Devil to the Belt (v1.1) by C. J. Cherryh

distance from R2’s spin axis equaled out with the car’s momentum as far as the inner ear was concerned. Then the ear figured out where Down was, the car’s rolling floor found it a half-heartbeat later, and bones and muscles started realizing that the stimsuits you worked in, the spin cylinders you slept in and the pills you took like candy didn’t entirely make up for weeks of weightlessness. Knees would feel it; backs would. The red-lit bar that showed their distance from the core was shooting toward 8-deck.
    Meg and Sal were on 6; he had found that out on their way in. He’d left a message for them on the ‘board, and he planned on company tonight. That and a drink and a long, long bath. Maybe with Meg, if she answered her messages.
    If she wasn’t otherwise engaged.
    The car stopped. He got out, on legs that felt tired even under 8’s low
g
, muscles weary of fighting the stimsuit’s elastic and now with
g
to complicate matters. Ben got out too, and said, “Meet you at the ‘Bow.”
    Ben didn’t even slow down. He just punched the button to go on down as far as the core lift went, to 3.
    Bird shook his head and headed off down 8-deck—damned if he was even going to call up his mail before he hit the bar at the Starbow. Mail would consist of a bank statement and a few notes from friends as to when they’d gone out and when they’d be back. His brother in Colorado wrote twice a year, postal rates out here being a week’s groceries and Sam not being rich. It wasn’t quite time for the biannual letter and outside of that there wasn’t mail to get excited about. So screw that. He just wanted a chance to get the weight off, get a drink, see a couple of familiar female faces if fate was kind, and never mind Ben’s wet dreams. Ships didn’t come without debts, probably multiple owners, not mentioning the bank, and the company would find some technicality to chew up any proceeds they could possibly make from the ship, til it was hardly worth the price of a good rock, plus expenses. Ben was going to work himself into a heart attack someday, if ulcers didn’t get him first.
    The meds said, and the Institute taught you, some null-
g
effects got worse every time you went out: your bones resorbed, your kidneys picked up the calcium and made stones, and the body learned the response—snapped to it faster with practice, as it were, and Ben believed it. Science devised ways to trick gravity-evolved human systems, and you took your hormones, you spent your sleeptime in the spinner and you wore the damn stimsuit like a religion. Most of all you hoped you had good genes. They told gruesome tales of this old miner whose bones had all crumbled, and there was a guy down tending bar in helldeck who had so many plastic and metal parts he was always triggering the cops’ weapon scans. He didn’t intend to end up like that, nossir, he intended eventually to be sitting in a nice leasing office collecting 15-and-20 on
two
ships, free and clear of debt, and letting other poor sods get their parts replaced. He had no objection to Morrie Bird sitting in that office as vice president in charge of leases, for that matter: Bird had the people sense that could make it work, and Bird couldn’t last at mining forever: they’d already replaced both hips.
    So Bird went off to the easy adjustment of 8-deck in blind trust that Mama would do the right thing and assay their take in the sling and record all the data they’d shot to the offices during their approach—while the one of them who’d worked for Mama for two years and knew the way Mama worked took the immediate trip down to 3-deck, and the frontage of the debtors’ barracks he’d once lived in. Oddity was endemic hereabouts—you could look down the strip now and spot a guy dressed head to foot in purple, but he wasn’t necessarily crazy—at least you could lay money he didn’t claim the company’d done this or that or ask you the time every five minutes.
    God, he hated