Rico gave a Belter shrug of the hands and tilted his head toward his daughter, sleeping in her bunk. “For her, sabe? Later is for later. For now I put some yuan aside. School, ring trip, whatever she needs.”

“I hear that. Later is later.”

“Oh, hey, they’re cleaning the head. Gonna grab a shower.”

“What’s with that, man?” Amos asked. “What’s the rumpus?”

Rico cocked his head, like Amos had asked why space was a vacuum. In fairness, Amos knew the answer, but it was interesting to see whether Rico did too. “Long-haul gangs, coyo. Price of flying on the cheap. Sucks to be poor.”

“The crew watches for that shit, right? Anyone gets in a tussle, they gas us all, tie up the perps. No fuss, no muss.”

“Don’t watch the showers. No cameras. If you don’t pay when the shakedown comes, that’s where they get you. Better to go when crew is around.”

“No shit,” Amos said, pretending surprise. “Haven’t seen the shakedown yet.”

“You will, hombre. Watch Jian and Wendy while I’m out, yeah?”

“Both eyes, brother.”

Rico was right. After the first rush of the flight, when the initial bustle of people finding bunks, deciding they hated their neighbor, then finding a new one was over, people were mostly settled in. The Belters bunking on Belter decks. The inners on decks split between Earth and Mars. Amos was on a Belter deck, but he seemed to be the only one mixing.

Prison rules for sure.

On the sixth day, a small group of toughs from a deck up came down the lift together and fanned out through the compartment. With fifty people on the deck, it took them a while to hit everyone. Amos pretended to sleep in his crash couch and watched them out of the corner of his eye. It was a basic scam. A tough walked up to a passenger, explained about in-flight insurance policies, then took a credit transfer with a cheap disposable terminal. All the threats were implied. Everyone paid. It was a stupid racket, but simple enough that it worked anyway.

One of the extortionists who looked like he wasn’t a day over fourteen headed their direction. Rico started to pull out his hand terminal, but Amos sat up in bed and waved him off. To the junior extortionist he said, “We’re all good over here. No one in this corner pays.”

The thug stared at him without speaking. Amos smiled back. He didn’t particularly want to be gassed and tied up, but if that’s how it had to happen, he’d live with it.

“Dead man,” the thug said. He put as much macho as he could into it, and Amos respected the commitment. But much scarier people than a skinny pubescent Belter had tried intimidating him. Amos nodded as if considering the threat.

“So there was this one time I got caught in a reactor crawlspace when a coolant pipe blew,” he said.