The belt is right to be furious. It may still be wrong about the number.

Let me start where the belt is right, because it is right, and pretending otherwise wastes everyone's shift.

A freight formula that reweights delivered prices by forty basis points — nine percent dearer on a standard ice-and-metal manifest — should not arrive with no author, no review window, no committee signature. That it traced back to a working group of inner-polity buyers holding energy-futures contracts, and not one lift contract among them, is worse than sloppy. It's the exact thing the Exchange exists to prevent: the people who pay for haulage writing the price of haulage, in the dark. Ola Nakamura, the shipping registrar at Ceres Reach, has every standing to be furious, and her twelve-outpost compact is a reasonable answer to being priced by strangers. Disclosure was forced. It should never have needed forcing.

Now the part nobody at Ceres wants to hear.

Distance isn't a prejudice. It's an underwriting cost. And it's a real one.

I've spent enough shifts on a loading floor to know what a Ceres transfer actually is. It's capital and crew and hull committed against a transfer window that won't open again for roughly two years. When a rigging crew closes a latch on an inward Ceres manifest, they aren't shipping a tonne to next month. They're shipping it across a calendar nobody can move. Every kilogram of that cargo ties up lift capacity — the one thing in this economy that has stayed stubbornly, expensively scarce — for the full length of that closed window. A short inner-system haul recycles its slot in weeks. A Ceres haul doesn't come back for two years.

Price that honestly and it costs more. Not because the belt is far and therefore contemptible. Because the belt is far and therefore the money is locked up longer, the risk rides longer, and the crew and the hull are unavailable to anyone else the whole time. Somebody has to carry it, and carrying it that far means carrying it that long.

Nine percent, against a two-year window, isn't extortion. Measured against the real haul risk it covers, it's close to modest. I watched a lift auction clear at a record this quarter and heard the brokers call it the wall, not the boom. That's what genuine scarcity looks like. It doesn't care where a manifest is going.

Here's my worry, and it's a worker's worry, not a broker's. The surcharge stranded on Ceres because buyers refused the downstream pass — seven of eleven returned Nakamura's revised terms unchanged, two rejected them outright, two are still talking. If the belt wins the fight over authorship and drags the whole formula down with it, someone still has to underwrite the far hauls. Underprice a two-year commitment and the capital stops committing. Then the lift the belt depends on for its own foundries and desalination simply doesn't get booked.

Burn the working group. Publish every name. Put a vote behind the next formula. But don't confuse the crime of who wrote the number with the question of whether the number is true. The vacuum-rated crews who close those latches will keep flying either way. What they need to know is whether the far run still pays enough to send them.