The world

Hauler's talk

Learn these and you'll sound like you've done the Deneb run.

Bar talk: What a pilot lets slip at a dock bar. Enough bar talk reaches the wire as a rumour, and then somebody with money posts a contract to go and look.
Belter: One of the settled belt crews: families, not prospectors, who live in the slack. Proud, close, slow to trust, generous once they do.
The board: Where the contracts are posted. Companies and factions both put work up; a company leans toward a faction but works for whoever pays.
Cold beacon: A dead transponder still pinging an old code out in the slack.
Coreward: In, toward the registry worlds. The opposite of rimward.
Cutter: Ice crews who work comets and ice worlds in small crews and heavy, slow ships. Quiet, superstitious and kind. They name their ships after weather.
The Desk: What pilots call the freight office their dispatcher works from. "The Desk says Rigel's paying."
Dipper: Pilots who skim gas giants for fuel. Riskier than cutting, better paid, and they drink more.
Dispatch: The voice on your comms from a freight office. You name them and choose their face, and nobody else hears them.
The drop: The moment a ship goes into the fold. Instruments say it takes no time at all.
Dropping short: Dropping out of a fold partway, into the slack, when you know where you are going.
Ghost: Pilots' word for an anomaly: an instrument return that should not be there. Lane-time running wrong, a light with no source, a signal on a dead code.
Glare-storm: A storm off the Rift that rolls inward along the lanes. Lanes close while it passes, and ships sit at the mouths and wait.
Glitter: A drift of Rift Glass in the slack.
The hang: The moment inside a fold. Total silence, which some swear is longer every time.
Her: The Rift, on a bad night. Nobody agrees who started calling it Her.
Hulk: An old wreck, long dead, sometimes from before anyone's records.
Ice is ice: Cutters' saying for anything that can't be helped.
The Kettle: A station's water plant. "The Kettle's low" is the most frightening thing a dockmaster can say, and the first line of a shortage.
Leave the snowball where you found it: Cutters' way of saying mind your own business.
The map's a timetable: The chart is drawn in hours, not light-years. Two stars side by side on it are close in lane-time, whatever the real sky says.
Mark: A point in open space worth flying to: a comet, a wreck, a hulk, a ghost, a cold beacon or a glitter. Also called a pin. Marks come and go.
Mouth: Where a lane begins, out past a star's planets. The further a lane reaches, the further out its mouth lies.
On the delay: Dispatch's voice out in the slack, arriving a few seconds late, then more.
The one cargo: Water. People drink it, air and fuel come out of it, and a tank of it round a hab is the best radiation shield there is. Every dock buys it, and nobody ever dumps it.
The Raft: The dippers' town at Mirach: a hundred ships lashed hull to hull in holding orbit round a gas giant with no dock. Nothing is for sale there.
Rift Glass: Faintly luminous shards that drift out of the Rift's edge. Nobody can say whether it's safe. The Authority bans it; the Frontier wears it.
Rift-sick: Can't take the drop: nausea, the shakes, a dread that lasts a day. Most pilots get over it in their first year.
The Rim: The edge of charted space. Fewer lights, longer waits, and everyone a bit too pleased to see you.
Rimward: Out toward the Rift, from any edge of the chart.
Rock hopper: An independent prospector hopping from rock to rock in a tiny, tired ship, chasing a strike. Sociable, broke and full of rumours.
The run in: Out of the far mouth and sublight again, until the lights of the port come up.
The run out: Sublight, from the dock to the lane's mouth. Long and dull: the radio and the clock.
Running dry: Running out of fuel in the dark, where there's no dock to refuel at. The one thing slack pilots never joke about.
Running the dark: A long sublight run with no lane under you, out toward the Rift: slow, hungry on fuel, with Dispatch on a longer and longer delay.
The Seam: What pilots call the Rift among themselves. Also the Glare.
The slack: The folded space between a lane's mouths, where comets drift, wrecks end up and Rift Glass collects. Open space on the chart is the slack.
Snowball: A comet, in cutters' talk. An ice body drifting in the slack.
The tab: Dispatch's emergency line home, for a pilot who's run dry. A pilot who needed it is talked about for years.
The wire: The news ticker. Place first, fact second, no adjective it doesn't need. "It's on the wire."
Without haulers, the systems starve: The sentence every pilot learns, from the Long Stop: forty days when the haulers stopped flying and three systems nearly starved.
Wreck: A recent loss: somebody's ship, maybe somebody's pilot. Claims, insurance, grief.