The contract came up on the board at Tau Ceti Orbital at the end of a bad week, and Nell Ashby took it before she had finished reading it.
Got word of a snowball in the slack at 12,19, pet. Big one, if the bar's right, and the bar's usually half right. Get eyes on it before we send the fleet. Don't touch it, don't tell Wearside.
'Tyne Deep,' said Gus, in her ear. 'They pay on time. They talk like your nan.'
'My nan never paid anybody on time.'
'Then they talk like somebody else's nan. Fuel's on the account. You've got water for a week, which is six days more than you'll need. Go and look at a comet, Nell.'
She had named him Gus on her first day because it was the first name that came into her head, and she had picked an old face for him with a broken nose because she thought it would make him sound tougher. It had not. Gus had the voice of a man who had been on the Desk for a long time and had stopped being surprised by haulers somewhere around the second year. He was the only person in charted space who knew her rig better than she did.
The Bad Penny was a Rust Runner like every other Rust Runner, which meant she had a cargo bay, a cab, and a heater that worked when it felt like it. Nell ran her out from the orbital in the usual traffic, past the ore barges and the Lumen liners and a Core patrol cutter sitting very upright in its lane. It took most of the morning to reach the mouth. She ate a protein bar and listened to the music Gus put on for her, which was always better than the music she put on for herself.
At the mouth she checked her heading three times, as every hauler did and every hauler pretended not to.
'Dropping short,' she said.
'Dropping short,' said Gus. 'Mind the delay.'
The drop was the drop. There was the lurch in her stomach, and then the hang, which this time was a single held breath of perfect silence. She had never told anybody that the hang got longer every time. Everybody said it did, and she did not want to be everybody.
Then she was in the slack.
There was nothing to see at first. No mouth lights, no traffic, no beacons. The stars looked the same as they always did, because they were the same stars. What changed was the quiet. In a lane there was always chatter on the band, somebody complaining about a price or a customs queue. Here there was nothing at all, and the silence in the cab had a weight to it.
'Gus?'
Nothing came back. She counted. At four, his voice arrived.
'Here. You're on the delay. About four seconds, getting longer as you go. I'll keep talking, you keep flying.'
'Fine,' she said, and then had to wait to hear him say good to a word she had already forgotten saying.
The coordinates put the snowball a few hours out. She set the Penny on her heading and sat back. The heater ticked. Somewhere behind her, past the mouth and the lanes and the long dark beyond the edge of the chart, the Seam was up. She did not look. She knew it was there the way you know somebody is standing behind you in a queue, and she had spent most of her first year as a hauler looking at it, and had learned to stop.
The comet came up on her scope as a blur, and then as a lump, and then as a shape her eye refused to believe was the size the numbers said it was. It was dirty white and grey, pocked and ridged, and it turned slowly end over end as if it had all the time there was. A thin tail of vapour came off one side where the far sun had found it.
'Oh,' she said.
Eight seconds later, Gus said, 'That's what everyone says.'
She started the survey run. The instruments chattered and she let them. Tyne Deep wanted mass, ice fraction, spin, a safe anchor face for a fleet of cutters. She ran the pattern the contract asked for and watched the comet turn under her, and it was on the second pass that she saw the ship.
It was very small. A rock hopper, a single cab on a frame with a cutter arm and an anchor rig, the kind of ship that was mostly hope and welding. It was anchored to the comet's dark side, and it was not running lights.
'Gus. There's a hopper down there. Anchored. Dark.'
She waited out the delay, and the delay felt longer than it was.
'Hail him,' said Gus. 'Polite. He's been out here longer than you.'
She hailed him polite. She hailed him twice. On the third hail a man's voice came back, rough and dry, as though he had not used it for a while.
'Who's that?'
'Nell Ashby, Bad Penny, out of Tau Ceti. Survey contract. You all right?'
There was a pause long enough that she wondered if he was on some delay of his own.
'Survey,' he said. 'For who?'
She thought about lying. She thought about the contract's last line, which was don't tell Wearside, and decided that a hopper on a comet in the slack was not Wearside.
'Tyne Deep.'
He laughed, or did something that was meant to be a laugh and turned into a cough partway.
'Course it is,' he said. 'Course it bloody is.'
His name was Tam Rourke and he had found the snowball nineteen days ago. He had anchored, fired up his cutter, and it had burned out its lance on the first block. A hopper's cutter was the oldest kit on his ship and the one he could least afford to lose. He had been sitting on a mountain of ice ever since, unable to cut a cup of it, with his tanks going down.
'You're out of water,' Nell said. 'Sitting on a comet.'
'I'm not out. I'm low.'
'How low?'
He did not answer that, which was an answer.
'Why didn't you call it in?'
'Call it in to who? I call it in, the board posts it, and Tyne Deep or Wearside or Coldwater turns up with a fleet and twenty cutters and it's theirs by the end of the week. I found it. I was going to cut enough to prove it, haul it in, and file the claim with the ice in my hold. You can't argue with a man who's got the ice in his hold.'
'So you sat here.'
'So I sat here.' He coughed again. 'Then somebody in a bar told somebody else about a light in the slack at twelve-nineteen, and here you are. Survey.'
Nell looked at the comet turning under her. It filled the forward screen now, close enough to see the seams in the ice where the cold had cracked it.
'Gus,' she said. 'Off channel.'
She waited out the delay.
'Go on.'
'There's a hopper here who found it first. His cutter's dead and he's low on water. If I file this survey, Tyne Deep sends the fleet and he's got nothing. If I don't file it, I've done a week's run for nothing and he's still dying on a comet.'
The delay was nine seconds now. She had time to think of three more ways to say it, all worse.
'You've got water in the hold,' said Gus.
'I know I've got water in the hold.'
'Then that's the first bit sorted.' Another pause, longer than the delay. 'Second bit. Read the contract again. All of it. Down the bottom where nobody reads.'
She pulled it up. Under the voice, under Tyne Deep's cheerful pet, there was the standard block of terms she had never once read in her life. She read it now.
Finder's share payable to the first registered finder of any body surveyed under this contract, where the finder is named in the survey report and the finding predates the posting.
She read it twice.
'Is that real?' she said.
'It's Tyne Deep,' said Gus, nine seconds later. 'They're a lot of things. They're not crooks. They put it in because their own hoppers made them put it in, about a hundred years ago, after a strike. Nobody reads it, so nobody claims it. Name him in the report, Nell. Put the date he anchored in. He'll want his logs to back it up.'
'He'll have logs. He's been sitting here talking to himself for nineteen days.'
'Then he'll have very good logs.'
She matched spin with the comet and brought the Penny in alongside the hopper's little frame, close enough to run a line across. It took her an hour to rig the transfer. She had never done one before and she did it badly, and Tam talked her through it in his dry, cracked voice, and did not once tell her she was doing it badly, which she would remember about him for a long time afterwards.
When the water was across, he went quiet. She heard him drink. It went on for a while.
'There,' she said, when he came back.
'There,' he agreed. 'What do I owe you?'
'Nothing. It's Tyne Deep's water.'
'Is it?'
'It is now.'
She told him about the finder's share. She read him the line. There was a silence on the channel then that was nothing to do with any delay.
'I've been a hopper for twenty-two years,' Tam said eventually. 'Nobody ever told me that.'
'Nobody reads it.'
'No,' he said. 'No, they don't.'
She finished the survey with his logs attached and his name at the top, above hers, with the date he had anchored. She sent it into the delay and watched it go.
The answer came while she was running back toward the mouth, with Tam's hopper a dot on her scope behind her, still anchored to the ice and still not running lights, because some habits did not break for one tank of water.
It was Tyne Deep, on the open band.
Survey received, pet. Lovely job. Finder's share logged to T. Rourke, which nobody's ever claimed before, so you've made our accounts department very cross, and that's always worth doing. Fleet's on its way. Tell him to keep his anchor down, we'll bring him a lance.
She sat with that for a while. The heater ticked.
'Gus,' she said.
The delay was shorter now, the mouth close. Four seconds.
'Here.'
'Did you know that clause was there before I took the contract?'
'I know everything that's on the board, Nell. It's my job.'
'That's not an answer.'
'No,' he said, and she could hear him smiling, which she had never been able to work out how she could do. 'It isn't.'
Ahead of her, the mouth lights came up, small and orange and steady, the way they always did. She lined up on them. Behind her, past the comet and the hopper and the dark, the Seam was up, a thin line of light across the sky that nobody had ever got close to and come back to talk about. This time she looked at it. It was very beautiful. It did not look back.
'Dropping in,' she said.
'Dropping in,' said Gus. 'Then home. Your tea's waiting.'
It was not, because Gus did not make tea, because Gus was a voice in a freight office somewhere she had never been. But it was kind of him, and he said it every time, and she had stopped correcting him a long while ago.