On the floor beneath the corner of his bunk lay a second crumpled up note, innocuous and overlooked. It was hastily written, like a bad first draft. Matty had picked it up and read the single sentence explanation. The hastily scribbled words were confounding. “I’M SORRY. THEY HaVE MY FaMILY,” they declared. Suddenly, everything became a blur of shoving and shouting as security, called to investigate the suicide, wrested this confession out of Matty’s hands.

* * *

Matty woke up tangled in sweaty sheets. His hands trembled from the dream that shook him worse than the anxiety attacks he suffered while locked up many years ago. For weeks now, the memory of discovering the body had invaded his sleep, tormenting him. Victor’s soul seemed to demand vengeance before it would grant him peace. But how? He wasn’t a priest or an exorcist. Besides, he didn’t believe in those things. Not to mention the strikebreakers swept up and whitewashed all the evidence with a cover story about embezzlement. Regular security wouldn’t have done that. Even in the current state of the site, they were too close to the Belters they worked with for so many tours.

Matty struggled out of his narrow rack and used the toilet. It was five hours till he was back on shift but it was clear he wasn’t getting anymore sleep. Giving in, he threw cold water in his face, and shaved “mask seal” smooth. He missed having his beard, let alone a five o’clock shadow. But if you want to live through a suit leak, you best be able to seal a mask to your face. Tenderly, he stroked his heart tattoo on his left forearm, as a hug and kiss to the loved ones he’d lost. Then he finger-combed his high and tight hair do, threw on some antiperspirant and put on his off-duty uniform before venturing out to The Pit’s recreation dome. This day already sucked.

“Maton! Yo callo chinga!” called one guy as he walked down the corridor toward him. Turning sideways so they could move their bulky bodies past each other, the two bumped hands in a fancy belter greeting ritual.

“Que pasa, Mulo?” Matty said.

“What’re you doin’ up already?” the grime covered miner asked. Splotches of dirt blackened mineral oil spattered his body save for his face.

“Can’t sleep. What’re you doing getting off shift now?” The two turned to face each other as they walked backwards toward their separate destinations.

“Got the option for 4 hours of overtime. Money’s good on the teardown, meng! You should try it,” Mulo said loudly as they got further apart.

“Nah, I get dat sweet-sweet UBM grift. Don’t need it,” Matty taunted back.

“Union stewards problems. Life is so cruel. You take care and don’t get too estupido,” Mulo said, laughing. “Vaya, cabron.”

“Vaya to joo too, mija,” Matty replied and turned around the corner. Mulo’s echoing laughter following along.

He started mulling over the last few months. The union rep life had gotten much sweeter since they won the strike. A trio of the strike breakers pass through an intersection ahead of him and a pang of bitterness went through him.

“At least those pendejos didn’t get orders to roll during the strike,” he thought.

Flashes of prison life came back. It might have been his experience doing time that lifted him up to the status of shop steward. When the breakers started getting rough as men stood up to them, he helped cool it down. He spent hours with them in holding and taught his union brothers how to behave around these kinds of legalized thugs. Most of the strikebreakers brought in for “supplemental security” were mostly former jailhouse screws and cops who got drummed out for bad fitness reports.

It blew Matty’s mind that anyone would trust him, but those men listened. They took his advice on how to behave as if The Pit was now a prison colony. Encounters between belters and breakers became less violent, even though they weren’t what you’d call pleasant. His union brothers stayed out of sick bay or stuck in the coolers for a week or more, losing out on pay because of it. Management hated being referred to by insulting prison slang terms and work slowed to a crawl. It wrecked their fantasy that they weren’t the bad guys. Guilty resentment boiled in The Pit’s meeting rooms as harsher new company directives came in on every freighter, and they made them look worse and worse. Of course, nobody knew the actual truth of what either side thought. Those friendly ties and off-the-record communication between miners and management had ended with the strike as effectively as a dropped guillotine.

With a start, Matty realized he now stood in front of Victor’s door with no idea how he got there. How long had he been walking? The nameplate was still there. But if he rang the bell, but who would answer? He never would again. Had Victor’s wife and children gotten his letter? He had no idea.

Since the strike, there’d been a series of issues that cut off direct comms out of the belt. The company said it was pirates or something that trashed the uplink satellites and they’d be a long time without direct connections due to shortages in specialized parts. Every belter suspected it was bullshit. Now everything went by mail courier. No one believed that the company respected their privacy. Any man who had at least two tours under his belt knew they read every correspondence or transmission that came out of here and started sending messages in code.

“Holcomb, Victor”. The revenant behind the name prodded at him. Matty tried the door. It was locked, of course. Even had security tape across it.

He looked down the corridor both ways, then took out his multi tool. No harder than stealing an aircar. Three seconds later, the door came open and Matty slipped in to his friend’s quarters unseen. Didn’t have to worry about cameras in the hall or quarters, as the union made sure that invasion of privacy stopped. That’s what caused the heavy strike breaker triad patrols in belter residency blocks.

Feeling in the black behind him, he found the switch, and the lights swelled to bright imitation daylight. It helped- had helped with Victor’s seasonal affective disorder. “Apparently not enough”, Matty thought with a tight knot in his throat. He swallowed hard and looked around. The ghost images of the last day he had come by remained burned into his memory. Like a blue afterimage from a camera flash. Why did this bother him? It seemed it was a suicide. But why the two notes? Why didn’t that second crumpled up confession match the company’s official conclusion of the investigation? They left it out of the official report.

Forcing himself out of his memories, he went to Victor’s desk and logged in. Nothing. Of course, these quarters were no longer in use and they’d turned off the feeds. But Matty knew ways around that.

The strike had restored privacy to the belters, which meant the camera feeds turned off, but the data access on the cameras still worked. He went over to Victor’s tech junk drawer and fished out a long data cable. Matty stood on a chair and peeled off the electrical tape covering the camera. He found the maintenance data jack and hooked up Victor’s computer to it. Once Matty established connection, he used some of his old tricks off his personal data pad and found the system back doors.

Everyone had assumed Maton went to prison for being a leg breaker or some other violent felon. That was far from the truth. Forbidden by the judge to touch any networked device during incarceration, he got his bulk by lifting weights in the prison yard. What got him put away was a career as a burglar, thief and hacker. Scams and stealing company secrets was good money till some rat pendejo corpo finked on him. It amazed him how fast a food manufacturer will turn on you when you sell them a competitor’s secret formula…then copy the data, anyway.

That earned him eight years. Lifting iron and learning how to jailhouse rock gave him his goon-like physique that people knew him for now. That physicality opened up new doors, giving him a way out of the old life. When his parole officer remanded custody to the United Belt Miner’s union, he got off Earth and ended up in hellholes like The Pit. He liked the life. It was a comfortable mix of prison and civilian life. For six tours he’d prospered and just kept on doing it even after his parole ended.

“Let’s see if someone was watching who ought not be,” he muttered as he wormed his way through the archived data. As he hoped, nothing was there. Not even a hint of migrated files.

“I guess they actually kept their word, after all,” Matty grunted with a bit of surprise. “Let’s see what else I can discover that might be juicy.”

His datapad found a few more back doors, letting him into more low-level security areas. Nothing really glamorous, of course, but it was amazing what people forgot to clean up from buffers, trashcans and other backup redundancies. As the age-old adage went, “The internet never forgets”.

His digital dumpster diving found something in the shipping schedules that gave him gooseflesh.

“What the shit?” Matty whispered.

Something wasn’t right, but this was coming right from a high-level manager’s sent email trashcan, so it was hard to deny it as a mistake. He picked up his datapad and looked at the schedule the company gave the union. They didn’t match. Then he used his union access to do the same trick on his higher ups in the UBM’s site hierarchy. Diving into the mail courier buffer drive, he found their official shipping schedule. There he found two lists. One for senior union officers and then to junior officers and lower got a longer schedule. One shipment longer.

Frozen in shock, his mind started putting the pieces together, Matty began seeing the sinister picture. The company had been lying all this time. They weren’t preparing for a facilities sale, they were mothballing the facility to be scrapped. And this would include every member of the victorious strikers writing them off as scrapped material! Their own union officers sold them out. Marooned and left to die. In three weeks, The Pit was to become their grave!

2.

It was getting unbearably hot in the multi-purpose room already. Shop stewards, foremen and other low-ranking union members packed into the multi-purpose room. All of them Matty could trust not to run their mouths or rat them out to the company. Men stood around the walls, and someone taped paper over the window on the door. He needed to keep it short.

“All right,” he started, but the screwing around didn’t stop.

“Shaddap!” Matty yelled. The fooling around stopped and people looked up front at him. Once he was sure they were ready to listen, Matty started talking.

“We’re in a world of shit, brothers,” he began, then reached down to his duty bag and pulled out a few sheets of hard-copy notes. “Here. Take this, give a look at the highlighted parts and then pass it on. I’ll take it back when you’ve all seen it. Memorize what’s on that page because your lives may depend on it.”

“Come on! What is this? A safety meeting?” one elderly foreman called up from the back. “They always say your life depends on this. It depends on that. If you eff up, you can kill the guy next to you. Blah, blah, blah.”

Matty fixed him with a hostile stare. “If you think this ain’t worth your time, GTFO. I ain’t forcing the truth on you ’bout how our own senior officers sold us out. Get goin’. I’ll wait.”

The foreman squirmed, but didn’t move and shut his mouth.

“You in, or just estupido thinking nobody’s gonna know if you are the rat if the screws come down on us?”

“Yeah, I’m in. I’ve got no reason to talk to those bastards about this.”

“And that’s part of the point. Is there anyone else here who used to be buddies with some of management, even after the strike?” Matty asked the crowd.

A few hands went up.

“Yeah? And how’s that relationship going? Lemme guess, only small talk and what they are gonna do when they rotate out? Right?”

Several heads nodded. “And security cuts no breaks. Like some Earther regulator is running a Class A inspection on site, giving every guard an anal probe. Nothing slides and nobody’s gossiping.”

As the paper moved through the room. Faces grew pale. Disbelieving flipping between the sheets of paper as they compared them, frantically looking for a mistake.

“That’s right. Nobody’s talking. Nobody hangs out anymore. This isn’t just holdover bitterness from the strike decision. There’s something more going on, and those printouts are the receipts.”

“How’d you get those?” a production scheduler called up.

“None of your business, pendejo,” Matty shot back. “I knew where and how to look. You make up your own mind about what that means.”

“So what?” One of his fellow shop stewards said. The man didn’t like him but he was trustworthy and no friend of management. “All this shows is that they’ve been taking personnel out with every shipment and they don’t need the last one. It’s not uncommon for a company to change its mind on what to leave behind when mothballing a site. We’ve all been through this process before at some point.”

A low murmur went through the crowd. He spoke the truth.

“They’re drawing down to a skeleton crew for management over the next two shipments. That second to last shipment on the schedule is the only one where they finally pull all security and strikebreakers out with the remaining company officials. No UBM members under senior officers. All company management and senior union officers plus security and strikebreakers ship out then.”

“I don’t get it,” another voice popped up. “So we go out last.”

“Put it together! They aren’t leaving any security, company management or even senior union officers. No one’s in charge. Unit Supervisors and below stay behind. What company would ever do that to a facility? You can see in on page five of the company-wide shipping schedule. The last ship should have left earth a week ago to keep the set schedule for us. It never left and there is no notification about a delay or technical issue that is SOP. Why is it that? We’re being left behind.”

That question hung heavy in the air.

“It’s probably the most efficient method,” someone reasoned.

“Besides, Belt Territorial law states you can’t just abandon people out here. Someone would talk and we’d get rescued. Then we could sue the company and become trillionaires!”

There were lots of laughs and hoots of approval.

Matty hated all these pop up comments from faces he couldn’t see. Why was he doing this? “You don’t want anyone else to die,” He told himself. “Doesn’t matter anyway. I’m here now, so man up and do the damn job you started!”

His eyes wandered about the room, trying to find some way to anchor his thoughts back on the topic. He needed to make them stop looking for excuses and embracing delusions.

“How are we gonna call for help if no freighter shows up?”

That shut them up.

“Didn’t think about that little detail, did you?” Matty mocked the excuse finders, busy trying to turn the crowd against him. “We don’t got a satellite. All communications are coming by couriers on the freighter. In two weeks, that last freighter shows up and when it leaves, anything left behind stays behind for good. You think the next owner will discover our bodies? There won’t be one! They are going to disappear this site, hide it on the books and The Pit will vanish from public knowledge. There are billions and billions of asteroids out here. You think they need this one? Nah. We’re a ghost story at best by those lucky enough to survive. Those too stupid to keep their mouths shut will also disappear, and we become a myth to scare belter kids.”

“Bullshit!” shouted his hater. “There’s got to be at least one whistleblower!”

Maton came out from behind the podium and got in the hater’s face. The man rose to Matty’s threatening approach.

“Yeah. There was one. Victor.” Matty growled. “Remember what happened to him?”

Hater turned the color of cottage cheese. He was a friend of Victor, too. No accounting for taste in friends, Matty guessed.

“You take that back…” Hater wheezed.

“I found his body. I saw the two notes,” he said, then stepped back to shout to everyone else. “Anyone else see both notes Victor wrote?”

He knew no one else had. They only knew the story that company security fabricated claiming some bullshit about embezzling from the union and how he couldn’t take the guilt anymore.

“I had. They were in his own handwriting. You know, with the goofy ‘a’ he used? The first stuck to his body. He called himself a traitor. The second lay crumpled up and on the floor like someone threw it away. It said that they had his family.”

“Why didn’t you tell anyone before?” The elder foreman asked.

“I did during the investigation. And then it was over and we got the official report. Suicide for reasons related to embezzlement.”

“At least they say he killed himself,” Matty said, then went back to the podium. His throat worked hard to swallow what felt like a stuck walnut. He’d never dared put his true suspicions out there before.

Once he felt strong enough to talk, he turned to face them all again. The printouts kept passing on, but now they weren’t being treated so lightly. “Victor couldn’t live with what he was stuck doing and he couldn’t expose them. So the best thing he could do was take himself off the count. I don’t blame him now. Either he complied or his family died. Either way, who benefits? The company. He obeys, we’re good. He refuses, his family dies. If that doesn’t shut him up, he’d die. Maybe that’s why I never got a letter back from Victor’s family.”

“But…why?” Hater demanded. His eyes were red and glistening.

“Because we’re fucking expendable. Meat robots,” Matty said softly. “You are as valuable as cattle in their sick brains.” He let those thoughts burn in real good.

“What’s the plan, chinga?” came a loud voice from the back of the room. Mulo stood there, his eyes flashing with a hate that could light a pack of smokes from across the room.

“The way I see it is we’re gonna have to get on the last freighter out or keep them from leaving till we’re all on board. If they leave all their intended cargo behind, everyone can fit. We’ll have to make a shit-ton of port-a-johns and strip The Pit of all food stores. That at least will make it possible that everyone gets fed and can take a dump safely.”

A chuckle went through the room at his earthy reasoning.

“What about the breakers?” the elder foreman asked. “They’re probably gonna be the last ones on, and if there’s any trouble, they’ll just start rolling on us. The ship will seal up and launch, and everyone on the platform will fry. Survivors will die as the company planned.”

“Then we’ll need to get behind them. Take control of the freighter’s bridge so they can’t take off,” Mulo said, some of his military experience coming out.

“And how we gonna do that?” Hater yelled back to Mulo.

“Look at the manifest of next week’s freighter,” Matty pointed out. “Where’s the paper? What does it say about next week’s arrival?”

The voice of another union steward piped up. “Says they have about a thousand moving pods big enough for all the belongings for a single employee’s personal possessions.”

“And that about equals every security officer, breaker and remaining manager on site. Plus, the senior union officers who sold our asses out,” Matty confirmed. The fury was catching among the rest of the brothers.

“That’s our ticket in,” Mulo said. Get a team to stow away into the pods. They get loaded on the ship, those get taken up to the staterooms of all the managers. Pull a trojan horse. Nobody’s gonna inspect them as long as we don’t act up. Besides, we all know there’s a few little secrets that will be tucked away and will slip through customs.

“But we’re not soldiers. How we gonna take them?” another voice came out of the crowd.

“Either you risk your life trying to live, or you just get in the grave and let them push the dirt in over you,” the elder foreman said. “I won’t let them bury me here without a fight.”

A rumble of agreement filled the room like a bulldozer starting up.

“Okay. We’re agreed we gotta save our lives, yeah?”

Another rumble of agreement.

“Veterans and those with military or previous police experience stay behind. The rest of you pendejos, get out there and start quietly spreading the word. If you can’t trust them to keep their mouths shut, don’t tell ‘em. The rest of us got a plan too. Morton? Stay behind too. I think we’re gonna need your blasting expertise. Everyone else, vamanos!”

3.

“Everyone in place?” Matty asked over the radio.

A series of affirmations came back. Mulo’s team replied with the morse code for the letter “Q”. They had snuck onto the flight deck and were ready to move.

“Stool pigeon?” Matty asked his snitches watching security operations.

“The neighbors have moved out,” a voice said. Security had abandoned their base.

“Crap on the chessboard and fly home,” Matty said.

“Dirty Rat?” he called out.

“Bellies are full,” the services team replied.

“Go take a nap,” Matty ordered. The material handlers and services team began moving the food stores to the staging hangar.

“All critters back to their nests.” Another chorus of affirmatives came back.

If all went according to plan, the mines started emptying. Thousands of miners came up on the elevators and made their way toward their positions near the landing pads. Thousands of men waiting behind closed doors to either counter attack or start loading depending on the outcome of this interaction.

A low murmur of guilty voices announced an approaching crowd of would-be evacuees as they rumbled up the ramp to the boarding terminal surrounded by the security. The all-hands meeting for management was done, and it was time to skip out on the check. Matty felt that same tickle deep in his belly he always got before a cell block riot. Only this time, people were gonna die if he failed. He needed to focus on more than making sure it wasn’t him bleeding out. There was much pressure on his shoulders, he could hardly stand it.

The first of the strike breakers came around the bend in the ramp up to boarding. Only Matty stood there blocking the pressurized gangway they would have to go through to get on board the freighter. He let out a hiss of disgust through his teeth as he watched those pendejo breakers doing an immediate action drill toward him like this was a combat zone. A touristy gaggle of company men and women straggled behind like bleating sheep. Some feeling relief, others chatting like it was just another day at the office. He saw the surprised face of The Pit’s GM and the UBM site president, looking panicked, at the head of this procession. “All they need are cameras around their necks,” Matty thought and almost burst out laughing.

“Down! Down! Get on the ground!” bellowed the breakers. Matty complied by raising up his folder of paper and did what any prisoner would do and complied. He knelt down, hands behind his head, folder on the floor in front of him, and crossed his legs at the ankle. He could practically taste the fear in the air mixing with the sadism of the breakers. They’d been so bored over the past few weeks as no one gave them any excuses to bust heads, just as he denied them that pleasure now.

His cheek slapped onto the hard stone floor hard enough to taste a little blood. Nothing too bad, though. Military grade stripper cuffs snaked around his wrists and ankles, but they missed his earpiece radio as he turned his head to hide it. He opened the channel and clicked the morse code for “go” with his tongue. A chorus of similar clicks came back to him through the earpiece.

“What do we have here? Someone’s not where he should be. The terminal is closed to miners,” the GM said, walking up and standing over Matty as six strikebreakers pinned him to the floor.

“This pendejo has no idea what’s about to go down,” Matty thought and grinned.

“Afternoon, sir,” Matty choked out around the knee, pressing down hard on his neck. “I need to speak with you before you board.”

“You’re out of line, Maton!” the Union president snapped back. “We’ll discuss this later.”

“When? After you’ve all left us behind to die?” Matty’s accusation actually staggered that weak-kneed backstabber.

“What is that supposed to mean?” the GM demanded.

“Look in the folder, sir. That’s why I’m here and need to speak with you.” Matty waited patiently for the guard on his neck to get up and hand the folder over to the GM.

The arrogant prick started leafing through the pages. He was a superb poker player and controlled his tells well. But even from seeing him only out of the side of his eye, he could tell those hard copies were all bulls-eyes.

“How did you come by this?” the GM roared, crumpling the papers in his fist and shaking them at him. “They’re going to get thrown in prison for this data theft!”

“Doesn’t matter how we got it,” Matty countered. “We got it. The entire Pit knows your plan and we’re not going to let you do it. Besides, you were going to leave us all here to die. Prison would be a step up.”

“How is a disarmed population of men going to stand against five hundred well-armed strike breakers in combat armor?” The GM demanded, throwing the folder away. Papers burst out in a small cloud. The impotent fluttering of the thrown papers caused someone on the radio to laugh out loud.

“Simple. We’re going to take control of your ship and not permit you to leave. You may have five hundred screws at your disposal. I have over seven thousand men ready to move on you. We’re just waiting for your decision.”

Immediately, the breakers started spreading out, searching rooms. In their rush to get everyone on board, and assuming the false feeds from the mine cameras were accurate, they were all in the terminal with Matty and management.

“You reckless bastard,” the union president blurted out. “You’re endangering your fellow brothers?”

“You murdering cabron. You sold us all out, so don’t try that moral high ground with me!” Matty gave a grunt as one of the breakers put more pressure onto the back of his knee.

“Nobody’s in the terminal, sir,” one of the breakers said.

The GM sneered. “I think you’re bluffing.”

“There’s one of three ways this is going to go now,” Matty said. “We all get on the freighter together. No one gets on, or only the survivors get off this rock. This outcome is entirely in your hands. We know what you’ve pulled and we’re not having any of it. For us, it’s literally life or death. You should know better than to back a man into a corner where he has nothing to lose.”

“The raccoons have the eggs,” squawked his radio in his ear. Mulo was too loud.

One of the breakers heard the sound and flipped over Matty’s head.

“Radio, sir!” the breaker said, jerking it out of Matty’s ear.

“Ow! You’re going to want to put that back in my ear? Otherwise, the choice will be made for you. I didn’t respond yet.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means I have about ninety seconds to tell them to hold, or they detonate all those mining explosives that are packed on the flight deck of that ship. It goes bang. We all sit here and wait for the next freighter to show up. And we know, thanks to your carelessness, that’s never gonna come,” Matty gave him a bloody lipped smile.

“You’re lying!”

“Sixty seconds. I got nothing to lose. Try me.”

Fear spread among the management, and a murmur grew.

“You’re good at playing poker. I can barely pick out your tells,” Matty taunted. “Let’s see how good you are at playing chicken.”

“Don’t mess around, man.” His union president wasn’t so good at chicken or poker.

“Forty-five seconds.”

Someone made a break for the boarding gangway. He got maybe a hundred feet down before the separation alarm sounded as the freighter airlock sealed. The man was athletic enough to get back to the terminal, sliding under the closing gangway airlock with a fraction of an inch to spare.

“I don’t give the word, we all get left here to die,” Matty said. “Twenty seconds.”

The breaker’s radios exploded with chaos and noise.

“Contact! JEsu-”

“They’re all up here! Oh, my G-”

Gunfire, muffled through space suits, filled the radios. Screams abruptly cut off in mid transmission with explosive impacts from the Saturday night specials the belters had cobbled together.

“Ten,” Matty started.

“Give him back his radio!” the GM ordered

“Six.”

A rough hand shoved his earpiece back in.

“Ouch. Five.” Matty rubbed his head on the floor, re-seating the radio in his ear canal. “Get your screws to stand down, pendejo! Three.”

“Stand down! Cease fire!” the GM screamed into his radio.

“Raccoon, protect the eggs,” Matty said and looked out the terminal window to watch for the blast.

A few people gasped as they realized they’d been holding their breath.

Nothing exploded.

4.

Reports came in from both sides. Mulo and his sappers had the charges planted. In a short firefight, over thirty strike breakers had perished and over seventy belters lost their lives. A Pyrrhic victory, but a victory none the less. Now they also were properly armed.

Matty stood up slowly, very aware that the breaker’s rifles were pointed at him ready to spray his guts all over the wall. “Everyone hold in place. We’re not done here.”

“What’s left to discuss? You’ve got the freighter. You do what you want,” came the GM’s nearly petulant whine.

“Not so fast. There’s a few issues left to clear up. We need some assurances and protections from the company and the union. Since both of you fucked us over, it doesn’t take much to see the instant we disembark on Earth, you’ll turn on us. Probably charge us all with revolution and let the government take us out while you skate away.”

Again Matty saw the GM’s tells give away precisely what he was going to do.

“So let’s put a little perspective on that plan. We’re going back to Earth for reassignment to different mining companies. The UBM will make that happen in 30 days. Meanwhile, this company will keep its mouth shut and write glowing reports on everyone so there is no question about any future employment. The company will not engage in any acts of vengeance against survivors of this mess. Everything is going to look exactly as the strike arbitrator originally promised. Everyone gets to walk away as men of their words and life goes on.”

The brows of the GM furrowed more, making him look like a pissed off owl. “What about the dead supplemental security? How’s that gonna get explained away?”

“Since you have about seventy dead belters on your hands also, you got two choices. Tell the truth, which no, you can’t. Not with what the government will do to you for it. Or do what you planned on doing, anyway. Lie about it. Make up a story about an industrial accident. People got sloppy these last few weeks and there was an accident. Pay off the death benefits to all the families and shut your lie holes,” Matty put out what he saw for them. Their blank expressions said volumes. His disgust rose again as he saw they were too lazy, greedy, or educated to care. Or perhaps they didn’t enjoy confronting the evil they signed off on.

“Seems you have it all figured out,” the union president muttered. He was on the hook even more than the GM. “And what will you do if we won’t make assurances? Leave us here?”

“We’re prepared to kill every one of you for attempting to do the same to us. Some of my brothers think I’m an idiot for even offering this, but it’s the moral thing to do.” A few derisive words flitted forward from the crowd.

Matty snapped back. “Yeah, a former jailbird has morals, you pendejos! More’n you people, I see. We don’t wanna have to do this, but we will if we must. Besides. If we left you behind, they’d send another ship. You’d have nearly enough food and supplies to survive till the rescue showed up, and of course, there’d be all sorts of charges leveled against everyone. As you can see, it’s easier and safer for all involved if we go home together as one big happy, family then go our separate ways.”

He let them think it over.

“And if you try to pull a fast one, we have a little poison pill of information that will go to the press and every elected official who represents someone who died in this little standoff. They can puff themselves up to campaign and promise to be tough on the sleazy corporations. The legal and political headache alone will dwarf the wrongful death lawsuits.”

The heat of all the people in the terminal was making the boarding gate uncomfortably warm. Beads of condensation rolled down the windows, making it look like it was raining in space.

The GM nodded his head like a broken horse. “You’d have made a great executive, Maton. You’re ruthless enough for it.”

“No way, man! Even in prison, I never sold my soul like you did, and you still suck at your job. Are we gonna go home now? Wha’choo wanna do?”

Every ear that could was listening in.

“Let’s go home,” the GM gave in.

“’Bout time. I’m sick of working for you people,” Matty said and walked to the sealed boarding gangway. He tapped in the code, the airlock pressurized and he spoke to the radio. “That’s it, you guys. Pack yer shit cuz we’re leaving. Nobody’s gettin’ buried here.”

~fin~

http://www.resonantmedia.art