Ferrer had expected the rock rats to be scruffy, feisty, hard-rock types. Prospectors and miners, existing at the edge of human civilization, independent individualists eking out their living in the vast dark emptiness of the Belt, surviving in a world of danger and loneliness. To her surprise, she found that most of the residents of Chrysalis were shopkeepers, accountants, technicians employed in the service industries. Even the actual miners and prospectors had technical educations. They operated complex equipment out in the Belt; they had to know how to keep a spacecraft functioning when the nearest supply or maintenance depot was millions of kilometers away.
But they stared at her. Even in plain coveralls buttoned up to her chin, she felt their eyes on her. Fresh meat, she thought. A new face. A new body.
Her mission at Ceres was twofold. She was recruiting more hands for the army of mercenaries that the war demanded out of the growing numbers of unemployed miners and prospectors. And she was waiting for the return of Levinson and his nanotech team, to see firsthand the results of their experiment on an actual asteroid.
It had been pathetically easy to keep Levinson on a string. Every time they met he stared at her with hungry puppy eyes. If he comes back with a success he’ll expect me to reward him, Ferrer thought. It won’t be so easy to put him off then. But if he’s successful I can let him down gently and maneuver him off to some other woman. God knows there are plenty here at Ceres who would be happy to get connected with a scientist who can take her back to Earth.
She tried to clear her mind of worries about Levinson and concentrate on the unemployed miner sitting on the other side of her desk. The clean-cut young man was trying his best not to ogle, but his eyes kept returning to the front of her shapeless turtleneck sweater. Momma and her damned genetic engineering, Ferrer thought. I should have brought sloppy old sweatshirts, or, better yet, a space suit.
She kept their discussion strictly on business, without a hint of anything else. Humphries had sent her here to recruit crews for HSS ships and she had no interest in anything else.
“I don’t understand your reluctance,” she said to the miner. “We’re offering top salary and benefits.”
He looked a decent-enough fellow, Ferrer thought: freshly shaved and wearing well-pressed slacks and an open-necked shirt. His dossier, on her desktop screen, showed he had an engineering degree and had spent the past four years working as a miner under contract to Astro Corporation. He’d quit a month ago and hadn’t found a new job yet.
Fidgeting nervously in his chair, he answered, “Look, Ms. Ferrer, what good will all that salary and benefits do me when I’m dead?”
She knew what he meant, but still she probed, “Why do you say that?”
Making a sour face, the miner said, “You want to hire me as a crewman on one of your HSS ships, right? Everybody knows HSS and Astro are fighting it out in the Belt. People are being killed every day, just about. I’d rather bum around here on Chrysalis and wait for a real job to open up.”
“There are a lot of unemployed miners here,” Ferrer said.
“Yeah, I know. Some got laid off, like me. Some just quit, ’cause it’s getting too blamed dangerous out in the Belt. I figure I’ll just wait until you guys have settled your war. Once the shooting stops, I’ll go back to work, I guess.”
“That could be a long wait,” she pointed out.
With a frowning nod, he replied, “I’d rather starve slowly than get killed suddenly.”
Ferrer admitted defeat. “Very well. If you change your mind, please contact us.”
Getting up from the chair in a rush, as if happy to be leaving, the miner said, “Don’t hold your breath.”
Ferrer conducted two more interviews that afternoon with exactly the same results. Miners and prospectors were abandoning their jobs to get away from the fighting. Chrysalis was filling up with unemployed rock rats. Most of them had run through what little savings they had accumulated and were now depending for their living on the scanty largesse of Chrysalis’s governing board. Hardly any of them accepted employment aboard HSS ships. Or Astro’s, Ferrer found with some satisfaction. Of the fourteen men and women she had personally interviewed, only two had signed up, both of them women with babies to support. All the others had flatly refused her offers.