Arlo himself, dirty and bleeding a little from one eyebrow, hauling himself through the frame with the gracelessness of a big man in a hole built for smaller ones. She grabbed his arm and pulled, and he came out heavy and swearing under his breath, and together they got the airlock shut and sealed before he'd finished saying words she didn't usually hear from him.

Then they stood in the corridor and listened. The boots on the grating came closer, two sets of them maybe three, unhurried, the walk of men who owned the hallway they were walking down. Irma put her hand flat on Arlo's chest and pushed him back against the bulkhead, and they waited, and the boots went past the junction and kept going, and after a while there was nothing but the station's ordinary hum.

Her heart was loud in her own ears. That was all right. His breathing was loud too.

"Okay," she said quietly. "My unit. Now. Nobody talks in corridors on this station, you know that."

---

Her quarters were small for a corner unit but they were hers, clean and a little bare, a desk with real paper on it because she was old-fashioned that way, a window looking down at the banded face of the gas giant turning below. Arlo sat on her sofa with a towel pressed to his eyebrow and looked around like someone who had never been inside a lawyer's home would, which he hadn't. She got him a bulb of water and sat down across from him and waited, because she'd spent twenty years waiting for clients to talk and it always worked better than asking.

He talked eventually. It took a while.

"You remember the regulator," he said. "Last quarter, when your scrubber went bad."

"Of course I remember the regulator. I'd be dead without the regulator. You told me then it was nothing."

"It was nothing," he said. "The debt's what wasn't nothing." He turned the water bulb around in his big hands. "I ran freight out of system for ten years, you know that. Came here three years back to fix things instead of fly them, quieter life. But the Grayline boys, the syndicate, they hold paper on half the dockworkers and they had a runner named Colch who owed them bad. Colch skipped out eight months ago. Skipped out and left his debts signed over to his crew, and I'd signed on his crew for one haul back before I quit flying, years ago, out past the Belt. Paper from out past the Belt is still paper, Irma. It caught up with me last month."

"That's not how debt law works on this station and you know it," she said. "Crew liability died out thirty years ago. I've written briefs on it."

"I know how it's supposed to work," Arlo said. "You want to tell the Grayline boys how it's supposed to work? Their man gave me the number this evening. Forty thousand credits, my payment or my kneecaps, and they gave me till the end of the week, and then they found me tonight anyway, so I guess the week was a courtesy."

Irma looked at him for a while. She thought about the regulator, how she'd been sitting in her unit watching the air numbers crawl down and knowing that the station maintenance queue was ninety-one days long for non-contract work, and how Arlo had shown up that same evening without being asked, spent six hours under her floor, and left without taking anything but a thank you.

"You saved my life," she said. "I'm grateful for that, and it isn't a debt, so don't start counting."

"You don't owe me anything, I..."

"Shut up, Arlo." She said it kindly enough. "Here's what I'm thinking. You want off this station. The Grayline boys control the docks and the passenger manifests, so you can't go out the front door. But there's a mining shuttle, Kestrel-class, berthed in the old sector, tagged for salvage, logjam in probate, nobody's touched it in two years. I've got clearance to move assets in probate if I document it right, and I can document anything right. It's sabotaged, or it was listed as sabotaged, which might just mean broken, which might just mean you could fix it, because you can fix anything, I've seen it."

Arlo was staring at her. "You'd falsify a probate transfer."

"I'd execute a probate transfer," she said. "The wording matters. I'm very good at wording. We fly out into the Belt, we find one of the derelict freighters the miners abandoned when the seam collapsed, there's still hulls out there with pressure seals that hold. We go dark, we wait for the syndicate to decide we're dead or gone, and then we figure out what comes next. But you'd owe me nothing. Not forty thousand credits, and not the regulator either. The regulator was a favor, this is a favor, and neither one is a bill."

He laughed then, a short tired sound, and pressed the towel to his eyebrow again. "Irma," he said. "You know what they'll do if they catch us."

"I know what they'll do if they catch you," she said. "Me, I'm a tier two counsel with an override log that says ventilation inspection. I've survived worse paper trails than this one. And I've been on this station eleven years, Arlo, and I'm forty-five years old, and I've been waiting a long time for something to happen that was actually worth the risk of it." She got up and went to her terminal. "The Kestrel's in probate under case number nine-oh-two-twelve. We leave tomorrow night, second shift change, when the dock cameras cycle. Tonight you sleep in my bed and I take the sofa, and if you argue about that I'll bill you for the argument."

He didn't argue. He just sat there on the sofa with the water bulb, a big battered man in a clean room, looking at her like she'd said something he'd needed to hear for a long time and hadn't known it.

"Irma," he said. "Why are you doing this? Truly."

She thought about the window, and the gas giant turning, and the eleven years.

"Because somebody finally asked me to," she said, and started typing.

The next day passed the way a lot of bad days pass on Meridian-7, which is slowly, with paperwork on top. Irma filed the probate transfer under nine-oh-two-twelve with a cover memo so dry that her own supervisor signed off on it without reading past the second line. Salvage assessment, relocation of asset to storage berth, standard transport fee waived due to condition. Every word of it was true if you squinted, and she had spent eleven years learning exactly how hard to squint. She printed one copy on real paper, folded it, and put it in her coat pocket where her hand kept finding it.

Second shift change came at 2140 station time. The old sector still smelled like grease and dead filters, and the Kestrel sat in its berth like something the station had been keeping in a drawer. Two years of dust on the hull, a salvage tag half peeled off the access hatch, one flickering LED above the ramp that Arlo thumped once and it steadied, which told Irma most of what she needed to know about how the next twelve hours were going to go.

Arlo went through the shuttle as a man seeking a specific lie. He had the engine covers off before she'd finished closing the ramp, and he was back in the cabin in forty minutes with grease to his elbows and a look on his face that she filed under complicated.

"It'll fly," he said. "Barely. Whoever listed it as sabotaged wasn't lying, but they didn't finish the job either. Thrusters are good for a burn or two. Life support is rigged off the cabin battery, so we keep the talkin' to a minimum and the breathin' slow."

"That sounds like a plan I can follow."

"Don't jinx it." He wiped his hands on a rag that was older than their acquaintance. "Dock's clear for another nine minutes. Get strapped in."

They came off the berth during the camera cycle exactly the way she'd mapped it, a slow lazy drift out of the old sector with a salvage transponder doing their talking for them, and for eleven minutes Irma Byrne actually believed her paperwork was the best thing she'd ever written. The station fell away. The gas giant filled the forward glass, banded and enormous, and Arlo put them on a course for the Belt and told her to hold onto something, and she held onto the edge of her seat and grinned like an idiot at the window because eleven years of watching that planet from an office had never once looked like this.

Then the proximity alarm chimed, twice, politely, the way cheap alarms do when they want to ruin your life.

Arlo didn't swear. That was the part she remembered afterward, that he went quiet and just started unbuckling. "Crawl in back," he said. "Third panel on the left, the one with the fresh scuff. I scuffed it during preflight because something didn't sit right, and I didn't take the time to chase it."

She chased it. She was a lawyer, chasing things was the whole job, and it took her four minutes with a light and a screwdriver to find the tracker bolted inside the frame, a Grayline unit, commercial grade, the kind Arlo would have named on sight if he hadn't been in such a hurry. The syndicate had gotten to the shuttle before they did. Probably days before. Probably the same night Arlo got the number.

"Irma." Arlo's voice from the cockpit, flat. "Their boat just lit up on the scope. Two minutes out, running hot. They were waiting on us to commit."

"Then we stop being findable!" She was already pulling up the engineering schematic on the cabin terminal, and she'd like to tell you she reasoned it out calm and careful, but mostly she saw the word CORE and remembered enough dock law to know what a shuttle's power core was worth to a tracker that needed it to talk. Jettison the core and the tracker died, and so did the main drive, and so did the heat, and so did about ninety percent of their options. "Arlo. If I blow the core, we're a rock. Dead drift, no main burn, no comms, just tumbling in the radiation belt until something finds us or doesn't."

"How long before their boat gets here?"

"One minute forty."

"Blow it."

She blew it. There was a clunk she felt through her boots and a shudder through the whole hull, and the lights died and came back sullen and orange on emergency cells, and the scope in the cockpit went to static, and the tracker, wherever it was bolted, went dark with everything else. Arlo threw them sideways on thrusters for eight seconds with what was left in the lines, then killed everything and let the Belt have them.

---

The radiation belt took them the way the ocean takes a cork. The shuttle rolled slow and kept rolling, and through the little forward glass the gas giant swung by in half-lit arcs, and the dust in the cabin floated the way dust does when nothing remembers which way down is. Irma sat in the copilot strap with her knees pulled up and her coat under her, and for a long while neither of them said anything, because there was nothing to say that the silence wasn't already saying.

The cold came first. Emergency cells ran the air scrubbers at a whisper, no heat, and Arlo dug two survival blankets out of a locker that hadn't been opened since before the seam collapsed, and they wrapped up like a pair of presents nobody wanted, and still the cold sat in the cabin with them.

"Three days," Arlo said finally. "Air's good for three days if we're quiet and lazy. Battery's good for less. Water we've got. Food we've got. What we don't have is an engine, so somebody finds us inside three days or we're an obituary."

"Then somebody finds us." Irma said it like she was filing a motion. "The Grayline boat saw us jettison. They know we're alive and they know we're blind, and there are only so many places a dead shuttle can drift. They'll sweep the