SPENDING his sleeptime with Bird wasn’t exactly what Ben had planned. Breakfast with Dekker wasn’t his idea of a good time either, but Bird insisted.
So here they were, himself and Bird at the table and Dekker in line—Meg and Sal were sleep-ins: they’d gotten in late last shift, up to what Ben didn’t try to imagine. Dekker hadn’t seemed enthusiastic about their company from his side either: Dekker had answered his door, said Yeah, he’d be there, and arrived late—clipped up the sides and all.
“All he needs is a couple of earrings,” Ben muttered.
“Be nice,” Bird chided him, over the sausage and unidentifiable eggs.
Ben looked at him, lifted a chilled shoulder. “Hey, did I do anything?” But he reminded himself he had better bite his tongue and keep criticisms of Bird’s precious pretty-boy to himself, the way he’d made up his mind yesterday that since the insanity had gotten to Meg and Sal he had as well go along with it.
Bird shot him a look that said he didn’t trust him not to knife Dekker in his bed. That was the level things had gotten to. That was the primary reason he figured he had better go along with it.
Until Dekker slipped up. Then he was even going to be charitable about “I told you so,” he sincerely was—so long as Bird saw it clear when it happened and came to his senses.
So Dekker walked up with his cup of coffee and his eggs, not quite looking at either of them, kicked back a chair and sat down.
“I have to apologize,” Dekker said first off, still without looking at them.
Ben manfully kept his mouth shut.
“I sort of wandered off yesterday,” Dekker said.
Bird shrugged, but Dekker wasn’t going to see that gesture, looking at his plate like the zee-out he was. Bird said, “Pills will do that.”
“I’m going off them,” Dekker said. His hand with the fork was shaking. Badly.—A real mess, Ben thought. Wonderful. We’re supposed to go out with this guy. This is going to be at the controls out there.
Dekker did look up then, shadow-eyed as if he hadn’t slept much. “I cut you off yesterday. If the offer’s still open—I’d like to talk about it.”
“Offer’s open,” Bird said. Ben thought: Hell.
Dekker didn’t say anything for a moment, just stirred his eggs around on his plate. Then a second look at Bird. “So I want my license back. What’s the time worth?”
“Depends on your work,” Bird said.
Ben did a fast calc, what Dekker had, what gave them a solid return on putting up with him. “10 k flat. With a guarantee you get the license.”
Dekker looked bewildered—maybe a little overcome at the price and not understanding the quality of what he’d just thrown in. He wasn’t exactly sure why he’d thrown it in—except he’d had this nanosecond of thinking he’d asked high and Bird was already on his tail. So it just fell out of his mouth: There you are, fancy-boy, I can fix it, I can, so you damned sure better mind your manners with me.
Bird didn’t say anything, Dekker didn’t, so Ben added, with a certain satisfaction, “Fair, isn’t it? Guaranteed, class 1.”
Bird looked a little worried. But he still didn’t say anything.
“Whose guarantee?” Dekker asked.
Ben gave him a cold stare. “Mine. On the other hand, if you ask anybody the time, Dekker, if you pull any shit on us out there, you’ll take a walk bare-assed.”
“Ben,” Bird said.
“I’m serious,” he said, and Dekker looked worried.
“Ben’s all right,” Bird said. “He really is.”
Dekker said, finally, “I haven’t got any other offers.”
“Small wonder,” Ben said, and realized that he’d broken his resolution a tick before Bird glared at him.
Dekker glared at him too. Dekker said, “I’ll pull my weight.”
Ben said, “Damn right you will. You’ll do whatever you’re told to do. And you’ll put up with whatever shit you’re handed, whatever you think of it—with no gripes.”
Bird said, “Ben,—”
Dekker glumly reached across the table. It took a moment before Ben realized he wanted his hand, that Dekker was truly calling his bluff and taking the deal.
Damn, Ben thought. He had as soon stick his hand in a grinder, but things with Bird were precarious. So he made a grimace of a smile, gave Dekker his hand and they made a limp, cheerless handshake across the plates.
No one looked convinced, not Dekker, not Bird. He certainly wasn’t. But he said, “All right, if we’re going to do this, let’s get that re-cert application in right now. I take it you haven’t done that.”
“No craters,” Meg said as they walked out into the bar. They’d come in late last shift, they’d slept late, gotten up and come out on the absolute tail end of breakfast. No Dekker, no Bird, no Ben. Meg shoved her hands into her pockets and looked at Mike over at the bar. Sal looked too, with a lift of the eyebrows.
“They kill each other?” she wondered.
Mike said, dishing up the last of the rubbery eggs, “Left like old friends, all three. Said tell you they were going up to the dock. They’re leaving you a pile of scrub-up and sanding in the shop.”
“Fun,” Sal sourly.
“Ben with Dekker?” Meg said, with a gathering worry. “Not damn likely. We got a problem here.”
Sal poured her own coffee and took the plate Mike handed her. “Kady, I think we got to use strategy.”
“What strategy? I vote we shoot Ben.”
“Na, na, he’s playing along with Bird.” Sal took the plate and the coffee back to the table and hooked a chair out, as Meg did the same. “We got, what, three weeks if we push it. If Dek’s able to pitch in. The guys are going to be trouble. Trez macho.”
“Trez pain in the ass. If Bird takes a position you need a pry-bar.”
“We can’t have Ben and Dekker in the same ship. That’s prime.”
“So Bird takes Dekker—and we take Ben.” That, come to think of it, wasn’t at all a bad idea. They’d been after Ben’s numbers for two years. That was solid and Shepherd promises were come-ons and maybes.
Besides which, if there was anybody who could keep Dekker in line—
Sal ducked her head, checked in her pocket a beat—God, smooth move, there, Meg thought, with a knot in her stomach; and Sal looked up with the devil’s own ideas in her eyes. “I’ll tell you what we do, Kady, we apply to go out tandem. All of us. I’ll tell you why.” A jab of Sal’s finger on the tabletop. “Because Bird doesn’t want Dekker sliced and stacked. Because Bird’s had one trip with Ben and Dekker already and if we give him the out to break that up—we ask for even split on the board time, just to make him believe it, we set it up with the Bitch, and we get Ben and his numbers and access to Dekker.”
“Hell, we have got a ship coming out of refit. Shakedown run.”
“That’s the grounds. Only reason they’ll do it.”
“A skosh noisy. Do we need MamBitch’s special attention on us? I don’t think a special app is a good idea.”
“Kady, we got the Bitch’s attention. I’ll ask my friends, but I don’t know what worse we can do. And if they say do it, and if She’ll let us—hell, if we can get out there tandem, we can just do our job, just ride it out while the shit flies, as may, and figure things are getting taken care of—they’re not going to arrange anything on the way out, not unless they’re pushed, and if the Association brings it up as an issue, damn sure the Bitch isn’t going to run us into a rock on the way back. There’s coincidences and there’s coincidences. They’re just a little from having the EC down their throats.”
You had to wonder whether more understandings might have passed in that little encounter at Scorpio’s than Sal had even yet admitted: and MamBitch beaming them up to v on a heading MamBitch picked—on charts that might have a little technical drop-out right in their path—hadn’t helped her sleep at all. MamBitch was finally admitting in the news how she might go grievance procedures with the Shepherds to settle the outstanding complaints and patch up the sore spots—MamBitch having this severely important production schedule to meet, because the Fleet High Command was breathing down her neck.
That was the public posture. Behind the doors in management there were careers on the line.
There was the Shepherds’ whole existence on the line.
“I tell you,” she said to Sal over the eggs, “I’d sincerely like to know if you know anything additional—now or in future.”
“If I know you’ll know.” A solemn look. “I swear.”
“Thanks,” she said. She did try to believe it.
A berth with the Shepherds, Sal said. It was already an endangered species. And they themselves were fools to think otherwise: you got out of the habit of longterm thinking—when the only out you had was a break in a business that was already taking the deep dive to hell. Freerunners weren’t going to last forever. Go with the lease deal or go for broke Sal’s way—see if the Shepherds kept their bargains, or if there was a bargain—or if the Shepherds were still independents when the shakeout came.
Sal had wanted this break, God, she’d chased it for years—blew it once, by what she knew, and those sons of bitches relatives of hers had kept Sal on a string for near six years, sure, let the kid be eyes and ears on helldeck, let Aboujib run their errands and risk arrest, let Aboujib sweat long enough to be sure she took orders—
Aboujib had gotten a severe warn-off from the Shepherd Association when she’d taken up with her—and being Aboujib, she’d locked on to her mistake and damned the consequences. Her high and mighty friends had said, Drop Kady, and Sal had gone to talk to some officer or other—God only what she’d said in that meeting, or what they’d said or threatened, but Sal had stormed out of their exclusive club and not talked about a berth with the Shepherds for the better part of a month.
They’d survived the ups and down since, gotten hell and away better than they’d started—things had looked so clear and so possible, til yesterday, til the Association dangled Sal’s dream in front of her, the bastards—
She’d said yes to Sal last night. She had the sinking feeling this morning she’d been a chronic fool, and committed herself to something she wouldn’t have, except for those two margarits. But she hadn’t exactly come up with an effective No this morning, either, both of them sitting here betting their necks on that little green light—Sal was dead set.
She still couldn’t open her mouth and say, Sal, no deal. We’re going with the lease.
Didn’t know if you’d call it friendship. Didn’t know what was wrong with her head—but the way things were getting to be on R2, the freerunners didn’t have that many more years. She could worry about Bird—you couldn’t call it romance, what she had with Bird. Mutual good time. And a guy she’d no desire to see run up against a rock, dammit: if Dekker was the problem… they were all tagged, as the Shepherd had put it: Bird, Ben, all of them. The Association might be using them—but the Association might be the only protection a handful of miners had—the Shepherds were the only independents with any kind of leverage.
That—was enough to advise keeping one’s mouth shut. And not to say No.
Couldn’t tell Bird. Bird wasn’t good at secrets. Damn sure not Ben.
What had the Shepherd said? The problem’s major? The problem’s gone major?
Something had shifted. Ben’s charts? Something the company had done?
The dumbasses in the fire zone didn’t get that kind of information.
Turn in the re-cert application, Ben had said. Move on it. Way Out was headed for soon-as-possible launch, dock time cost, Ben swore he had friends who could get the test scheduled within the week, and Dekker decided, in Bird’s lack of comment, that Ben might be telling the truth.
So it was a good idea to do that, Dekker supposed: and found himself sitting in a Trans car between Bird and Ben, nervous as a kid headed for the dentist—only beginning to calm down and accept the idea of taking an ops test before he’d gotten the shakes out of his knees. Ten days was soon enough, Bird said. Give him a little time. Ten days to get his nerves together, ten days til he had to prove to BM that he still had it—that was still time enough to get the class 3 license pushed through, Ben said, which he had to have before he could count any time at Way Out’s boards.
God, he couldn’t blow this.
Bird said: “After we get this done, we thought we’d take you up to the docks, show you the ship, all right?”
“All right,” he said, in the same numb panic, asking himself what they were up to—show you the ship…
Maybe they wanted to see if he could take it. Maybe they were pushing him to find out if he would go off the edge—
Sudden memory of that fouled, cold interior, the suit drifting against the counter—the arm moving. He’d waked in the near-dark and imagined it was Cory beckoning to him.
Bird talked into his ear, talked about some of the damage on the ship, talked about what they’d done—
But the ship in his mind was the one he remembered. The stink, and the cold, and the fear—
“Admin,” Ben said as the Trans pulled into a stop. “Here we are.”
He got up, he got off with them into an office zone, all beige and gray, with the musty cold electronics smell offices had. They went into the one that said ECSAA Certifications, and Ben and Bird walked up to the counter with him.
“I want to apply for a license,” he said.
“Recertification,” Ben said, leaning his elbows on the desk beside him.
“Just let me do it.” He couldn’t think with Ben putting words in his mouth; he felt shivers coming on—he’d caught a chill in the Trans—and he didn’t want to be filling in applications with his hands shaking. Fine impression that was in this office.
The clerk went away, came back with a datacard, directed him to a side table and a reader.
He went over to it and his entourage came with him, one on either side as he put the card in the slot and made three mistakes entering his name.
“Look, you’re making me nervous.”
“That’s all right,” Ben said. And when he tried to answer the next question, about reason for revocation: “Uh-uh,” Ben said. “Neg. Say, ‘Hospitalization.’ ”
“Look, the reason is a damned stupid doctor—”
“They don’t want the detail.” Ben reached over and moved the cursor back. “Don’t explain. The only answer any department wants in its blanks is the wording in its rule books. Don’t volunteer anything, don’t get helpful, and if you don’t know, N/A the bastard or shade it in your favor. Remember it’s clerks you’re talking to, not pilots. Say: ‘Hospitalization.’ ”
That made clear sense to him. He only wished it hadn’t come from Ben.
“ ‘Reason for application’?” Ben read off the form, and pointed: “Say: ‘Change in medical status.’ ”
He hadn’t thought of having to pass the physical again. The idea of doctors upset his stomach. But he typed what Ben said.
“Sign it,” Ben said. “Put your card in. That’s all there is to it.”
It left a lot of blank lines. “What about ‘Are there any other circumstances…?’ ”
“This is a 839-RC,” Ben said, and tapped the top of the display, where it had that number. “An 839-RC applies, that’s all it does. It doesn’t explain. It’s not a part of the exam. Just send it.”
“Have you ever filled out one of these?”
“Doesn’t matter. I worked in Assay. Answer by catch-phrases. Don’t pose the clerks a problem or it’ll go right to the bottom to the Do Pile. Don’t be a problem. Send the bastard.”
“Do it,” Bird said.
He keyed Send. In a moment the screen blinked, notified him his account had been debited 250.00 for the application and told him he had to pass the basic operationals within sixty days, after which he had to log 200 hours in the sims or at the main boards of a working ship, by sworn affidavit of a class 1 pilot—
And take a written exam.
Someone had as well have hit him in the gut. He stood there staring at the message til Bird laid a hand on his shoulder and said they’d go on to the core now.
He was down to 95 dollars in his account, he hadn’t yet paid his bill at The Hole, and he’d never taken the writtens, he’d come up from the cargo pushers to the short-hop beam haulers to a miner-craft; but he’d never had to take the written exams.
Ben elbowed him in the back. “Come on, moonbeam. Don’t forget your card.”
He took it out of the slate, he walked out of the offices with them, in a complete haze. They got to the Transstation as the Trans pulled in and the doors opened.
“Come on,” Ben said, and Ben taking his arm was the last straw. He snarled, “Let go of me,” and shook free, wanting just to go on around the helldeck, wanting to go back to his room, lock the door, take a pill and not give a damn for the rest of the day; or maybe three or four days.
“Come on.” Bird got his arm and pulled at him. The Trans doors were about to close in their faces, the robot voice was advising them to get clear. “Oh, hell,” he said; and let them pull him aboard, because otherwise they were going to miss their ride and stand there til the next Trans came, asking him why he was a darned fool.
They fell into seats as the doors shut and the Trans started moving. “What in hell’s the matter with you?” Ben asked. “Are you being a spook again, Dekker?”
“No,” he said, and slouched down into the seat, staring at a point between them.
“You have some trouble about going onto the ship?” Bird asked him.
“No.” He set his jaw and got mad, lifelong habit when people who ran his life crowded him.
Ben said: “You’re being a spook, Dekker.”
Probably he was, he thought. And a kid might keep his mouth shut, but a grown man in debt up to his ears and about to end up on a heavyside job had finally to realize who he owed, and how much. He swallowed against the knot in his throat and muttered, “I can’t pass tests.”
Bird tilted an ear and said, louder: “What?”
So he had to repeat it: “I can’t take tests.”
“What do you mean you can’t take tests?” Ben objected, loudly enough for people around them to hear. “You had a license, didn’t you?”
Screw you, he wanted to yell at Ben. Let me alone! But he said quietly: “I had a license.”
“Without an exam?”
“You can do that,” Bird said to Ben. “Construction work lets you do that. You can jump from class to class that way, just the operationals and a few questions. Same as I did. Not everybody comes through the Institute.”
“Well, then,” Ben said, “—you’ve been a class 1. You claim you were good. You know the answers. What’s a test?”
Ben made him mad. Ben could make him mad by breathing. He tried to be calm. “Because I can’t pass written questions!”
“God,” Ben said, sliding down in his seat. “One of those. Can you read?”
He didn’t want to know what “those” Ben was talking about. He didn’t want to talk about it right now. He wanted to break Ben’s neck. He stared off at the corner, past Ben’s shoulder. He’d go to the ship, all right, he’d restrain himself from acting like a crazy man; he’d pass the operationals and put in his hours in Bird’s ship and he’d come back and fail the damned test.
But meanwhile he’d have gotten fed. He’d have gotten in with Bird. Maybe he could get a limited license to push freight, work up through ops again, on the ship construction out there: he didn’t know, he didn’t even know if it was possible out in the Belt. He didn’t want to worry about it right now, just take it as far as he could, and not think about the mess he was in.
Bird and Ben talked in low voices and he was the topic: he could catch snatches of it over the noise. It was two more stops til the core lift. He wanted this ride over with—wanted to get up to the dock, the ship, anywhere, to get them on to some other subject.
“Look,” Ben said, leaning forward, “on this test business, it’s easy done. It’s a system, there’s a technique—”
“Easy for you!”
“You a halfway good pilot?”
“I’m damned good!”
“Then listen to me: it’s the same as filling in the forms back there. Don’t give real answers to deskpilots. The whole key to forms or tests is never give an answer smarter than the person who checks the questions.”
He took in a breath, expecting Ben to have insulted him. He couldn’t figure how Ben had.
“We can get you through that shit,” Ben said, with a flip of his hand. “But first let’s see if you’re worth anything in ops.”
He didn’t want to owe Ben anything. He told himself that Ben had probably figured out a new way to screw him—and if there was any hope at all, it was that Ben’s way of screwing him happened to involve his getting his license restored.
Slave labor for him and Bird, maybe: that was all right, from where he was. Do anything they wanted—as long as it got him that permit and got him licensed again.
He thought about that til the Trans came to their stop, at the lift. They got out together, punched up for the core, and waited for the car. He tucked his hands into his pockets and tried not to think ahead, not to tests, not to the docks, not to what the ship was going to look like—
Everything was going to be all right, he wasn’t going to panic, wasn’t going to heave up his guts when he went null-g, it was just going to be damned cold up there, bitter cold: that was why he was shivering when he walked into the lift.
He propped himself against the wall and took a deathgrip on the safety bar while the lift made the core transit: increased g at the first and none at the end—enough to do for a stomach in itself. The car stopped, let them out in the mast Security Zone, and they shoved their cards in the slot.
The null-g here at least didn’t bother him—it only felt—
—felt as if he was back in a familiar place, and wasn’t, as if he were timetripping again: in his head he knew R2’s mast wasn’t anywhere he’d been before when he was cognizant—he kept Bird in sight to keep himself anchored, hooked on and rode the hand-line between Ben and Bird—
The booming racket, the activity, the smell of oil and cold and machinery—all of it could have been Rl. Here and now, he kept telling himself, and by the time he reached Way Out’s berth in Refit, his stomach might have been upset, but he could reason his way toward a kind of numbness.
Even entering the ship wasn’t the jolt he’d thought it would be, following Bird and Ben through the lock. Bird turned the lights up and the ship seemed—ordinary again. It smelled of disinfectant, fresh glue, and oil. He touched Way Out’s panels with cold-numbed fingers and looked around him. Everything around him was the way it had been, as if the wreck had never happened. Same name as she’d had—Cory’s joke, actually—but they’d given her a new number, and she wasn’t his and Cory’s anymore.
Most of all there was no sense of Cory’s existence here. That had been wiped out too. And maybe it was that presence he’d been most afraid to deal with.
“We’ve got the tanks replaced,” Bird was saying, reorienting toward him. “We’re stalled on one lousy part we’re trying to organize on the exchange market—but we’re closing in on finished.”
“How does she look?” Ben asked, point blank, and he could say, calmly, without his teeth chattering, “You’ve done a lot of work with her.”
“Want to get the feel of the boards?” Bird asked. “Main system’s hooked in. Want to run a check?”
He knew then what they were up to, bringing him up here: they were running their own ops test. They wanted to see on their own whether he was missing pieces of his mind—just a simple thing, bring the boards up. Run a check…
He took a breath of the bitter cold, he hauled down and fastened in at the main boards, uncapped switches and pushed buttons—didn’t have to think about them, didn’t think about them, until he realized he’d just keyed beyond the simple board circuit tests: memory flooded up, fingers had keyed the standard config-queries and he could breathe again, didn’t damn well know where he was going, didn’t know exactly at what point he was going to make himself terminate or whether they wanted him to run real checkouts that fed data onto the log—
—Number 4 trim jet wasn’t firing—he caught the board anomaly in the numbers streaming past, the rapid scroll of portside drift; he compensated with a quick fade on 2 and kicked the bow brakes to fend off before the yaw could carry him further—not by the book—he knew it a heartbeat after he’d done it.
The screen went black. The examiner said: “Been a cargo pusher, haven’t you?”
He said, trying not to let the shakes get started, “Yeah. Once.” The examiner understood, then, what he’d done. And why.
The examiner—he was a man, and old—punched a button. Numbers came up, two columns. Graphs followed.
“You’re a re-cert,” the examiner said.
“Trying to be,” he said. He kept his breath even, watched as the examiner punched another set of buttons.
“You can take your card out.”
“Did I pass?”
“D-class vessel, class 3 permit with licensed observer.” The examiner keyed out. “Valid for a year.—You in the Institute?”
“Private,” he said, and the examiner gave him a second look.
“Who with?”
“Morrie Bird. Trinidad.”
“Mmmn.”
He wished he dared ask what that meant. But examiners in his experience didn’t say what your score was, they didn’t discuss the test, they rarely asked questions. This one made him nervous, but he thanked God the man was more than a button-pusher, he must be.
He left the simulator room with his card in hand, took the B-spoke core-lift down to the ECSAA office, feeling the shakes finally hit him while he was at the Certifications desk getting the license, shakes so bad he had to put his hands in his pockets for fear the office staff might see it.
Damn warning light had failed in the sim—or he’d flat failed to see it til it showed in the numbers. You never knew which. An alarm might have been blinking, he might have missed it, he might have just timed out—it felt like that, that time wasn’t moving right when those numbers started going off, when he’d had to do a fast and dirty calc and just thought… thought it was a tight-in situation, he had no idea why, his brain just told him it was and he’d imagined impact where there wasn’t any such thing in the simulation—
No, dammit, the sim had increased g sharply and for one sick moment he’d hallucinated that the engines were firing.
Maybe it was just his nerves. He wasn’t sure anymore. Maybe that was the problem.
“Uh-oh,” Meg said, seeing Dekker come out and down the Admin strip. They’d taken time out of the shop to shepherd Dek back… in case it’s bad news, she’d said, and Sal had agreed.
So knowing he was already nervous they hadn’t told him they were close by, hadn’t come down with him—just called and asked a Certification office secretary how long a D3 permit exam might take, and they’d come down from the 3-deck shop to be here—in case.
“Doesn’t look good,” Sal said; and Meg had a moment of misgivings, whether they shouldn’t just duck back and try to blend with the Transstop traffic—not easy in her case and not easy in Sal’s. So there was no chance for cowardice. She waved.
Or maybe on second thought they might make it away unseen. Dekker was walking along looking at his feet, off in some different universe.
She said, as he came close, “Dek? How’d it go?”
He looked up, looked dazed, as if he couldn’t figure them being there, or he hadn’t really heard the question.
“How’d it go?” Sal asked.
“All right,” he said.
“So did you get the permit?”
“Yeah.”
“So, bravo, jeune rab!” Sal clapped an arm around him and gave him a squeeze. “We said, didn’t we?”
He was dead white. He looked scared—and a little zee-d. “I said I’d call up to the ship—tell Bird how it came out. I need a phone.”
Deep-spaced, Meg thought uneasily. Got himself through the test in one piece and just gone out. God hope they hadn’t spotted it in the office. She linked her arm through his, protective custody. “Come on. Phone and lunch. In that order.”
He went with them. They found a public phone near the Transstation, and she punched through to Bird. Bird said, “Good,” when he heard, and Ben said, in the background, “So what’s the fuss?”
Break that man’s neck someday, Meg thought. With my own bare hands.
Another damned breakdown in D-28, and a pump-connection had blown out in the mast at dockside—spraying 800 liters of hydraulic fluid into free-fall toward the rotating core surface. The super swore it was worker sabotage and Salvatore, with three more cases on his desk, had a headache.
He put a tech specialist on the investigation, poured himself a cup of coffee and told himself he had to clear his desk: the stacks of datacards in the bin had reached critical mass, Admin was having a fit over the quarterly reports being a week late, it had a Fleet Lieutenant on its lap bitching about a schedule shortfall, and he couldn’t find the cards the current flags referenced.
Flag on Walker. The guy had card use near an office break-in, had no business there—no apparent relation to the crime, merely a presence that didn’t make sense. Flag on Kermidge: every sign of resuming bad associations. Flags on Dekker: blew hell out of the sims.
He keyed up the subfile.
Wills’ voice said, out of the comp, “Dekker passed his D3 ops. Score shot straight to the Chief Examiner. Word is the sims jumped out of D class and ran clear up in C before the examiner terminated the test—standard if there’s an overrun: the Certifications office suspects a suspension at a higher grade—started searching court records, potential inquiries to Sol—”
Oh, shit!
“I intercepted it, told them let the license stand at a D3, pending inquiry with this office: I hope that was all right.”
Thank God.
“I did check the examiner’s record in the files: retired pilot, ECI training,, Sol based, good record, three years in his present position, et cetera. He’s clean.
“But here’s another interesting development: Bird and Pollard, the ones who brought him in, that got his ship on salvage, that’re staying in the same sleepery? They’ve filed to run pairs, refit shakedown run with Dekker’s former ship leased to one Kady and Aboujib. Dekker’s on that application as a D3 wanting board time.
“Here’s the catch. Aboujib and Kady have records—Kady’s, as long as your arm. Smuggling, rab agitator—SolCorp background, opted here on an EC transfer. Aboujib’s an AIP dishonorable discharge, reckless endangerment with a spacecraft, Shepherd background, small-time morals charges, one assault, bashed some guy with a bottle. Allocations hasn’t ruled yet. Deny or let-pass?”
Salvatore hit Pause, sat there with his elbows on the desk, reached for his inhaler, thinking: Son of a bitch…
Not about Wills. Wills had done a good job—so far as it went. The business with the examiner jangled little alarms, no less than the immaculate Bird’s shadowy associations.
Report that finding to Payne’s office? Payne had said: We don’t need to drag this out. The report to the ECSAA said mechanical failure, no fault of the pilot…
Payne wanted the case closed; but, dammit, it kept resurfacing in the flags, and now with Wills’ information came the niggling worry that where there were anomalies in official records there might also be management secrets. Salazar’s threatened lawsuit, contractor disputes, the rash of incidents on the dock and in the plants—the military making demands to install Security personnel on R2—some kind of “readiness survey” involving their contracts, which was, one could suspect, strongly tied to schedule slowdowns, and, dammit, an implication of blame for his department—it was the whisper in the company washrooms that the Fleet was putting heavy pressure on ASTEX management, the Earth Company was worried about sabotage and slowdowns, possibly sympathizer activity—the labor agitators were looking for the right moment to embarrass the company; and damned right the radical fringes of all sorts were looking for a way to get control of the labor movement—radical fringe elements ASTEX had more than its share of, thanks to the EC’s policy of letting malcontents and malefactors transfer out here—sans trial, sans publicity that might catch media attention in the motherwell, where strikes and welfare riots and lunatic religions fed on the airwaves. This Kady was probably a prime example, but monetary rather than political. That was no problem. Shepherd connections? Shepherds had more kids than they could find slots for. Reckless endangerment? An ECSAA violation. Not this office’s province and any shift on helldeck could provide three and four assaults and a few cases for the medics.
ASTEX Security had a damn sight more on its mind than a couple of small-time malcontents and a disputed miner craft. Dekker was a watch-it, but Dekker had so far done nothing worse than show up an anomaly on a simulation—better than average. Meanwhile management had a ship over at that classified facility way behind schedule and sabotage in a plastics plant that had no damned reason except a fool of a manager.
Hell, no, it wasn’t the ASTEX board that was going to take the damage: boards were never to blame—ASTEX management wasn’t to blame: dump it on Security, dump it on Salvatore’s desk—
So what had he got, but a missing kid with a mother on MarsCorp board, whose lawyers were threatening a negligence suit against the mechanic at Rl and trying to get those records opened. Dekker had had one incident, making wild charges against the company—but he had been quiet since then, had spent money on clothes, on food—his only current sin was applying for a re-cert in D class when he might—he read through Wills’ report—have rated higher.
You did have to wonder about some ringer thrown in at higher levels, somebody working for some investigatory office, even—in these nervous days—something that should come to the attention of MI.
Blow the Dekker case wide and he could kiss his career goodbye; but if he failed to report a problem, and let something slip, his competence was at issue. Hell of a crack to be in. In his most paranoid moments he was moved to ask had there ever been a Cory Salazar—
But there was no doubt about Dekker on any level he could assess; the various departments over at Rl had his background from two years back; and no clandestine operator would be so stupid as to ring bells on a test: it didn’t in any wise smell like an EC probe or a security problem.
Hell, Dekker had had his Dl from back in ’20, he’d had working experience since, and very possibly he’d been dogging it back in ’20, lying low from the military recruiters: that behavior was an epidemic among draft-age males. With that medical against him, he’d put out everything he had—and very nearly brought himself back to Ms. Salazar’s attention: thank God Wills had put the stop on that.
So Dekker wanted to go back to space. It didn’t seem a bad place to have him right now. You couldn’t be quieter than out in the deep Belt, with no communication with anybody but BM. Alyce Salazar’s lawyers couldn’t serve him a summons there without a damned long arm.
Memo the doctor on Dekker’s case to sign the medical release and satisfy the meddling clerk with the ECSAA rule book, get Dekker out and off the daily flags, and if Dekker went psycho out there and slash-murdered Bird and Pollard, they should have known what they were getting into. Only hope he got Kady and Aboujib with them. They didn’t need the tag end of the rab acting up.
So with the push of a few keys, that was one problem off his desk for three months—a fix good the minute that ship cleared dock. Flag its return, flag—God!—Bird and Pollard, Aboujib and Kady, have Wills’ office run down all the datatrails they might have left, at leisure. In a situation that could blow up again, on any whim of Salazar’s lawyers, upper echelons could come down demanding complete files.
Pity, Salvatore thought, he couldn’t sign up a few other problems for a three-month cruise in the belt…
Like the manager of D-28, with his dress codes and his inspections and his damned constant memos about sexual conduct off the job and his rules about mustaches, God, he’d like to memo Payne that Department Manager Collin R. Sabich had a private problem with kink vids, but owning the vids wasn’t illegal and the fact wasn’t relevant to anything but the fact Sabich was a slime. Admin knew that. Admin had already promoted him sideways three times and evidently couldn’t find anywhere less critical to put him. What else could you do with a sonuvabitch with a kink and an Institute degree in Plant Management?
God knew, maybe they’d give him an administrative office to run.
ONE thing had started going right, Dekker thought, God, and another thing followed: a message turned up in the bar’s mail-file at breakfast, addressed to Mr. M. Bird, from Belt Management: special permit granted for 2 ship operations in the same sector—launch permit and all, usual permits for loading and charging, et cetera, et cetera. They had a sector assignment, they’d get that and the charts when they boarded, they had a launch date, September 18th, four days from now—Bird had shaken his head over that, one of those damned do-it-now decisions from BM, no different at R2 than at Rl. You expected a delay, you applied early, and you got a go-yesterday.
First the offer from Bird, then a piece of his license back, and Ben turning downright civil: now BM approved a joint run—and still nothing fell apart: Dekker sat holding his coffee cup, listening to the regulars in the bar congratulate Bird on BM’s good behavior with the recollection that the last time in his life things were going this right—
But he didn’t let himself think about that. He just stared at where he was and told himself that the letter had to be a sign his luck had turned, or maybe a signal from BM that management had decided to dog somebody else for a while. Who knew? Maybe somebody had slipped up and nobody had noticed he was on the crew. Maybe BM was signaling it would drop its feud with him and let him pick up his life if he just kept his mouth shut.
Don’t worry about might-be’s, was the way Meg put it. Just keep your head, don’t make noise. MamBitch has a real shortterm crisis sense. There’ll be some new sod on her grief list next week, and she’ll forget all about you.
He truly wanted to believe the wreck might be a closed case, but experience told him no desk-sitter ever bothered to track and erase what some other desk-sitter had sent into files: that medical report and everything else in the files was going to surface time after time for the rest of his life, he was sure of it, a file uncatchable in its course through the company computers… probably every time he applied for a sector assignment. Damned sure if he tried to certify into C3.
And BM was putting him back to work, officially—still with no real resolution of what had happened, no answer, no justice. It was a cover-up Cory’s mother evidently couldn’t breach. He was sure she had to know by now—at least the official version. So what was he supposed to do that a mother on the MarsCorp board couldn’t?
He thought about writing Alyce Salazar directly, send her his own account of what had happened, never mind Ms. Salazar hated him with a passion. But mail went through a lot of hands before it went out of R2. If anyone’s mail found its way to special attention—his was a hundred percent certainty: he’d gotten that canny by now.
So it looked as if they were really going, and all he had to do was hold on to his nerves and stay out of trouble til launch, hope if the permit was a mistake nobody caught it in time—and try, meanwhile, to believe that Ben had really meant it just now when Ben had slapped him on the shoulder and said, in his subtle way, that in spite of him being an ass, he might actually work out.
Bird pocketed his datacard and remarked that since BM had a hurry-up on, they had a last few things to do in the shop, and they’d better get at it…
Sal said, “All right, all right, Bird. God, we put in fifty hours this week!” and Bird said: “Yeah, plenty all right if the shower doesn’t work. Won’t get any sympathy from me.”
So it was a last-minute rush of things that had waited—no really vital jobs: they hadn’t applied for their run without the big items latched down and Way Out past the mandatory ECSAA inspection: but Bird wanted some cleanup and the shop offered a refuge where a body could sit, put screws in holes and test circuits without a thought in his head except the job he was on, and he personally had no objections—anything that kept his hands busy.
Ben came and went, handling the legwork. Meg and Sal worked in the shop, raked over old lovers, the quality of hair dye, a vid they couldn’t agree on—chatter, just chatter… human noise. They looked strained. Tired, yes. But he kept having the feeling it was more than that.
He didn’t think. He didn’t want to think.
Day before launch. He was holding on. Sal was frazzled. Bird grew short. “Launch nerves,” Meg said under her breath. “Bird, dammit, just take it easy, we got it covered.”
“It’s a far walk after supplies,” Bird snapped, and went off for another all-day stint on dockside, despite them arguing with him that old bones had as well get all the heavy time they could.
“Can’t argue with him,” Meg sighed. And Bird sent Ben down with a basket full of odd bits of Trinidad’s works he wanted serviced—36 hours before launch.
“Why in hell,” Sal moaned, “didn’t he see about this eight weeks ago?”
Ben just shook his head. “Does it every damned time. Everything’s a will-pass until he gets to packing the supplies in. Then this latch has got too much give and he’s remembered we had a condensation problem last run.”
It kept their hands busy. It took their minds off the passing hours. Dekker understood Bird’s state of nerves.
Eventually, please God, they’d board and start launch routines and, Dekker thought, he might make it off R2 still sane.
“What kind of vids do you like?” Meg asked him, while he was testing a pressure switch.
He shrugged, figuring Meg meant they were going to rent a few for the trip, for all the spare time they weren’t going to have, and he’d used to like the action stuff, but now that he thought about it, that wasn’t what he wanted right now. Cory had made fun of his taste for his bloody-awfuls, that was what she had called them—but now he feared he’d never see an explosion in a vid without feeling that awful slam in the gut. He filed that away, in the odd total of silly, simple things he’d been robbed of in the wreck. Maybe he could handle it someday. But not now. Right now he just wanted to keep all that at arm’s length. One step at a time, Mr. Dekker…
“Dek?”
“Huh?”
“You want to go out tonight?”
He shook his head. “No,” he said sharply—he didn’t mean to be rude, but it was the truth—he didn’t want to go watch things blow up: he didn’t want any dark theater, God knew he didn’t want any suspense—didn’t know what he did want to do 24 hours before launch—but that wasn’t it.
“Oh, come on,” Sal said. “What about dinner? We can talk Bird into spending money. Something trez genteel. Candles and tablecloths. Give ourselves plenty of time to get through, get in and clean up. What d’ you say? Dinner at 1900, cruise the bars, say our au’voirs along the ’deck.”
“Yeah,” he said, finally. Being with people tonight was probably a good idea. Meg and Sal were trying to include him in their festivities, trying to draw him into their conversation, but now that he d committed himself he felt a kind of panic—as if by joining in he’d somehow stepped over an edge he’d really rather reconsider. He had no friends but these people, no future but what they’d arranged for him. They made their jokes, they talked to him, he answered what they asked, one side and the other of a trip for soft drinks and a package of chips.
But this Attitude kept coming over him—a blow-it-away kind of Attitude, resentment—outright rage at their trying to get at him: they had everything he owned and now they wanted his consent to it; now they wanted the resentment that had kept him alive—stupid way to feel, he thought, but their friendliness and Ben’s made him mad, and he tried to figure out why, and not to be, as Ben called him, an ass.
But, dammit, everything hit nerves. Even their before-launch dinner. He’d done the same with Cory—Cory didn’t make off-color jokes about the men she’d slept with—
Sore spot there. His mind was full of pits he didn’t want to look into, this afternoon, pre-launch jitters triggering memories, God only knew what was going on with him—and that the tumbling, out of control feeling he’d had after the wreck was still there, making it impossible to take his life for granted—all the pieces were out of order. Everything felt new, dislocated.
Rab said do. Act. Move. Be.
But move where? Be what? Meg and Sal had their heads together, talking in low voices, protecting some secrecy they wouldn’t admit him to—but they wanted him to take their lead. They’d dressed him like some damn doll—not a joke at his expense: far too serious for that. They had designs for him he didn’t think had as much to do with sex as with way-of-life… making bitter jokes, flaunting their difference, trying to drag him away from Cory’s way of doing things and back into all the blind outrage he’d used to feel—wake up, kid, join us, kid, be like us, be with, think like us and survive.
Maybe it was friendship. Be grateful, he told himself. Go out with them, mind your manners—today’s enough. There’s worse. There’s hell and away worse to have fallen in with.
There’s the people that run this place.
He was back on the ship for a moment. And back again sitting in the shop with a small valve switching assembly in his hand and no memory of whether he’d just started or just finished with it.
Panic shot a chill through him. He sat there staring at the piece and trying to figure out what he was doing with it.
“That’s the last.” Sal snatched it from his hand and tossed it into the basket. “God, Dek, come on, give it up. We’re done!”
It wasn’t anything he couldn’t fix with a screwdriver if it stuck later. Nothing vital. Potential malfunction wasn’t what scared him. It was the gap he’d slid into.
Damn nervous wreck, Sal thought, wiping sweat, kicking the null-g cart’s wheels out. This one’s wheels stuck. The rental office swore they didn’t have another.—Get us all out of here—
Bang. You lifted one end and rammed it at the floor. Two times freed it up.
“Aboujib,” someone said.
She turned about with an intake of breath.
Mitch’s friend.
“You’re still launching on the 18th?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t depend on it.”
“Shit!—What’s going on?”
“That’s the word. Keep a line on your problem. A tight line.”
“Why?”
The Shepherd said, “You got that thing I gave you?”
“Not on me, I don’t go to the core with it…”
“I want you to bring it to the club tomorrow. No advance word to Kady, no word to anybody. Just bring that, your friend, and your problem.”
“We got a—”—launch tomorrow, she started to object. The universe turned around that point. Everything in their minds did, with manic concentration.
“Tomorrow,” the Shepherd repeated.
She felt her heart sink. She thought, My God, Bird and Ben have everything they own tied up in this run…
They can’t not launch tomorrow… Meg and me be damned, they can’t not go tomorrow. “You don’t back out this close, MamBitch won’t change a launch date!”
“That’s not in our control,” the Shepherd said, and walked away.
“Why don’t you come with me?” Meg asked him. “Sal’s going to run that last batch up to Bird, and if he tries to give us another lot, we’ll say sorry, the shop’s closed. You and I can get cleared out of here and turn the keys in. I’m going to pick up a few things at Ward’s, maybe stop for coffee…”
He shook his head. “I’ve got gym time to do.” It was the only escape he could think of. He couldn’t take Meg’s company right now, couldn’t risk timing out with her if that was what he had just done. He left: he didn’t even realize how stupid the excuse had been until in the lift down he remembered he’d left Meg with a heavy tool case to carry to the rental office.
By then it was too late to go back and catch her, and he had no idea what to do with himself but go to the gym. Nothing seemed solid of a sudden, nothing of his life was in order—time worried him—he was freefalling, too scared to admit just now he’d been on autopilot and didn’t know it—scared that a hatch shutting behind him was going to start him unraveling—
The blip was still moving. No question.
Cory argued with him: “It’s the biggest chance we’ll ever have—”
A piece of memory clicked in, quietly, just there of a sudden with that sense of frightened foolishness—he’d realized the danger in the ’driver—and he’d folded the argument, folded the way he’d folded with Sal up there. He’d had the ship completely in his hands—but he’d been afraid to be afraid, he’d let Cory’s college education convince him she was right when his gut was telling him a silent, advancing ’driver the company charts didn’t show wasn’t playing by the rules she understood—
Cory, who knew MarsCorp inside and out, had said, We’re going to call their bluff; they’re in contact with BM every damn minute… and he’d frozen. He couldn’t say,
Cory, this scares hell out of me. He’d been too scared of Cory’s education to say, Cory, this is just damned stupid—
She’d say, now, if she were here to say it, Well, I really blew that one, didn’t I?
And he wouldn’t. He couldn’t—couldn’t talk, couldn’t get his words straight when he thought he could sound like a fool—
So he’d protected his damned soft spot. And Cory had died.
He bumped into someone. He mumbled an apology and kept walking, playing that moment over and over in his mind.
They’d been invulnerable—then. Nothing was going to turn out wrong. She’d made a bad choice, but rocks were her department, the ship was his. The company was crooked as hell, but he could call their bluff. He could make that ship listen—
He’d backed a wrong call. He’d known it and he’d done it. That was what he had to look at and look at til it burned its way into his brain.
THEY waited and they waited in the bar—they’d talked Bird, practically manhandled Bird, out of Trinidad and into the idea of a fancy dinner, best clothes, rezzes at the Europa, a bit of bar-hopping afterward—and now Dekker went missing. Ben was mad, Sal was a nervous wreck—Dekker had been acting strange all day, Meg reminded herself glumly, and spent her own money calling the gym he reasonably should have gone to hours ago.
Of course he hadn’t.
Damn.
“So, look,” Bird said when she reported that fact back to the table, “we just leave word with Mike. Mike can give him directions when he shows up. He’ll find us.”
“Leave that guy loose on the ’deck?” Ben groaned—not the way she’d have put it, but it was another worrisome side of it. “Let’s just give it a little while.”
“He’s a big boy,” Bird said. “He’s found his way around the Belt, for God’s sake, he’s not lost. He may not have understood it was a date.”
“He understood,” Meg said, and was about to say she agreed with Ben, they should give it another little while, when Mike at the bar signaled they had a call.
She stood up to take it, but Mike indicated Sal specifically, to her acute disappointment. She slid back into her chair while Sal went to take the call—probably some friend come onto R2, she decided: Dekker might call her if he was in a funk and he might call Bird, but Dekker asking for Sal was hardly likely.
“Probably in some bar,” Ben said. “Probably drinking his way to tomorrow. Or zee’d on pills.—Dammit, Meg, think of another place.”
“Pacific,” Bird said.
“So let’s call there,” Ben said, and something else, but Meg lost it. Sal hung up on her call and flashed her a come-here signal, looking seriously worried.
“Excuse me,” she murmured and got up and met Sal by the phone. Sal said, head ducked and voice low, “That was Mitch. He said meet him out front. Now.”
She felt a little chill. And puzzlement. “Seriously nonreg. He say anything?”
“No. Just that.” Sal looked truly scared. Terrified. “Cover me with Bird. I don’t know how long this may take.”
“God,” Meg said. “Yeah. All right.”
Sal went for the door and she went back to the table.
“What was that?” Ben asked.
“Friend with a problem.”
“Dekker?”
“No.”
“God, this isn’t getting any more organized. We’re all over the damn ’deck!”
“I think we ought to make that call to The Pacific.”
“Do that,” Bird said, so she pulled out her card and went for the phone again.
“No,” The Pacific said. “… Yeah, I know him. No, he hasn’t been here.”
Another try gone nowhere. Sal was off. Dekker was missing. Bird was as apt to go off next. Ben was right. She said to Mike, “Another round.”
“Sal coming back?”
“I wish I knew,” she said. “Skosh nervous day, Mike.”
Mike gave a little shake of his head. “A lot wouldn’t have the patience.”
“Yeah,” she said and went back to the table.
“Well?” Ben asked.
She shook her head.
“God, I don’t know why we’re putting up with this!”
“The lad’s probably sorting out a few things,” Bird said. “I’m not real surprised.”
“Yeah, sorting out a few things… For all we know, the cops have got him.”
“Look,” Bird said. “Let’s just put in a few phone calls. There’s eight more gyms.”
Sal came back, not looking like good news. She came up to the table and leaned against it with her hands. “Trouble,” she said, very low. “They just found Dek’s partner.”
“Alive?” Meg asked.
“Neg. Shepherd found her drifting. At the Well.”
Some things you heard and they just didn’t make any kind of sense. A fool kid got killed in the far interface of the refinery zones, back sometime in March, and turned up a couple of hundred million k away in September, in a Shepherd recovery path?
“No way,” Ben said.
“We have any word yet,” Sal asked, “where Dek is?”
“No,” Meg said, and leaned back as Mike brought the drinks.
“On my tab,” Bird said to Mike, all business, and Mike cleverly made himself absent.
Ben hissed, “What do you mean, drifting at the Well? What in hell’s going on?”
Sal shook her head, glitter and rattle of metal-tipped braids. “They don’t know. Word’s out on their net—code-com, to every Shepherd out there… you didn’t hear that. They don’t know if MamBitch can crack it, she gets mad as hell when they do it—but we got a seriously deviated ’driver out there.”
“Fired a body at the Well?” Ben said. “God, somebody’s stark crazy!”
“Worry what else they might do,” Meg said. “If a general message is going out on the Shepherd net, that ’driver’s going to hear the transmission, going to know the time and the PO, going to have an idea what that message was, even if they can’t crack the code.”
“They’re not going to tell MamBitch anything,” Sal said. Her voice was shaking. “But the question is how long the Shepherds can hold this quiet. This is a seriously bad time for Dek to go missing.”
“If the cops haven’t got him,” Bird said. “Question is—does Mama know what’s in that transmission? They’ll pick him up.”
Sal pulled two datacards from her pocket and laid them on the table. “That’s from a couple of friends. We’re them. They’re real high Access. The word is Find Dek. Get him to the club next to Scorpio’s, and don’t use our cards or his.”
Ben whispered, “Dammit, we got a launch tomorrow!”
“He may not make it.”
We may not make it, Meg thought. The cards lay there—seriously illegal, what the Shepherds were doing and what they were risking. One kid was dead. Good chance there could be another.
She picked up one card.
Bird picked up the other.
The message stack was jammed by the time William Payne reached the office—halfway through an important dinner and three glasses of wine under his belt when the phone had rung, and he wished to hell he’d had at least one fewer. He turned on the light, slid into his chair and keyed on line, watching the flash of prioritied incomings—
His immediate superior, Crayton, with a cryptic memo: An unexplained ship to ship message is proceeding from the Shepherds. Be alert for sabotage.
A statement from the president of the board: The company stands by its policy on abuse of communications.
From Cooley, in News & Entertainment: Continuing regular programming pending further instructions.
From Salvatore, in Security: Stage 1 alert in progress. Code team is assembling.
Payne keyed on, waiting for Crayton’s instructions to flow down, waiting for information to flow up from Salvatore. He was shivering. The temperature in the office was still coming up. Or it was nerves.
The Shepherd negotiations were in trouble, and this happened—they were clearly making a move and the company now had to break off the contract talks or lose credibility—
With agitators stirring up the dockworkers and the refinery workers spoiling for a chance to press their agendas—real problems in those groups. The EC insisted on dumping its touchy cases out here, and those problems didn’t go away, they just recruited other problems and made demands. They opened valves in the mast. They slashed hoses. They vandalized plastics vats. Now the Shepherds committed a deliberate, massive defiance of company rules—outright challenging the company to take action, possibly even signaling the long-threatened work stoppage.
The right action, it had to be, and incoming information and outgoing instructions intersected at his desk in Public Information.
Continue the media blackout? That might keep the lid on for an hour, but it also made rumor the main source for the workers. Better to start dribbling out information as soon as he could get a policy direction out of Crayton: keep the workers glued to the vid reports and off the open decks. Some offices in the mast had equipment to hear that illicit transmission, and rumors were as quick as two workers hitting the 8-deck vending machines on coffee break. There were war jitters—and coded-com like that could set off alarms over in the shipyard, in the military base, God, clear to Earth’s security zone.
He keyed up, composed a query from PI to Crayton in General Admin. Request clearance for news release to forestall rumor and speculation.
There were going to be hard questions for every administrator in the information chain. Every decision over the next few hours was going under a magnifying glass. The EC, the UN, UI—God only knew how far and how many careers were going down with this as it was; the Shepherds, damn them, were calling the company’s bluff.
He wasn’t in The Pacific, wasn’t in the Tycho or the Europa or the Apollo, and so far as they could find out, he wasn’t in any gym they’d ever used. They fanned out, gave up communication with each other—couldn’t phone when you didn’t know where to phone, and you never knew when the company was listening. I’ll check 3, Meg told Ben, last time their paths crossed on the’deck, and she caught the Trans to 3, to check the gyms there.
“Seen a dark-haired guy, rab cut, about 20, thin?”
No, no, and no. She had a stitch in her side, she had a bash on her elbow from a fast stop in .8 g, and she was running out of places that didn’t involve the cops or the hospital. She imagined odd looks at her back, imagined the rumor starting to run the corridors: What’s to do with the dark-haired rab? On helldeck she’d gotten Will I do’s? from guys she asked, and the last try in the gym she hadn’t—out of breath and looking like no joke at all. That wasn’t good. That invited questions from the cops—especially with the Shepherds sending illegal transmissions. She took the stretch back toward the Transstation at a slow walk, catching her breath and racking her brain for where next to look, when the thought hit her that she was already on 3—and Dekker obviously hadn’t done anything logical, or they’d have found him.
The cops might be tracking card use by now, and using a Shepherd card was about as nervous a proposition as using her own. But there were more Shepherds than there were Meg Kadys on R2, and a cop looking for a guy might just look past her. She about-faced and went for the core lift, used the card and rode it up with a couple of obnoxious tender-jocks who wanted to get friendly. She stared obdurately at the door, arms folded, sweating, panicked, thinking, God, no trouble, I don’t want cops… not carrying an illegal card…
Up through lighter and lighter decks, where you had to take hold: the tender-jocks tried to talk her into getting off at 8 and going to a sleepery with them. She said no, very patiently, and swore she was going to hunt these guys down and kill them if she got out of this.
8. The jocks got off. Thank God… The car made the jolting transit to the core and stopped—the Access light went on and she shoved the card in, hoping to God customs wasn’t on duty right now.
The door opened. She caught the grip on the line, and rode it through the numbing cold—no jacket, obviously not dressed for the core; but she’d done it before, and customs off in their warm little office had seen her come and go like this a dozen times.
Hope to God nobody’s put a watch on the ships.
She was half-frozen by the time she’d braked off the line and caught Trinidad’s rigging-cord—hadn’t even a hand-jet: she monkeyed over to the hatch, her breath coming in ragged, teeth-chattering hisses as she opened up and hauled herself through.
The damn fool was there, just doing a little wipe-down on a cabinet. He made a slow turn to look at her, all calm—like, What’s the rush, Meg? What could possibly be the matter?
She brought up against a console, hauled herself steady against the recoil, out of breath, not knowing what that look meant—that he’d lost his mind and gone totally eetee, or that he was holding it together, up here testing the limits of his sanity.
“You kind of missed a dinner date,” she said.
He blinked as if he were dropping into another track of thought. “God,” he said, “I’m sorry.”
Blank and innocent. She wasn’t entirely sure he was sane right now, or that she was even safe with him in this lonely, noise-insulated place. She said, with her teeth chattering, “Dek, we got to get down and find Bird—right now. Something’s come up.”
“Something wrong?”
She wasn’t about to explain to him here, alone. She grabbed his arm. “We just got a problem.” Her teeth rattling made it hard to talk. “Come on, Dek, for God’s sake, I’m freezing.”
“What’s going on?”
“Tell you on the way.” She made a little finger-sign that meant bug. “Bird wants you. Now.”
He disposed of the cloth he was holding. He wiped his fingers on his sweater, looking scared now.
But he dimmed the lights and followed her out of the hatch.
Message from Salvatore: We’ve got some kind of stir among the military personnel on the ’deck—MP’s and officers going from bar to bar, spreading out. Looks as if they’re pulling their people off leave…
Payne passed the message on to Crayton’s office and grabbed the phone. “FleetCom,” he told it, and got one ring after another, then a robot.
“Input your priority please.”
“This is Payne, ASTEX Public Information Office.”
“Your call is entered in queue. Your call will be answered…”
Priority beeped him off. Red lights spread like plague across the phone console.
“Sir!” Salvatore said into his ear, but another priority beeped Salvatore down to autorecord.
The phone said, simultaneously with the computer, on voice: “… This is President Towney’s office. We are in receipt of an uncoded message echoed from Shepherd craft at the Well, quote:…‘At 1540 hours on September 2nd, the Shepherd Athens picked up an anomalous object in the recovery zone. It proved to be human remains, carrying the identification of Corazon Salazar, a miner registered to Rl, and reported lost earlier this year during a reported bumping incident between the ’driver Industry and the miner ship 1-89-Z. Our calculations indicate an origin consistent with other loads fired by the aforenamed ’driver. We are in possession of charts which indicate falsification of records. We are advising the company of these facts and we are demanding that charges immediately be filed of willful murder and attempted murder, with arrest warrants issued for the chief officers of the ’driver ship—’ ”
Sweating, heart thumping, Payne keyed to Salvatore: Whereabouts of Paul Dekker. Priority One.
DEKKER kept his jaw clamped on questions Meg clearly wasn’t going to answer—“I don’t know what the situation is right now,” was the last information thing she’d yet said, when she’d insisted on stopping on 4-deck and walking breakneck to a lift that only took cards like the one she was using—which wasn’t hers. Gold. The only card like that he’d ever seen was Shepherd Access.
He’d never seen this end of helldeck, either—where the lift let out. She led the way across the ’deck immediately to a door next to a fancy restaurant. A card-sized gold plaque was the only sign of business: the Shepherd emblem, Jupiter and the recovery track, right above the card-lock.
“What is this?” he asked.
Meg put the card in, shoved the door as the electronic lock clicked.
He ducked inside after her, into a carpeted reception room where he knew they didn’t belong—by no right ought they to be here, except that card.
A blond man looked up from the reception desk.
Meg said, “This is Dek; Dek, Mitch.—Have we heard anything from the rest of us?”
“Neg,” Mitch said, before Dekker could say anything, and pointed to the first door down the hall. “Wait in there. Both of you.”
“I’ve got friends out there,” Meg objected, “looking for him.”
“We’re doing something about it, Kady. We’ll do it faster if you take care of him.”
“Maybe you’d better tell me what’s going on,” Dekker said, but Meg grabbed him by the arm, said, “Dek, come on,” and steered him down the hall.
“Dammit, Meg,—”
“Shit, I don’t know, I don’t know, come on, just awhile—sonuvabitch! I’m up to here with sons of bitches…” Meg took him back into an elegant deserted bar, left him standing while she turned on the lights and set up on her own, poured two fast, shaky drinks, one whiskey, one rum.
He came and leaned his elbows on the bar, said carefully: “We’re not getting out of here tomorrow, are we?”
She took a sip of the whiskey and shoved the rum at him. “Drink up.”
“Meg. What’s happened? What are we doing here?”
She leaned on the bar, nudged his hand with her glass. “You seriously better have a little of that, jeune rab.—They found your partner.”
That was it.—But the Shepherd Access, Meg’s breathless rush—coming here… He stood bewildered. Meg came around the end of the bar and snagged him by the sleeve, pulled him to a table and set him down opposite her.
She said, “Dek, they found her at the Well. That sonuvabitch put her in a bucket and sent her a long tour of Jupiter. A Shepherd picked her up on the recovery path.”
Meg sneaked up all gentle. Then she shot for the gut. His mind went blank and black—
That huge dark machine…
“Why in hell—” Breath dammed up in his throat. He couldn’t get it out. He reached for the glass, slopped it left and right getting a drink.
Meg reached across the table, reached for his free hand as he set the glass down, squeezed his fingers til they hurt.
“Cher. Death is. Pain’s life. And there’s, above all, sons of bitches. Get your breath. You’re not the only one who knows now. You’re not alone out there. It’s the independents… the freerunners… the Shepherds they were aiming at. The old, old business.”
“But what in hell do they think they’re doing?” His voice came out higher than he intended, hardly recognizable. “What kind of a game is this? How could they ever think they could get away with it?”
“There’s crazy people. They shot us down at the company doors. News cameras everywhere. Everybody in the world saw it. How’d they get away with that, can you tell me, jeune rab? —Have your rum. The word’s out on the Shepherds’ com. They’ll be hearing it at Sol about now. The company won’t want you to talk, you understand—seriously won’t want you to talk to anybody. That’s what’s going on. But if MamBitch pushes now, the Shepherds are going to shut MamBitch down. Let the corp-rats fly the ships with their cut-rate crews. Let the company execs fly the Well.”
“I want that guy, Meg.”
“Close as we can come. You got the guys that launched him. Somebody’s job’s gone. Best you can do with these sumbitches.”
He’s reported in the core, the last report from Salvatore’s office had said. They were still searching; and Payne, with Towney’s office requesting the Dekker file, searched screen after screen of records generated by Salvatore’s investigation.
Record score on re-certification. Cleared to retrain, shipping with the two miners who’d picked him up, plus a Kady and Aboujib, both female—
Ships both due to launch on the 18th, the sleepery owner swearing he had no idea in hell where Dekker was—Dekker has missed a supper appointment: his partners had been phoning around trying to find him. Dekker could have come and gone, the owner had no idea, he’d been watching the vid. Everybody in the bar had been watching the vid…
Aboujib and Pollard both had Shepherd parentage. Kady was a cashiered shuttle pilot. Bird had been a suspect in the Nouri affair, close friend of Pratt and Marks—
The file had gone to Towney’s desk.
And the monkey was climbing up PI’s back.
Nobody had told his office that Dekker was anything but, at absolute worst, a skimmer who’d gotten caught and bumped. Nobody had told him that a ’driver captain was going to make a gesture like this at the Shepherds.
He keyed up Industry’s record. Windowed in the second chart.
No record of asteroid 98879 prior to the incident. Industry’s transmission logged the discovery to the company. March 7th.
God.
Dekker had flat spooked out about the launch—that was Ben’s opinion on the matter. Thtey’d tried restaurants, game parlors, tried the bars again in the idea he could be skipping from one to the other, but the cops and the military were getting more and more visible on the’deck.
To hell with that guy! Ben thought, trying to look inconspicuous while a group of military police came past the frontage. Inside, the vid was saying something about shifts held over due to “military exercises” and “a test of security procedures…”
A hand landed on his shoulder. His heart nearly stopped. He spun around nose to nose with Bird.
“Don’t do that!”
“Now we got a problem. We got wall to wall cops at The Hole.”
He felt of his pocket, cold of a sudden. “Card’s with me. We’re all right.”
“All right,’” Bird echoed him. “You got a hell of an idea of ‘all right.’ Have you seen Sal or Meg?”
“Not since an hour ago.”
The PA blared out: “Shifts will be held another hour. There is a Civil Defense Command exercise in progress. If you have an assigned CDC post on 3-shift, go to it immediately. If you have no assigned duty, clear the ’decks, repeat, all off-shift personnel get off the ’decks and return to quarters,”
“The hell,” Bird muttered. “I’ve seen this before.”
“What are they doing?”
“Cops,” Bird said. “Martial law. Shit with finding the kid. They’re going to shut him up, shut it down—it’s Nouri all over again.” Bird’s hand closed on his arm. “And we’re in it up to our ears, understand me?”
He did understand. He saw company cops moving through the crowds—saw blue-uniformed MP’s too, with heavy sidearms.
Bird said, “This time we put the word out, just find some friends, spill the beans, tell them pass it on.”
“Why risk our necks? We got enough troubles.”
“That’s what we said the last time.”
“Bird,—those are guns out there!”
“Do you know the word ‘railroad,’ Ben-me-lad? Pratt and Marks were innocent. No way those boys were with Nouri’s lot. Good, dumb kids. But now nobody’s sure.—You do what you like.”
“Where are you going?”
“Doing a little discreet talking around in various ears. The company’s not hushing this one up. This time we know numbers. And dates.”
His mind went scattering in panic—the launch tomorrow… but that wasn’t going to happen. The urge to kill Dekker for involving them in this… but Dekker was probably the first one under arrest.
He took a fistful of Bird’s coat, hauled him back. “Bird,—”
“I knew Pratt and Marks were being screwed,” Bird said. “I had the evidence, you understand me. It could have tied me to Nouri—in certain eyes. Everybody was scared. Everybody was saving his own ass. And everybody lost.—Not this time.”
“Bird, for God’s sake—”
“This time it’s us in the fire-path, you understand me? And we’re not dumb kids. You’ve got that datacard. Give it to me.”
Ben felt after the flat shape in his inside pocket, desperately trying to think what old classmates he knew that could fix this one—but there wasn’t anyone. Not a damn soul who wouldn’t be, the way Bird said, saving his own ass.
“Give it to me.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Put it on the bulletin board. And pass the word.”
“Shit!”
Bird leaned close and put a hand on his shoulder. “Find yourself a hole, hear me? Get down to the club. Don’t know if Sal’s friends’ll let you in, but, hell, you’ve got ties there. Use ’em. It’s the only hole might cover you.”
Bird trying anything under the table—Bird didn’t know shit about the safeguards on the computer systems, Bird didn’t know shit what he was doing, dammit, those charts were their living—
They also were the only evidence that existed about where they’d been and what they’d done, and if the company arrested them and erased it—
“Hell,” he said, “you’ve got that Shepherd card. Thing’s got 1-deck Access.”
“Do what with it? Hell, Ben, that thing’s probably more dangerous—”
“Just leave the computer stuff to me and stay out of it, Bird, you don’t know shit how to get past the lockouts. I can get into all the boards, hell, I can get it into general systems, Bird, I know the modem codes…”
“Where in hell did you get those?”
He said, “Just give me the fuckin’ card, Bird, and tell ’em the filename’s Dekker.”
“Mr. Crayton is in conference,” the secretary said, and Payne shot the memo through in desperation. “Give that to him. We’ve got to have a policy decision. Thirty minutes ago!”
“I believe that’s the subject of the con—”
Payne hung up in frustration, and stared at the stalled press release on his screen. Then he shot it unapproved to News & Entertainment, for release.
The nature of a coded Shepherd transmission has been revealed as a query to Shepherd senior administration regarding the discovery of human remains in a Shepherd recovery zone. Company records have tentatively identified the body as likely that of Corazon Salazar, lost earlier this year in an accident near the R2/R1 boundary. Ms. Salazar, daughter of Alyce Salazar, a MarsCorp board member and prominent member of the Defense Advisory Council, was two years resident on Rl. She was apparently struck and killed while EVA when a tank explosion sent her ship out of control. The ship then traveled helplessly at high velocity into R2 zone. Dr. Ronald Michaels, of the Institute, has offered the theory that the body, traveling in the firepath of the ’driver ship Industry, was struck by one of the loads and carried along with it at a velocity sufficient to delivery it to the recovery site.
The Shepherd discovery adds another chapter to the already tragic story of the ill-fated miner craft Way Out. The surviving partner, Mr. Paul Dekker, was rescued earlier this year by an R2 ship dispatched to his rescue. Mr. Dekker, surviving isolation, cold and failing lifesupport after an amazing 71 days adrift, was released from James R. Reynolds Hospital after extensive treatment for physiological and psychological trauma. A spokesman for the hospital this shift expressed concern that Mr. Dekker has not responded to urgent attempts to notify him in advance of public release of this news. Mr. Dekker currently remains unlocatable on R2. Dr. Emit Visconti, Mr. Dekker’s physician, authorized release of the news in the fear that Mr. Dekker has heard the report via other sources and appealed for Mr. Dekker or anyone knowing his whereabouts to call Security or the information desk at Reynolds Hospital immediately. Mr. Dekker is on medication and may have suffered disorientation or mental confusion due to the stress of this tragic report, and may be despondent. A spokesman for ASTEX Administration assures Mr. Dekker that he has been cleared of all fault in the accident, which occurred as the result of a catastrophic equipment failure, and urges Mr. Dekker to contact the hospital immediately…
Damn him. Damn Crayton—dumping a case like this on him with no indication at all that it had hidden problems.
Now Crayton couldn’t even clear a press release. He had to put his neck on the line, try to keep the lid on—knowing that win or lose, this was something the company would want black-holed. Lost. Forgotten. Along with anybody in any way tainted with it.
The comp took the message. Another one windowed up, for Salvatore:
A Shepherd came and went at the core between 2041 and 2108h. Customs didn’t see him. They were in the office listening to the outlaw transmission. The card belonged to a tech named Nate Chaney, who isn’t answering to calls at his listed numbers…
No way to get to the rental comp at The Hole—but any phone would do, that had a keypad, and Io’s fancy establishment had that amenity. Neon flashed, dyed the beer green and red while it shook in the glass. Couldn’t hear a core blowout in this place, Ben thought, and it was crawling with low-level corporates—but he was wearing his best ’deck casuals and the corner of the bar afforded a dark area. Shepherd card first: then his:
Boot file: PROCESS. Invoke: CALL13; README5; ADD2; ADD1; ADD3
Boot memory resident file: PROCESS2. Enter.
Student pranks. The datawindow showed dots, the Egg assembling its parts and pieces.
The datawindow said: CALLME: INS TXT
INPUT: $/CHART.CUR; CHART. 14; CHART. 15
OUTPUT: DEKKER
The datawindow said: ENTER SYSACC
His hands trembled over the keys. He didn’t think about cops. Or the corporate behind him, waiting to use the phone. He thought about data. He typed, rapid-fire: *2;20;W489\209:INSTAL:C\$/$y;*BOOT3;*3. l/$;{rs/#} /P*280:#[TAG/*1]
He switched datacards—inserted the Shepherd’s before the pause ran out.
Phone charge went to the Shepherd card. The Run trigger waited the first phone user after him. Nasty trick on the guy fidgeting behind him. He’d be out of the bar.
He sipped the beer, punched charge, extracted the card and palmed it for his, held that one up, right color for a miner, if it mattered in the blue strobe, indication to the bar he’d paid: “Thanks,” he called out, drowned in the general thunder of the bass line, left his beer on the bar and went out the door.
He had the general shakes by then—but, damn, he’d really done it, he’d actually run the thing—his own tinkered-up finesse on an old Institute prank—with Assay Office bank and com direct line access numbers and a Shepherd’s 1-deck phone system authorizations. The question was now whether he was ahead of the current game with the trap programs—
—and whether he could get Bird off the ’deck—whether he could find Bird, before the cops did.
The cops were out in force, clearing the ’deck. It was the old game, the cops said Move along, you said, Yes, sir, and you went somewhere else you didn’t live—helldeck played that game, the cops knew it was a game—didn’t push it too hard, helldeck crowd being what they were. They were going to have to make the sleeperies close their bars to everybody but residents, if they were serious and not just Making the Presence Felt: and that move would lock legitimate residents out on the ’deck and have angry confrontations left and right—not what they were after, Ben told himself; but if it was your face they might be looking for, it seemed a good idea to hang to the back of crowds, keep behind taller people and drift on when they did.
God, he thought, no knowing what Bird’s puttering around into. I got to get him to cover somewhere—and if they pick us up, we just go along with it, take it easy, wait for the upper echelons to sort it out.
No way they’re going to screw us for this one—too many people know the truth, too many people on corp-deck are going to be covering their asses, and to do that, they have to cover ours, axe that sumbitch captain out there—and any clerk they can pin it on: those are the ones who need to worry.
Maybe we can even parlay this into a company buyoff, get us that helldeck office—
Justice, hell, Bird,—it’s the names you know that matter. It’s where they are and what you can do to them in court.
Wipe down this card is all—
Slip it right into the trashbin.
“Screwed the kid good,” Bird said, leaning close to Abe Persky, whispering over the music in the Europa. “But what they did to the girl, that wasn’t any company order. That was a ’driver/Shepherd piece of business—damn sight more than letting a rock drift from a sling, this time. Shepherds are broadcasting it, outside code now—they’ll hear it clear to Earth, plain as plain. That’s what the alert is about.”
“Damn,” Persky said with a shake of his head.
“Listen. I dumped my charts to the helldeck board—might check it before they catch it. Filename’s Dekker. D-e-k-k-e-r.” He nudged Persky’s arm. “Pass it on, everyone you know.”
“Got you,” Persky said, and reached for his datacard. Nudged him back as he was leaving. “Careful, Bird.”
Collins’ table next. Collins was a company pilot now, but he didn’t like being that. He came to helldeck to keep up old acquaintances. He was sitting with Robley—Robley was doing factory work now: the kidneys had gone.
He sat down with Collins and Robley, and saw Persky pay out and leave.
Just one and two at a time. But the ’deck telegraph moved like lightning.
Another call from Payne’s office. Salvatore said, “Yes, sir,” and, “We’re trying, sir, we’ve thought of that, sir, we’re trying that too…”
Payne said: “Don’t tell me ‘trying.’ I want all the records, I want the whole file on this guy. On all of them. Don’t give me another dead kid with relatives in MarsCorp, dammit, Administration’s had enough surprises in this case! I want to know who this Dekker is, I want to know if he’s got a record, I don’t care if it’s a misdemeanor, I want a total profile on him! You hear me? All the files, no ten-year cutoff, I want them as far back as they go, and I want them yesterday!”
Payne hung up. The comp flashed up a new message: Workers in Textiles 2B are demanding to be let go. There’s been some breakage, some pushing and shoving, manager’s scared and wants some help.
And another from Crayton’s office: Fleet Operations is recalling its personnel from liberty, stationing armed guards at two shuttle docks and at essential lifesupport and manufacturing accesses. We need immediate operations coordination…
God, Salvatore thought, and a report from Wills came in:
Morris Bird had dinner reservations at the Europa, for five. It was a no-show.
He wanted the inhaler. He didn’t dare. “Call my wife at home,” he told his secretary. “Tell her to check on my daughter. Make sure she’s in the dorm.” He sipped cold coffee, trying to think who he could spare to liaison with the MP’s.
More messages crawled across the screen. A man is having chest pains in Textiles 2B. Paramedics have been called…
Wills again: Brown’s turned up a witness in customs who thinks Meg Kady was in the core at about 2040h. He’s not sure on that, says he saw all of them come and go the last few days taking parts back and forth—they had a permit for that, a ship in refit. We do have a confirmation on a card access for Dekker up there at 1723h. No exit. No card use at all from Kady since a phone call at 1846, from The Black Hole to The Pacific. The owner at The Black Hole claims they all left about 1900. He thinks.
Two people slipping a security gate on a borrowed card. Happened once or twice a week, usually for assignations.
The mast was a hell of a job to search, even under optimum conditions.
Textiles 2B reports a riot in progress. Manager requests additional security and paramedics…
Priority came through, bumped that: Virus Alert: Technical level shutdown.
Priority override: A virus is copying an unauthorized file through the Belt Management System. Contents are illicit sector charts. Virus variation on COPYIT. Request computer crimes division to trace and erase proliferation through BM system.
“… cleared of all fault in the accident, which occurred as the result of a catastrophic equipment failure, and urges Mr. Dekker to contact the hospital immediately…”
Bird gave the vid a look over his shoulder, shook his head and looked at Tim Egel. “You’re a good numbers man. You believe that line?”
“No,” Egel said. “Not the tooth fairy either. Shoved to the Well by a load. I’d like to see the math on that one.”
“They don’t teach physics in Business Ad.”
“Don’t teach math either, do they?” That was a tender-jock, in on it, beer in hand. “What kind of stuff is that they’re giving out?”
“They want Dekker back in hospital. They worked him over with drugs. But he remembered the numbers anyway. That’s what they can’t cover up. 79, 709, 12. There was a bloody great rock there. That’s what it was about. That ’driver came down on them while they were tagging it. Now the ’driver’s sitting out there stripping that rock to loads. I’d like to match those loads with the sample Dekker had in his sling.”
“Can anybody do that?”
“I got the sample. It’s on record in Assay.”
“This here’s Morrie Bird,” Egel said.“The guy that brought Dekker in.”
“No shit! I heard of you! You’re the old guy!”
Being famous got you drinks. Being famous could also get you arrested. He took a couple of swigs from the beer the guy insisted to buy him, and set it down, said, “If you’re curious, check the boards for a file named Dekker. With two k’s.”
“Dekker,” the jock said.
Egel said, in Bird’s diminishing hearing, “I’ll tell you what they’re up to, friend. They weren’t going to pay that rock out to any freerunner. Pretty soon they won’t pay it to a company miner either. Or the tenders. When the freerunners go, there go the perks anybody gets on the company ticket. When they don’t have to compete with independents like us…”
“They can’t do that,” somebody else said.
Time to leave, Bird thought. Getting a little warm in here. He set his drink down and slid backward in the crowd, faced about for an escape and saw cops coming into the place.
The cops waded in through the middle of the crowd yelling something about a closing order and residents only; and he stuck to the shadows until there was a clear doorway.
Outside, then. In the clear. But that was it—cops were getting just a little active.
“Where are they?” Meg asked the only live human being she could find in the place—no Mitch, now, just this pasty-faced guy at the desk with the phone, with no calls coming in that she’d heard. Nothing was coming in, that she could tell, not even the vid, for what good it might be.
“No word yet,” the Shepherd said—guy in his thirties, serious longnose, busy with the com-plug in his ear—not liking real rab on his clean club carpet. He focused for a moment, lifted a manicured hand to delay her. “Ms. Kady—go a little easy on the whiskey.”
She’d started away. She came back, leaned her hands on the desk. “I’m all right on the whiskey, mister. Where’s Mitch? Where’s my partner?”
“We have other problems.”
“What?”
A wave-off. A frown on the Shepherd’s face. He was listening to something. Then not.
“Look. I hate like hell to inconvenience you guys, but I have a seriously upset guy in there who’s damned tired of runarounds. So am I. Suppose you tell me what’s going on.”
“A great many police is what’s going on. They’re still holding 2-shift.”
“Shit.”
“Don’t be an ass, Kady.—That door’s locked.”
“Then open it!”
“Kady, get the hell back to the bar—get that kid back in there.”
“Meg?”
She turned around, saw Dekker in the foyer. “Dek, just be patient, I’m trying to get some answers.”
“There aren’t any answers, Kady, just keep the kid entertained.”
She saw a flash of total red. Bang, with her hand on the counter. “Listen, you son of a bitch—where the fuck is my partner?”
“I don’t know where your partner is. If she followed orders she’d be here.”
“She doesn’t know we’ve got him! She’s not on your network!”
“I don’t know where a lot of people are, right now, Kady—we’ve got a lot more problems than your—” The Shepherd pressed his earpiece closer, held up a hand for silence.
“What?”
“They’re bringing that warship’s engines up, over at the ’yard. They want us out of here.”
“They. Who, ‘they’?”
“The Hamilton. There’s a shuttle on the mast. But we aren’t getting com with it. Hamilton’s saying it can’t raise it. That’s our contingency sitting up there.”
“Shit! This is going to hell, mister!”
“Shut up, Kady!”
Message from CCrimes: Ordering immediate shutdown of the banking system. The virus has entered 2-deck bulletin boards, spreading on infected cards with each use…
The man in Textiles 2B had died. There was a broken leg in a fall off a catwalk, there was damage to the machinery, a woman had gone into labor—Salvatore had a view from an Optex and it was a mess. They had the phones stopped on 2, but the damn chart had proliferated from the bulletin boards to the card charge system, sent itself into every trade establishment on R2, and they didn’t know if it was into the bank databank itself.
He washed an antacid down with stale coffee, and tried to placate Payne. Payne said he had to go to a meeting. Payne said his aide LeBrun was handling the office.
Damned right there was a meeting. There had better be a meeting real soon now. With some faster policy decisions. Salvatore’s hands were shaking, and he didn’t know who he could trust to handle emergencies long enough for him to get to the restroom and back.
“Sir,” the intercom said, “sir, a Lt. Porey to see you.”
He didn’t have any Lt. Porey on his list. He started to protest he wasn’t seeing anybody, but the door opened without further warning, and a Fleet officer walked in on him, with his aide. “Mr. Salvatore,” the man said. African features. An accent he couldn’t place. And a deep-spacer prig Attitude, he’d lay money on it, expecting stations to run on his schedule.
He got up. A second aide showed up, blocked his secretary out of the doorway. And shut the door.
“Mr. Porey.” He offered a grudging hand to a crisp, perfunctory grip, all the while thinking: We’re going to discuss this one with Crayton. Damned if not.
“Mr. Salvatore, we have a developing situation on 2-deck. Rumor is loose, and some ass in your office is referring FleetCom to PI—”
God, a pissed-off Fleet prig. “That’s the chain of command.”
“Not in our operations. I want the files on this Dekker and I want the files on the entire Shepherd leadership.”
“I’m afraid all that’s under our jurisdiction, Mr. Porey: you’ll have to get an administrative clearance for that access. I can refer you to Mr. Crayton, in General Admin—”
Porey reached inside his coat, pulled a card from his pocket and tossed it down on his desk. “Put that authorization in your reader.”
Salvatore picked up the card with the least dawning apprehension they were in deep, EC-level trouble, and put it in the reader slot.
It said, Earth Company Executive Order, Office of the President, Sol Station, Earth Administration Zone.
To all officers and agents of Security and Communications, ASTEX Administrative Territories:
By the authority of the Executive Board and a unanimous vote of the Directors, a state of emergency is deemed to exist in ASTEX operations which place military priority contracts in jeopardy. ASTEX Security and Communications agencies and employees are hereby notified of the transfer of all affected assets and operations to the authority of EcoCorp, under ASTEX Charter provision 28 hereafter appended, and subject to the orders of EcoCorp Directors…I hereby and herewith order ASTEX company police and life services officers to place themselves directly under the order of UDC Security Office in safeguarding records and personnel during this transfer of operational authority.
Salvatore sat down and read it again.
“Effectively,” Porey said, “your paycheck comes directly from the EC now. You’re a civilian law enforcement officer in a strategically sensitive operation, subject to the rules and decisions of the UDG, the UN and the EC officers and board. I’m directing you to turn over those files.”
“You can’t have gotten an order from the EC—you haven’t had the time to get a reply.”
“Good, Mr. Salvatore. You are a critical thinker. There were triggering mechanisms. The transfer document has lain on my commanding officer’s desk for some few days. But I’d think again about destroying files, or advising your former administrators of your change of loyalties. You have a long career with the EC in front of you if you use your head. I can’t say that about all your managers.” A second card hit the desk. “That goes in a Security terminal. It will make its own accesses. Can you trust your secretary?”
“I—” He saw the guns—automatics. Explosive shells. Not riot control gear. And not ASTEX any longer. “I think I’d better explain it to him,” he said, and thought about his wife, about his daughter. He took the card, slid it into the computer and pressed ENTER.
The screen went to Access, and came up again with a series of dots. Porey folded his arms and watched it a moment, looked his way then with the tilt of a brow.
“The Industry file. Purge it, among first things.”
“Purge it? Erase it?”
“It’s become irrelevant. Personnel have already been transferred. Certain questions won’t be asked beyond this office. That’s official, Mr. Salvatore. Your career could rise or fall on that simple point. Take great care how you dispose of it.—Mr. Paget.”
“Sir!”
“Find Paul Dekker and escort him to the dock.”
“So what’s the new plan?” Meg asked, she thought with great restraint, standing between Dekker’s temper and some fill-in Shepherd data-jock with a rulebook up his ass who persisted in trying to get contact with a shuttle that was probably—
The Shepherd said, “They’re still not getting through to Mitch—they’re jamming us.”
“So what do you expect? It’s not just the company anymore, it’s the soldiers, for God’s sake, and you can’t hide on a station—”
“You can’t hide a ship, either, Kady. I’m not sure how long my ship can hold position out there—”
“Then let’s get up to the dock. Play it by ear for God’s sake!”
“This isn’t a game, woman, we don’t know if the lifts are working—”
“Sit on your ass a little longer and we won’t know what else won’t be working when we need it.”
“I’m the only contact our people have on this station—I have my orders—Mitch is—”
“Mitch isn’t answering, you’re not contacting anybody out there, the phones are down, the soldiers are all up and down the ’deck, for God’s sake—let’s get the hell up to the dock, if that’s our option!”
“It does us no good to get to the shuttle, our pilot’s out there on the ’deck!”
“Is that your problem? Well, you’re in luck, mister! You’re up to your ass in pilots.”
“C-class, Kady, not a miner craft—”
“Earth to orbit, ship to station, Bl, anything you can dock at this hellhole. Let’s just get the hell up there.”
“Kady, there’s police out there. There’s armed police in front of our door. D’ you have a way we’re going to get past them?”
Good question.
A whole squad of soldiers passed, going somewhere in a hurry. Ben found sudden interest in a bar window, in a crowd of exiting patrons. They were shutting the bars, dammit. At least closing the doors.
Serious time to get somewhere. Bird might have headed back to The Hole, Bird might have been arrested by now, God only where he was.
A touch brushed his arm. His heart turned over. He looked in that direction and saw a coffee-dark face under a docker’s knit cap.
Dock monkey’s coveralls, too. When women were damn scarce on the docks. “What are you doing?”
“Getting to the club unobviously as I can, which I think the both of us urgently better. Any word on Dekker?”
“No, damn him, I’m looking for Bird right now.”
“We better get him. They got soldier-boys with rifles now. They pulled those lads off liberty and they’re putting some of them down by the offices.”
“Damn, I don’t like that.”
“No argument, cher. Some of those guys are still flying a little.”
“Bright. Corporate bright, there.”
“Ain’t corp-rat, cher, that’s the so’jers—which we got gathering right down there. Don’t look. Just let’s stroll along and find Bird.”
He hadn’t been entirely scared until now. He started to walk, hearing distant shouting. People were coming out of the bar behind their backs.
A beer mug hit the deck and broke.
“Just keep walking,” Sal said.
“Don’t hold my arm. You’re a guy, dammit!”
“Yeah,” Sal said, and dropped it.
Try to find a match on a refinery station—
“There’s candles in Scorpio’s,” the Shepherd said, rummaging the repair-kit.
“Not excessively helpful, mister. Never mind the screwdriver. Screw. Have you got a brass screw? Wire?”
Dekker objected, “Meg, what are you doing?”
She pulled the cover off the door-switch. “Wait-see, cher rab. God, the man has wire. What are we coming to?”
“A short’s only going to start the—”
Dekker got this look then.
“Yeah,” she said, winding wire about bare contacts. “Remember the ’15, cher? Want you to take a few napkins, and the vodka bottles… Won’t take me a minute here.”
“That door’s going to seal,” the Shepherd said, “the second the fire-sensor goes off. We’ll suffocate.”
“Uh-uh. Door’s going to stay open. Make me happy. Say we got fire-masks in here.”
THE emergency speakers said, from every other store front: This is a full security alert. Go to your residences immediately. Go to your residences immediately. Clear the walkways for emergency vehicles.
Sal said: “So what are we supposed to do, go home or clear the walkways? Stupid shits!”
“I don’t like this,” Ben said. “Seriously time to get down to the club.”
The wires sparked and melted, the door opened, Meg whipped a chair into the doorway and ducked back. Shots spattered. Dekker kept his hands steady: the toilet paper caught, the cloth fibers caught, the cloth caught, blue fire in the folds; Dekker lit the next and Meg snatched the bottle and threw it into the hall.
It shattered. Dekker lit a third vodka bottle, passed it, and Meg lobbed the second out the door and ducked back as somebody screamed in pain.
The Shepherd was on a chair with another bit of burning cloth. The smoke alarm went off inside. The fire system started spraying, the door tried to shut as shots spattered off the edge and blew hell out of the chair-back. They were down to gin bottles.
Fire-spray started outside, white chemical clouds billowing up.
“That’s got it,” Meg said, pulled her mask up, trod on the chair and cleared it into the smoke outside as shots went past the door.
No notion whether she’d made it, no knowledge how to dodge or duck—he just deafened himself to the shots, cleared the chair and hugged the wall in the neon-lit smoke—running shadows rushed out of Scorpio’s, screaming in panic.
Shots slammed into the crowd. Bodies flew; voices shrieked above the wailing siren. He sprinted past the restaurant’s blue glare, dodged runners in the mist, not caring right now if the Shepherd was behind them or not—Meg was ahead of him trying for the Emergency Shaft, Meg had the Shepherds’ key, and people who’d been taking cover in the restaurant were running every which way through the mist and into the gunfire.
He saw Meg stop, saw her trying to get the key in a slot.
A shot blasted a gouge in the wall beyond her—he flinched, pressed himself as flat to the wall as he could.
“Take the lift on the next level,” the Shepherd gasped, clutching at his shoulder, beside them. “They’re bound to have our cards blocked—Use your own. Berth 18 if we get separated—”
People were bunching up around them in panic—somebody in a waiter’s uniform had a key, shoved Meg aside. The door opened. Meg slid in with the crowd and he pushed after her, he didn’t care who he knocked out of the way—there were more and more pushing at their backs, the rush shoving them past the second door and up the steps. He pulled his mask down for air, grabbed the rail to keep from being shoved down and pushed all the way into the clear, with the Shepherd close behind, around the turn and up.
“3-deck damn door isn’t going to work!” the Shepherd yelled out of the clangor behind them in the stairwell. “Door’s still open down there! Go for 4-deck, get a door shut behind us!”
Dekker turned his shoulders, grabbed a handhold, forced his way past panicked, flagging clerks and restaurant help—the Shepherd yelling “Go!” and shoving him from behind.
A hundred feet each deck level. No way clerks and waiters could outclimb spacer legs—on the end of four months’ gym time. Meg was out of sight above them.
A siren had started in the distance—around the curvature of the ’deck. Ben couldn’t see where—but, God, it was the direction of the club—where they were going.
“Come on,” Sal cried, trying to hurry him—grabbed his hand and pulled him through the crowd coming out of the Amalthea, but steps raced behind them. “Hold it!” a shout came from close at their backs: a hand grabbed Ben’s shoulder and spun him around and back, bang up against the plex front of the bar. He found himself nose to nose with a cop, with a stick jammed up under his chin.
“Pollard, is it?”
Shit, he thought, struggling for air.
Out of nowhere, Bird’s voice said, “Hey! Hey, what do you think you’re dealing with?” Bird came up and caught the cop’s shoulder, another cop grabbed Bird and somebody in the crowd spun the cop around face-on with a beer mug.
“Hold it,” Ben tried to say, “wait, dammit,—Bird!”
Something banged, the plex window shook to an impact, and there was blood all over—he slipped, and the cop’s riot stick came away as he hit on his knees, Bird was lying there with a bloody great hole in his sleeve and a look of shock on his face. All else he could see was legs and all else he could hear was people cursing and screaming. He scrambled over, grabbed Bird’s coat and dragged him up close against the frontage, Bird fainting on him, people trampling them until he had a moment of clear space and Sal grabbed his arm to pull him to his feet.
“Ben! Come on!”
He scrambled for his feet, pulling at Bird. Sal hauled,
Bird tried to get his legs under him, and they threw arms around him and ran with the crowd, battered and staggered by people passing them, Bird doing the best he could, Sal shoving him up from the other side—gunfire and shouts echoed at their backs.
Screaming broke out ahead of them, and the crowd ebbed back at them without warning, shoved them the other way. The PA said, echoing over the shouting and the distant siren, This is not a test. This is a real emergency—
“Stairs,” Bird gasped, and Ben thought, God, where are they? You passed them time and again, the utility accesses—between the frontages, back in the bars—
—used to use them in the Institute, up and down the dorms, you used to duck under the security cameras—
One was right next to The Hole, that was where.
His lungs were burning, Bird was losing his footing, stumbling with every step as they reached the alcove and Sal shoved at the door.
“Mike’s got a key,” Bird gasped.
“Hell with that,” Ben said, and hit #, /, and 9 simultaneously, 8, 0, and /. Management Emergency Access.
They weren’t the only ones that wanted the stairs—“Get out of my way!” Ben snapped at Sal, feeling the panic in the crowd as they pushed for the opening door—God, they couldn’t climb and carry Bird between them: he got a shoulder under him and carried him solo, with Sal running the stairs ahead of him. Hysterical people shoved him from behind, shoved past, nearly knocked him down, and then somebody with sense, thank God, pulled him square again and shoved him forward when his balance faltered.
“Lock through, dammit!” Sal yelled—downside door shut was the only way the door up on 3-deck would open; and the guys ahead of her got out. Ben saw it through a black-rimmed blur, heard it through the ringing of the steps and the pounding in his chest, one thin feminine voice, “E-drill, ten at a time, you dumbass bastards!”
They had a human wave behind them. Sal was holding the door open. Sal screamed at them to get in, and the guys behind—thank God, must have had the sense to turn around in the lock and shove the tide back. The doors shut, the hallway door opened, and they had the clear cold air of 3-deck.
“Core-lift!” Sal yelled, grabbing him. He didn’t know how he could do it, but Bird wasn’t in any shape to carry himself. His knees and his ankles were giving and wobbling with every step, his vision was nearly gone—people were scattering past them in every direction, piling into the Trans, any way in hell they could get away. He couldn’t get enough wind, he knew his knees were going, but it was close… he knew it was close.
He couldn’t see anything but blurs—didn’t even know where they were, except Sal kept him straight, and Sal hit the button when they got there and propped him on his feet—he kept blinking sweat out of his eyes, couldn’t hear anything but his heartbeat and distant screams, was scared mindless the core-lift was shut off at 3 with the alarms down on helldeck, but the door opened, welcomed them with white light and cold air.
She got the door shut. He stooped, eased Bird down from his shoulder, held on to him til he could lean him against the wall—Bird’s face was white even after the head-down carry, Bird’s blood was soaking him, but Bird breathed something coherent about the door.
Sal was trying to card it to move. He staggered to the panel to try the E-code, but abruptly the power cut in without his touching it and the car rose—
“What did you do?” he gasped—but then the car slowed down again, on 4, and the door opened, on an out-of-breath Meg, Dekker, and a Shepherd with a key—
“God,” Meg said. And: “Bird?”
The Shepherd shoved them in ahead of him and keyed them from the core as fast as Ben could get his next breath—bent double with the pain in his gut, while Meg and Sal were kneeling and trying to take care of Bird.
“We waited,” Dekker panted. “Long as we could—”
Ben nodded. He didn’t have the breath to tell Dekker he was an ass and it was his damned fault, he wasn’t sure he could get his next gasp. He waved a helpless gesture at Bird, meaning take care of him, fool, do something for him: he couldn’t straighten—while the car shot for the core and the Shepherd said, “We don’t know what’s going to be waiting for us up there. The minute the door’s open, out and hit the handlines. If he can’t hold the line—” A breathless wave of the hand in Bird’s direction. “There’s no way to take him.”
“Screw you!” Dekker said. “We’re taking him.”
“There’s guards on the dock up there!”
“Then screw them too!” Dekker yelled.
“Listen, kid,—”
“Shut up!” Meg yelled, and Ben saw the way Meg was holding Bird—how of a sudden Bird had become weight in her arms and his eyes and his mouth were still open. No, Ben thought; he couldn’t move, just stood there, waiting for Bird to move, bent over with the ache in his gut, until Sal got up and took hold of him and a handhold, because they were approaching the null-zone.
Meg said, between breaths, Bird still locked in her arms, “We got a shuttle at 18, clear down the far end of the mast, dumb shits couldn’t park it closer—going to take us out to a Shepherd ship. They got that carrier coming this way from the shipyard, don’t know if it’s got guns mounted.”
“It’s fast,” the Shepherd said. “Too damn fast.”
Their talk went past Ben’s ears. It ran through his brain, as a set of facts explaining where they were going and that their chances weren’t good. He thought he ought to come up with a better idea, but his brain wasn’t working right—he just felt the lift reach that queasy spot and felt his gut knot up.
Bird wasn’t dead, Bird couldn’t be gone—it didn’t make sense to him. He’d done everything he could and somehow Bird just—went out on them and he didn’t know what to do with him. It wasn’t damned fair, what had happened—he’d carried him, dammit, til his gut was full of knives, and Bird wasn’t friggin’ dead, he couldn’t go like that—
Dekker reached in slow-motion after his arm as the car clanked into the interface. Dekker held on to him until the car stopped and the doors opened. The Shepherd made the first swing from the lift’s safety grip to the mounting bar and hand-over-handed himself toward the line. Meg had let Bird go, and Meg went next—
Nothing else to do, Ben thought, with an anguished glance at Bird drifting there so white and different, among beads of blood, and grabbed the mounting bar and went, fast as he could. Without Bird.
Eerie quiet in the core. The chute was silent. You could hear the line moving in the slot, you could hear the low static hum of the rotation interface. Couldn’t see anything for a moment but the line’s motor housing slipping past them.
He looked back, to be sure it was all real. But Sal and Dekker were reaching for the line, blocking his view of the inside of the car.
Meg was on the line behind the Shepherd, he was three spaces back. They passed the housing out into the open, out where the core spun to a dizzy vanishing point and tricked the eye and an already aching stomach. He held on—just held on, while muscles cramped in the cold.
Past the customs zone. He kept thinking—what if someone had a gun—what if they know where we are? Nothing they could do up here. Nothing but go at the pace of the line. Cold chilled his blood-soaked clothing and turned it stiff. Fingers lost all feeling, eyes teared from the cold, more bitter than he’d ever felt it, and the line moved at the same steady pace, clank, clank, clank—with his teeth chattering and the only thought in his head now just keeping his fingers closed on the hand-grip. Meg had said berth 18. 18 was hell and gone at the end of the mast. Shuttle out to a ship that was going to take Dekker and the rest of them out of here, he guessed, but the only thought that kept replaying, over and over again, was that gun going off, Bird getting hit—
He hadn’t had time to stop the bleeding, dammit. Hadn’t had time—Sal had known where she was going, Sal had known about the shuttle—hadn’t told them, God, he should have told her to go to hell, taken Bird to the Trans, taken him to the hospital—Bird shouldn’t be dead…
It was Trinidad they were passing, now, Way Out mated to her for the trip they weren’t going to take. They’d been so damn close—
Movement caught his eye, against the steady spin of the core, big supply can drifting free—hell! he thought, shocked by the sight, damned dangerous, a thing the size of a skimmer floating along like that with no pusher attached—
He thought—as clearly as he was thinking at all—that’s wrong.
That’s wrong, that is—
The line jolted and stopped.
“Shit!” Sal gasped, loud in that sudden silence, and Dekker thought—we’re not going to get there, it’s not going to work—we’re hanging up here and we can’t reach the shuttle—can’t reach the dismount lines…
“Hand off the line!” Meg yelled of a sudden, juvie lessons, old safety drill. He reached for Sal, caught her hand—saw, all of a sudden, the whole line bucking, a wave coming toward them.
Dekker yelled, “Let go!” and threw everything he had into the chain they made, hand to hand—he threw his whole body into that snap-the-whip twist, aimed as best he could and let go—
A moment of floating free, then, nothing they could do if that line hit them, if they missed the dismount-line—
The wave sang overhead and passed. The Shepherd snagged a dismount line with his foot and hauled them all toward it.
Meg called out, “Center-mast! We can’t make the shuttle, we got our own ship there. Her tanks are charged!”
“Won’t dock!” the Shepherd yelled back. “Won’t mate, dammit!”
“Take what we can fuckin’ get,” Sal yelled. “They’ve turned the line loose, there’s no way we can get there, Sammy, move your butt!”
Fire popped, somewhere, Dekker had learned that sound. “They’re shooting at something,” he called out, following Sal and Ben down the line that connected along the dockage.
Something sang past him. He thought, God, they’re fools, there’s seals where we are and they’re shooting bullets—
Another ricochet—he saw Meg kicked sideways, blood spraying—thought she was going off the line, but her left hand held the line, and Sal caught up and grabbed her jacket. He made a fast catch-up to help both of them, but Meg had caught Sal’s coat with her left hand, blood floating in great dark beads near her other arm. Sal screamed at Ben to get out of her way, get the hatch open.
Ben scrambled along the line and overtook the Shepherd at Trinidad’s entry. Sal took a swing and floated free toward them and Dekker hurled himself after, caught Meg’s arm and got his hand over the bleeding as Ben and the Shepherd grabbed their clothes and hauled them into the open hatch.
“Get it closed!” he gasped, stopping with a shove of his foot on a touch-pad. “Meg,—”
Meg’s own hand shoved his aside, clamped down on the arm. “I got it, I got it,” Meg said between her teeth. “God, just get me a patch—get us the hell out of here! Get us to the shuttle, 18, this guy’ll tell you—”
“We can’t mate with a shuttle-dock!” the Shepherd cried. “We’ve lost it, dammit, all we are is under cover. Aboujib, get com, get contact with the Hamilton, tell them our situation, see if they can talk us out of this—”
“Severely small chance, Sammy.”
Severely small, Meg told herself, couldn’t move her arm for Ben to get a wrap on it, sleeve and all—spurting blood everywhere, real close to going out.
Like Bird.
No fuss, not overmuch pain, just—going out.
“Hang on,” Ben said, and hurt her with the bandage. “Damn it, Meg, pay attention! Hold on to it!”
Grapples banged loose. She thought, Good boy, Dek…
… Bills every damn where on the table, Bird excused himself up to the bar, talked to Mike a minute, Bird about as upset as she’d ever seen him during the days when they were trying to fix that ship. Bird was working himself up to a heart attack. Meanwhile she sat there looking at her fingernails, telling herself she was a fool for staying with this whole crazy idea.
Old anger, she told herself. So the company won another round. So another kid died. A lot of them had died—
She kept hearing the gunfire behind the rattle of glassware. Watching the rab go down. Kids, with shocked looks on their faces. The company cops with no faces, just silver visors that reflected back the smoke and the frightened faces of their victims.
Lawless rab.
Property rights. Company rules.
“We got to fix this,” Bird said the day Dekker came to them. “What they’ve done isn’t fair.” And she thought, sick at her stomach, Dammit, Bird, they’ll kill you…
Trim jets kept firing. She felt the bursts.
The shuttle’s mains kicked in, in the high lonely cold above Earth’s atmosphere, the transition she loved. You knew you were going home, then, the motherwell couldn’t hold you—
Up, not down—
Black for a while. She felt the push of braking, had Sal’s arm around her, the aux boards in front of her, Sal trying to get her belted in. She reached with the arm that didn’t hurt, took the belt and snapped the clip in, solid click. Tested it for a rough ride. She told Sal: “Get yourself belted, Aboujib, I got it, all right…”
Another burst of trim jets. Dek was maneuvering, Ben was fastening his belt for him while the Shepherd—Sammy, Sal called him—was filling in at the com, saying, urgently, “They’re warning us to pull back in. That carrier’s moving in fast. The Hamilton’s powering up now—we can’t make it, there’s no time for them to pick us up—”
Trim jets fired constantly at the rate of one and two a second, this side and that—she had the camera view, a row of docked skimmers blurring in the number two monitor as they skimmed along the mast surface—damn close, there, kid—
Static burst from the general com: the Shepherd had cut B channel in. “AMC Twenty-nine Hamilton, this is FleetCom. You’re in violation of UDC directives. Stand down—”
“Cut that damn thing off!” Ben snarled. “We got enough on our minds.”
“We can’t dock,” the Shepherd yelled. Sal was belting in. Ben was. Acceleration was increasing in hammer blows from the main engines. The mast whipped past faster and faster—
Then nothing. Sudden long shove from the bow stabilizers and the mast swung back in view, retreating now—going for decel—another burst of Trinidad’s mains…
No, she thought—Way Out’s mains… we’re coupled. Double mass.—Are we giving up? Going back? Shuttle’s on the mast, Dek, did we miss it. Don’t get rattled, kid…
Ben said something. Dek said something, and the trim jets fired another long burst, taking the ship—God, felt like a right angle to the station.
God, he’s going after the Hamilton—
Mains again, hard push—pain, from the arm, real pain—
This is interesting, she thought, feeling the accel, figuring vectors. Hell of a ride, Dek,—you tell ’em we’re coming?
Big shove. Dark again. She could hear the beeps from the distance indicators, the higher ready-beeps from systems on standby—she thought: that’s nice, nice sound, that, everything’s optimum config, that sumbitch interface back there worked, didn’t it?
Loud argument, and the whine of the forward bay hydraulics.
“What the fuck are you doing?” a man’s voice shouted. “They’re ready to move, dammit, we’re in their blast pattern—they got a carrier on intercept—”
Sal’s voice, clear and sane: “Shut up, Sammy!”
Thank God, Meg thought, listening for the beeps and tones, easier that than keeping her eyes open. Plenty of information there: bay was open, manipulator arm was working—Sammy was saying, “God, you fool, you damned fool…”
Worth a look. She blinked the blurry monitors clear, saw an irregular surface, slotted with dust-deflectors and bolted-onto with tether stanchions—the arm extending out in front of them, white in the spots, shadowed onto the irregular plating—
“Go for it, go for it!” Sal said, “you got it, Ben!”
Neat touch. Hardly felt it.
Attached. To a tether stanchion. The manipulator grip closed and locked.
“Nice job,” she said. She wasn’t sure anybody heard.
The Shepherd yelled, “Go!”
Acceleration started, built and built.
Better dump those tanks, Dek, better just uncouple Way Out, let her go, and just hope to hell the arm mount holds—no way we can decel off what a Shepherd can put on us, anyway…
Ought to tell the kid. But just hard to get organized—hard to get the mouth to work.
Unstable load. Lot of push on. Pressure built in her arm and deserted her brain.
Going up, guys, going up, long and hard as we can…
Quiet. Couldn’t even hear the fans. But no more g.
Taste of blood.
Explosion—
But they weren’t tumbling. Wasn’t the way it had been. He opened his eyes, got the board in focus in this peaceful drifting—neck was stiff, muscles sprained. He turned his head and saw Ben out cold—the Shepherd beside him, headset drifting loose. If there was sound he couldn’t hear it, except the fans.
Then he remembered shutting down. Remembered Meg—tried to move. There wasn’t a muscle that didn’t hurt. But he unclipped, pushed off and turned, getting to Meg’s position.
Blood made a fine mist. She was white as a ghost and cold when he touched her face. She looked dead.
But tension came back, dead one moment, then unconscious, but there, by some subtle change that wasn’t even movement until the eyelids showed stress. Ben was moving—number 2 boards and the best place, his and Ben’s, to ride out the push.
“She make it?” Ben asked fuzzily.
“Yeah,” Meg mumbled, speaking for herself. At least that was what it sounded like.
“Are we still grappled?”
“I don’t know,” Dekker said. “We seem stable.”
Ben freed himself and drifted over to see to Sal—Sal was coming to. The Shepherd was still out. Dekker reached for the headset, heard faint static and a thin voice before he held it to his ear. “… alive in there?” he heard, and: “I’m hearing voices. Their com is open…”
“Yeah,” he said, pulling the mike into line. “This is miner ship Trinidad. Is this the Hamilton?”
HE wasn’t doing a damn thing,“ Ben said—there was blood all over him and Sal, blood dried on his own hands, Dekker saw, Bird’s, Meg’s, he had no idea. There was too much of it.
“Nothing?” the officer asked.
“Cops had me, dammit, he didn’t need to be there, he wasn’t doing a damn thing, just objected to them grabbing me, and some fool—just—pulled a trigger.”
Dekker stared at the backs of his hands, seeing what he hadn’t been there to see. Seeing Meg in the lift, holding on to Bird.
Sal said, “I saw it. They were arming guys straight off leave, some of them still higher than company corruption: green kids, didn’t know shit what they were doing.”
“It was a soldier.”
“Damn right it was a soldier. Marine. Couldn’t have been twenty.”
The Hamilton’s purser clicked off the recorder. “We’ve got that. We’ll send it before we make our burn.”
Dekker said: “How is the fuel situation?”
“Not optimum,” the purser said.
“Shit.” Sal shook her head. The purser left. Ben didn’t say anything, just got a long breath and clasped his hands between his knees.
It was as much information as they’d gotten. The same information as they’d gotten since they’d come aboard. Hadn’t seen Sammy—Sammy had gone offshift, probably in his own bunk asleep or tranked out if he hadn’t gotten the news yet. Sammy—Ford was his last name—had been fairly well shaken up, hadn’t asked for the position he’d been handed—the situation at the dock had gone to hell, the shuttle crew hadn’t answered, the 8-deck group hadn’t answered, they’d suspected their com was being monitored: Mitch had gone next door to use the restaurant’s phone to get contact with his crew and hadn’t come back, arrested or worse, they still hadn’t found out. Sammy wasn’t flight ops, he was the legal affairs liaison, a Shepherd negotiator, for God’s sake, who’d come aboard R2 to deal with management, if the plan had gone right, if the soldiers hadn’t come in…
Sammy’d done all right, Dekker decided. All right, for a guy who’d probably never gotten his hands dirty. Had to tell Meg when she came to. She’d get a laugh out of it.
Another officer, this one straight past them, where they waited in the tight confines of the medstation. Right into the surgery.
Angry voice beyond the door, an answer of some kind.
“Think they’ve got a hurry-up,” Sal muttered.
More voices. Something about paralysis and another thirty minutes. Voice saying, quite clearly, “… doesn’t do her any good if she’s dead, Hank, we haven’t got your thirty minutes. Get your patient prepped, we’re moving.”
Man came back through the door then, looked at them, said, more quietly, “We’ve got your ship free, we’ve got a positional problem and we’re doing a correction burn, about as fast as the EV-team can get in and I can get up to the bridge. Best we can do. You’ve got belts there. Use them. Staff’s got take-holds.”
Bad, then. Dekker clamped his jaw and reached for the belt housed in the side of the seat as Sal and Ben did the same. The officer was out the door and gone.
“Shit-all,” Ben muttered. His hands were shaking. Sal’s were clenched in her lap.
They were in trouble. No question. Headed into the Well, nobody had to say it. “Positional problem” on a Jupiter-bound vector meant only one thing, and a hurry-up like that meant they were on their own, no beam, just the fuel they had left—which wasn’t a big argument against the Well’s gravity slope.
Way Out’s whole mass had had to go—that had been his decision: save Hamilton the fuel hauling it, keep Trinidad’s manipulator arm from shearing off at the bolts, or maybe taking the bulkhead with it: but that fuel in Trinidad’s tanks had been a big load—big load, on those bolts. He’d made a split-second judgment call, last move he’d made before he’d gone out. Maybe opening that valve had saved their lives. If that bulkhead had gone they’d have decompressed; but an uncalc’ed mass attached to Hamilton, three-quarters of it dumped without warning a few seconds into the burn… hadn’t helped their situation. Computers had recomped. But their center of mass had changed twice in that accel; and when the arm gearing had fractured—they’d had to lase through the tether ring—they must have swung flat against Hamilton’s frame and that would have changed it again. He’d gone out by the time that had happened. Didn’t know how long they’d pushed, but with a warship moving on them, they’d had to give it a clear choice between chasing them or dealing with R2.
Hamilton crew couldn’t be real damn happy with their passengers right now.
The lock hydraulics cycled and stopped. A siren shrieked. A recorded voice said: Take Hold Immediately.
“All hands prepare for course correction burn. Mark. Repeat—”
“The Bitch won’t give em a beam, Sal muttered, teeth chattering as she checked her belt. ”The Bitch is damn well hoping we’ll all take the deep one. Won’t lift a finger.“
“We’re going to be all right,” he said.
“‘Going to be all right,’” Ben said. “‘Going to be all right.’ You know if you weren’t a damn spook Bird’d be alive. Meg wouldn’t be in there. We wouldn’t be where we are. This whole damn mess is your fault.”
“Yeah,” he said, on a deep breath. “I know that.”
“His damn fault, too,” Ben muttered. “They weren’t after him, they didn’t know who the hell he was. He was clear, damn him, he was clear. I don’t know what he did it for.”
Engines fired. Hamilton threw everything she had into her try at skimming the Well.
He thought, I could just have pulled us off and out. Didn’t have to go to the Hamilton. Wasn’t thinking of anything else.
They’d have picked us up. But the shooting would have stopped by then. And we wouldn’t be in this mess. Ben’s right.
“Didn’t make sense,” Ben said. “Damn him, he never did make sense…”
Somebody had started shooting. The police swore they were military rounds, and Crayton’s office wanted that information released immediately.
The statement from Crayton’s office said: . . greatly regrets the loss of life…
Morris Bird was a name Payne fervently wished he’d never heard. Thirty-year veteran, oldest miner in the Belt, involved with Pratt and Marks, and popular on the ’deck—a damn martyr was what they had. Somebody had sprayed BIRD in red paint all along a stretch of 3-deck. BIRD was turning up scratched in paint on 8, and they didn’t need any other word. The hospital was bedding down wounded in the halls, a file named DEKKER was proliferating into places they still hadn’t found and the Shepherd net was broadcasting its own news releases, calling for EC intervention and demanding the resignation of the board and the suspension of martial law.
Now it was vid transmission—a Shepherd captain explaining how the miner ship Trinidad had made a run for the Hamilton—more names he’d heard all too much about. A pilot who’d had his license pulled as impaired. A crew who’d been with Bird when the shooting happened. The story was growing by the minute—acquiring stranger and stranger angles, and N & E couldn’t get ahead of them by any small measures.
…A spokesman for the company has expressed relief at the safe recovery of the Trinidad and all aboard. The same source has strongly condemned the use of deadly force against unarmed demonstrators and promises a thorough…
The door opened. He blinked, looking at rifles, at two blue-uniformed marines. At a third, who followed them in, and said,
“William Payne? This office is under UDC authority, under emergency provisions of the Defense Act, Section 18, Article 2.”
He looked at the rifles, looked at the officer. Tried to think of right procedures. “I need to contact the head office.”
“Go right ahead, Mr. Payne.”
He doubted his safety to do that. He hesitated at picking up the phone, hesitated at pushing the button. “This is Administration I’m calling. Do you want to be sure of that?”
“Check it out wherever you like, Mr. Payne. Your computer will give you an explanation. Go ahead. Access Administration.”
He took a breath, touched keys, windowed up Executive Access.
It said, Earth Company Executive Order…
It said Charter Provision 28, and Defense Act, Section 18, Article 2.
“We have a press release for you, Mr. Payne.”
“Yes, sir,” he said. No questions. No hesitations. He reached for the datacard the officer put on his desk and put it into the comp.
It said: The UDC has assumed control of ASTEX operations. All workers, independent operators and contractors, and all ASTEX employees below management levels will be retained. President Towney is under arrest by civil warrant, charged with misappropriation of funds and tax evasion. Various members of the board are likewise under investigation by the EC. Residents who have information on such cases are directed to deliver that information to the military police, Access 14, on the system.
All residents who report to the UDC office on their decks will have their cards revalidated and will be passed without question or exception under a general amnesty for all non-executive personnel of R2.
The UDC will meet with delegations from the independents, the contractors, and civilian employees to discuss grievances…
“Hell of a mess,” Meg said, propped on pillows in the peculiar kind of g you got in small installations—still lightheaded, but the fingers could move in the cast, she’d tested that.
“Couldn’t tell you from the sheets when they brought you in.” Sal sat down carefully on the edge of the bed, reached out a dark hand and squeezed her good one. Skins brut sure didn’t match right now, Meg thought, seeing that combination, and then thought about Bird, left adrift in that lift-car. Hell of a thing to do. Bird had deserved better than that. But he’d always been a practical sumbitch, where it counted.
Water trickled from the corner of her left eye. Sal wiped it with her thumb.
“Hell,” she said, and tried to put her arm over her eyes, but every joint she owned was sprained. She blinked and drew a couple of breaths. “They get us out of the dive yet?”
Sal didn’t answer right off. Hadn’t, she thought. Welcome back, Kady. We’re still going to die.
Sal said, “We still got a little vector problem. Where’d you hear it?”
“Meds said. Thought I was out. Are we going in?”
Another hesitation. “Say we’re going in a lot slower. They’re having a discussion with the EC right now. Idea is, deploy the sail to half, see if we can get a line-up with the R2-23, just get a little different tack going.”
“That’d be nice.”
“Listen, ice-for-nerves, we got word the military’s taken over—got Towney under arrest—yeah. And the board. They’ll bring the beams up, they damn well have to. They’re talking deal with helldeck right now—they’re asking for Mitch and Persky and some of the guys to come and talk grievances—“
“It’s a trick.”
“They going to put so’jer-boys to picking rocks? Beaucou’ d’ luck, Kady. First tag they try they’ll be finding bits of some ship clear to Saturn.”
“They’ll deal. Maybe even get us our beam. Wouldn’t be surprised. But it won’t change, Aboujib. Won’t change.”
Sal didn’t say anything for a moment. And she was on a dive of her own. Wasn’t fair to Sal. Sal had real vivid nightmares about gravity wells.
She said to Sal, only bit of optimism she could come up with, “Won’t be Towney in charge, anyhow.”
“They’re sending out this EC manager. Meanwhile it’s the so’jers.”
Not good news for the guys on R2. Long time til the new manager got here. Meanwhile they were trying their best not to fall into the Well. She wondered how good their options were. Beams going up again, yeah, if the soldiers hadn’t some damn administrative mess-up that was going to wait on authorizations, or if it wasn’t just convenient to the EC to have them gone. Beside which, if they were talking about a bad line, and they were having to use R2-23, they evidently were in one of those vectors where getting a beam was a sincere bitch. R2-23 was a geosync. Geosyncs at the Well were a neverending problem, always screwed, Shepherds futzed them into line and refueled them with robot tugs, and hauled them out of the radiation intense area and fixed them when they’d gotten screwed beyond the usual—useful position, that particular beam, what odd times its computer wasn’t fried—
“Got two nice-looking guys want to see you,” Sal said, looking seriously fragile right now. Doing her best to be cheerful.
“Shit. I got any makeup on?”
“Forgot to pack,” Sal said, squeezed her shoulder and staggered off to the door—hadn’t got her ship-legs yet.
Neither had the boys. They looked like hell. Scrubbed up, at least. But limping and not walking real well, especially Ben. Good time to be horizontal, she decided, sore as she was—Hamilton was fair-sized, but her g differential still wanted to drop you on your ass, besides which your feet swelled til your body adapted. Went through it all again when you went stationside.
If they ever saw stationside again.
She patted the bedside. “Sit,” she said. They sat down very carefully, one on a side of the footboard.
“Hurt much?” Ben asked. Stupid question.
“I’ve had nicer times in bed. You all right?”
“Fine,” Dekker said. “We’re fine.”
“Yeah,” she said, surveying the bruises. “We’re a set, all right.”
Course correction put them in reach of R2-23, the message from Ops said. That’s their last serious option. Calculations extremely marginal even at this point. Situation with beam goes zero chance at 0828h. We checked out that cap and their fill, and the miner-crafts’ registered mass. Unless they got something from the remaining miner’s tanks, they have nothing left. Cap on Athens indicates zero chance intercept. Dumping the tugs didn’t do it. Athens would put itself in danger. We estimate their continuing on course is only for the negotiators. Our data appended.
Porey tapped the stylus on the desk, called up the figures, considered it, considered a communication from the meeting in the corporate HQ, typed a brief message. Tell their negotiators we’ve calc’ed Athens and the chances on the beam go neg at 0828. Tell them we’d be glad to provide them the figures and we’re standing by our offer.
No time for another cause with the miners. Or the Shepherds.
Good PR. Magnanimity. General amnesty, revalidate the cards, put Towney’s arrest on vid, get the beams up again and get the Hamilton out of its situation.
The minute the Shepherds came to terms.
Breakfast.
Marmalade. Dekker hadn’t tasted it since he was a kid—Ben and Sal never had. Meg said it brought back memories of her smuggling days.
“I used to run this stuff,” Meg said. “Course we’d lose a jar or two now and again.”
Sal made the sign for eavesdroppers, and Dekker felt it in his gut. But Meg said, “Hell, if they got time to worry about us—”
“Kind of sour,” Ben said. “Bitter. Not bad, though.”
“Ben, cher,” Sal said. “Learn to appreciate. Life’s ever-so prettier that way.”
“I appreciate it. It’s bitter. And sour. Isn’t it? What’s the matter with that?”
Meg rolled her eyes.
The door opened. Dekker turned his head.
Officer.
Breakfast stopped.
“Sorry to interrupt you,” the Shepherd said, leaning against the doorframe, arms folded. Afro, one-sided shave job, Shepherd tech insignia and a gold collar-clip on that expensive jacket that meant he was senior-tech-something. “Though you’d appreciate a briefing. We’ve got a rescue coming.”
Dekker replayed that a second. Maybe they all did.
Good news?
“Who?” Meg asked.
“That carrier. Moving like a bat.”
“Shee—” Meg held it.
Dekker thought, God, why? But he didn’t ask. He left that to Meg and Sal, who had the credit here—who weren’t the ones who’d put them in the mess they were in.
“Looks as if we’re getting out of this,” Meg said.
“God,” Ben said after a moment. No yelling and celebrating. You held it that long, doing business as usual as much as possible, and when you got good news you just didn’t know how to take it.
“Where’s the catch?” Sal asked. “They can just overtake and haul us out?”
“Thing was .75 our current v two minutes away from R2. They’re not wasting any time.”
Dekker did rough math in his head, thought—God. And us well onto the slope, as we have to be now—
“They’re talking deal,” the Shepherd said. “Seems the Fleet’s figured out they need us. Seems the Association’s said there’s no deal without the freerunners, they’re hanging on to that point—they’ve axed Towney, that’s certain now. Thought you’d want to know. —Mr. Dekker?”
“Sir.”
“The captain wants to see you.”
Another why? But maybe if they were out of their emergency stand-by… the captain wanted to make a serious point with the resident fool. He shrugged, looked back at Meg and Sal and Ben, with: “I’ll see you—” Meaning that they could think about later, and being alive day after tomorrow.
God, the shakes had gotten him, too—he didn’t figure what he was scared of now—a dressing-down by a Shepherd captain, good enough, he had it coming: or maybe it was suddenly having a future, in which he didn’t know what he was going to be doing hereafter. The Shepherd might take Meg and might take Sal—even Ben turned out to have a claim.
But him?
Credit with the Hamilton might be real scant about now. Trinidad was gone, likewise Way Out—nothing like Trinidad’s velocity when they’d dumped her, but not in R2’s near neighborhood by now, either, and on the same track. If she was catchable at all, the law made her somebody else’s salvage. He had the bank account—but God knew what shape that was in, or what kind of lawsuits might shape up against him—corp-rats were corp-rats, Meg would say, and he had no faith the EC was going to forget him and let him be. Not with people dead and the property damage.
It wasn’t a far walk to Sunderland’s office. The tech-chief showed him in—announced him to a gray-haired, frail-looking man, who offered his hand—not crew-type courtesies, Dekker thought. That in a strange way seemed ominous; Sunderland didn’t look angry, rather worn and worried and, by some strange impression, regretful.
That disturbed him too.
“Mr. Dekker. Coffee?”
“No, sir, thank you. I just had breakfast.”
“Good. you have an appetite—have a seat, there. —I confess mine hasn’t been much the last while.”
He made the chair, sank into it. “I know ‘sorry’ doesn’t cover it. I shouldn’t have dumped the tanks.”
“We wouldn’t have you if you hadn’t; bulkhead wouldn’t have stood it. Tried to tell you to do it. Don’t know if you heard.”
He shook his head. “No, sir.” And thought, Just not enough hands. Not enough time.
“Things were going pretty fast, weren’t they?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Things have been going pretty hot and hard here, too. You know about the ship coming.”
“Yessir.” He felt light-headed—g difference. Sitting down and standing up could do that.
“Took some talking. But I didn’t seriously figure they were going to let us go down. The EC wouldn’t. R2-23 was an option—best we had without the EC’s help, I’m sure you were following that, and a couple of exotic, chancy possibilities that we really didn’t want to get down to, but when they called us this morning and told us the R2-23 computer was down… I had a good idea that ship was going to move. I had a good idea they had it calc’ed down to the fine figures and they were going to carry it live on vid. Clear to Sol. The EC doesn’t want us in the Well. Bad media, Mr. Dekker. Bad media with the miners. They’ve resorbed ASTEX, you’ve heard that, Towney’s dismissed… a lot of changes, a lot of them for the better. We can work with the contractors. We can work with the EC. We can work with the UDC. They know that. They just wanted the best deal they could get.”
The captain called him in to talk politics?
Hell. What’s he getting to.
“We’ve got the numbers on the accident,” Sunderland said. “I don’t know how much you’ve been told…”
“I’m told you’d found her weeks before you reported it.” He’d found that out this morning, from Ben, and it was on its way to making him mad. “You didn’t tell us, you let us go clear into prep, didn’t warn us—”
“Didn’t have any idea how you’d react—whether you could keep it together and do business as usual. Didn’t know, frankly, whether Aboujib was going to jump our way or not. We thought so. But she’s a hair trigger in a situation like this. And we were pushing for all the time we could, to get at records we needed. We knew about the bumping. We knew there was a miner missing. We were already comparing charts and finding discrepancies when Athens found your partner. We knew you were going out—quite frankly, we waited because we were still doing the legal prep. Sam Ford—you met Ford—was down there making sure the t’s were crossed and the i’s were dotted: when you go up against the company in a lawsuit, you’d better not have a loophole. We advised Aboujib, we set everything up for a quiet transfer hours before the thing went out over the com, we were going to get you quietly up to the dock, shuttle you aboard where they couldn’t get at you and get some essential changes out of the company—I’m being altogether honest with you now—while we were helping you pursue your case against the company. Unfortunately—”
“I took a walk.”
“Not that it mattered, I’m afraid, at least in the majority of what happened. We factored in the company’s stupidity—we expected the military to involve themselves, but not— not that an EC order to resorb the company was already lying on FleetCommander’s desk, waiting for any legal excuse it could, frankly, arrange. They were preparing a general audit of the company, to do it under one provision, but there was an emergency clause in the charter, that had to do with the threat to operations; and there is the Defense Act, that would let the military outright seize control if things were falling apart. And they were ready—ready because of the labor situation, ready because they thought the managers might try to destroy records—”
“They did.”
“They tried. We had one piece. There were others. FleetCommander had that carrier fueled. We’d gotten that rumor. We didn’t like what we were hearing. We knew when we did move we’d be dealing with the Fleet on a legal level—we even expected a confrontation at the dock. But not that they’d be as fast as they were and not that they had the legal documents to take control of the company without a time-lagged information exchange with Earth. That was eight to ten hours we turned out not to have. They had their people on R2, they had weapons on their transport, they turned out and they took the dock and our shuttle crew, and when that happened we were in deep trouble. But it has shaken out: we didn’t anticipate dealing with the UDC this fast—but we’ve gotten what we were trying to force: we’re dealing directly with the parent corporation, now, and very anxious defense contractors and the Fleet, all of whom have a budget and absolutely no personnel who can do what we do—efficiently. We can meet their quotas. We. The miners and the Shepherds. And the ’drivers, who have to come into line. Ultimately they have to. That’s where it stands.”
“Morrie Bird’s dead. A lot of people are dead.”
“We regret that. We regret that very sincerely. But we’re not defense experts. We fought with what we had, the best way we knew. People were being killed. The way your partner was killed. You understand? ASTEX was killing miners, killing us—ultimately something would have happened. Something possibly with worse loss of life. With one of the refineries going.”
He believed that, at least. He thought about it. Thought about the system the way it was and didn’t believe the military was going to be better. “Bastards could have pulled us back ten hours ago,” he said. “Are they better than Towney?”
“No. But they’re saner.”
“They let us fall for ten hours—”
“Part of the game, Mr. Dekker. We fall toward the Well at a given acceleration… their negotiation team meanwhile meets with ours, they won’t get the beam tracking system working, the EC is hours time-lagged and not talking to us, and everybody pretends they’re not going to reach a compromise. I’ve been through too many years of this to believe it would go any differently than, ultimately, it did. Hair’s gone gray a long time ago—between the Well and the shit from ASTEX. Last few went this morning til we knew that ship was moving. But we were fairly sure. All along, all of us were fairly sure.”
“Yessir,” he said, in Sunderland’s wait for a reaction. Adrenaline was running high, there was no place to send it. He’d gotten the rules by now. They included not expressing opinions to Shepherd captains. He looked somewhere past Sunderland’s shoulder, seeing Meg and that dockside, and the blood floating there. Seeing Bird, in the lift-car. Ben covered with blood.
“I’d like, for the record, Mr. Dekker, to have your version of what happened out there, with Industry.”
“God, I’ve told it. Doesn’t anybody have the record?”
“Just in brief. For a record ASTEX hasn’t touched.”
That was understandable, at least. He drew a wider breath, leaned back in the chair, recited it all again. “We found a rock, we went for it, the ’driver went too, and we figured he was going to try to beat us to it. And maybe muscle us off if he didn’t. So we wanted a sample on our ship before BM told us to get out. But they didn’t do that. They ran us down.”
“Bumped you.”
“No damn bump. Sir.”
“I know that. I know other details, if you want them.”
“All right. Then what the hell were they doing?”
“Trying to stop an independent from the biggest find in years. Trying to keep the company from a major pay-out— that could have made the difference between profit and loss that quarter—”
“God.”
“What you may not know, or may not have thought about—’drivers keep track of miners—they have all the charts. They are a Base. And you moved, I’m guessing—on your own engines. Maybe you made quite a bit of v, on quite a long run.”
Another piece of memory clicked.
“True?”
He nodded, seeing in his mind all the instruments of a tracking station, a long, long move for a miner, with no request for a beam. Anomaly. Cory’d suspected BM. They hadn’t thought about a ’driver monitoring what they were doing. BM did. But you could move in a sector without saying… if you could do it on your own engines.
Stupid, he thought, the other side of experience. Fatally stupid. But…
“They could have ordered us off. They could have claimed it on optics.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because—because Cory said they might not log it. They might just claim the ’driver had it first.”
“Politics. Politics. They did log it. They gave it a number.”
“Then why didn’t they call us and tell us? We saw them moving. But BM didn’t tell us a damned thing—not ‘They’ve got it,’ not ‘Pull back,’ not—”
“They wanted that ’driver to beat you there. Crayton’s office had stepped in and said they shouldn’t have logged it that way, they should undo it because they hadn’t made a policy decision yet. They’d called Legal Affairs and asked for advice. We can’t reconstruct all of it: the military’s sitting on those records—but what I guess is there was a ’driver damned determined to get there; BM was waffling—trying to figure out how to solve it, finally figuring they were in a situation—nobody believes BM. Nobody’d believe you weren’t screwed. It’d be all over the ’deck at Rl, one opinion in management was afraid it would touch off trouble, another said otherwise—they went ass-backwards into ‘letting the local base handle it’… that’s BM code for the shit’s on the captain. ‘Use your discretion,’ is the way they word it. That means do something illegal.”
He heard the tone of voice, he looked into neutral pale eyes in a lean, aged face and thought: This is a man who’s been put in that position…
“They just hushed it all,” Sunderland said. “They left it to the ’driver. They didn’t make a policy decision. And he was under communication blackout, because that’s the way things go when you’re ‘handling it’ for the company. The consensus was you’d spook and run.”
“They didn’t know my partner.”
“Extraordinary young woman, by what I know. Extraordinarily determined. Did you call it on optics? Did you try that?”
(—we just use the fuel, Cory had said. Trusting BM to get them home.)
“We were close enough we could get an assay sample before they got there. They weren’t talking to us. We figured they’d pull something with the records, so it just didn’t damn well matter. We thought they’d brake, that’d give us the time. And if we had the sample aboard—and our log against theirs of when we moved—we could make a case. We knew—we were sure BM knew what was going on. We didn’t expect they’d run right over us.”
“You understand bumpings? You know the game?”
The man thought he was a fool. There was “poor, stupid kids” in his voice. He set his jaw and said, “I’ve heard. I’d heard then.”
“Usual is a low-v nudge, usually near the Refineries. Like a bad dock. Usually it’s their tenders, just give you a scrape, make you spend time checking damage. But this time you’d beat him. You’d outdone his best speed even with a beam-assist. And his ass was on the line with the company. No time for nudges from his tenders. They didn’t want a sample in your hands. If you had it, they wanted it dumped. Radio silence—from his side. Nothing to get on record. So he kept on course—had it all figured, closest pass he dared, bearing in mind you don’t brake those sumbitches by the seat of your pants. Scare hell out of you. Get you so scared you’d do anything he said. But you moved toward his path, didn’t you? And his Helm hadn’t calc’ed that eventuality.”
“What was I supposed to do?”
“Most would get out of the way.”
“My partner was out there!”
“Some might. Some might run all the way to elsewhere. Maybe just tell BM there’d been an accident. Maybe have a ’driver tender claim a rescue.”
“Hell!” But he’d known—known it wasn’t quite a collision course. He’d known they were trying to shake him, he’d called their bluff—
They’d called his.
“Damn single correction,” he muttered. “All they had to do. Fire the directionals and brake. Hell, he’d already braked off the beam, he was coming in well inside his maneuvering limits. He was as able to stop as I was.”
“Their Helm was Belter. And that’s a class A ship. Automated to the hilt. You understand me? Didn’t even remotely occur to an Institute cut-rate a move like that was a choice—he wouldn’t, so he didn’t have it laid into his computer in advance. Not the directionals. Without it, running on auto—the jets won’t fire if you don’t take the autopilot off. He hit the jets, all right. With the autopilot on. Nothing. Some projection on the ship hit you.”“
“God.”
“I’d have fired him. Damn sure. But there the ’driver was, he’d hit you. Your ship had blown a tank, you’d shot off into R2, his tenders couldn’t catch you without getting a beam, you’d hit the rock as well as taken the scrape that blew the tank—they were in shit up to their necks—and Ms. Salazar was dead in the explosion. We’re sure of that. —Do you want this part? You don’t have to hear it. Your choice.”
“I want to hear anything you know. I’m very used to the idea she’s dead.” But it wasn’t that easy. His hands were shaking. He folded them under his arms and went on listening, thinking: The ship hit her. I did.
Sunderland said: “Captain Manning—that’s the senior captain on the ’driver, was the one who made the decisions at this point. He had one dead. He figured your chances were zero. He had no doubt whatsoever the company was going to black-hole the whole business. And they wouldn’t clear him to chase a ship that wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place. BM wouldn’t want that in the log. He knew he had to get rid of the body himself. So they reported they’d acquired the rock, BM didn’t ask what had happened— Registry wasn’t in the information flow. Your emergency beeper was working. BCOM upper management knew what was going on with the ’driver, so it wasn’t asking questions. Nobody in management was going to ask, and maybe—here, I’m attributing thoughts to Manning that may not have been—but maybe he was worried you could be alive. At any rate he never filed a report that he’d actually hit the ship. There’d been a flash the military could well have picked up—but flashes near ’drivers are ordinary. Your radio was out, just gone—you were traveling near a ’driver fire-path, so you weren’t going to be found for a long time. If any tech reported that signal of yours, I’m betting it just got a real fast silence from upper echelons for the next couple of months. You never called in for a beam, and somebody erased Way Out off the missed-report list. Just—erased it. You were in R2 zone, you weren’t on R2’s list, and nobody was going to put you there, and nobody in R2 was calc’ing your course, except that eventually the ’driver and maybe management knew you’d go into the Well, and that would be that.“
“But why did he send Cory there? What the hell was he doing? What was he trying to prove?”
“My guess? His tenders had gone after Ms. Salazar’s body… he couldn’t call them back from a rescue mission. They knew it had been a bumping; they knew it had all gone very wrong, and Manning wanted them too scared to talk. So he made accomplices of the ’driver crew, the techs, everybody aboard—to scare them into silence; to prove, maybe, if they had any doubt—that the company was going to hush it up.”
He was numb. “So they could’ve fired at the Well. They didn’t have to leave a trace.”
“I’m not saying Manning isn’t crazy. But there’s no love lost between us and the company crews. He was pissed, if you want my opinion, about the job he was sent on, he was pissed at BM, pissed at management, he was upset as hell about the accident and he had no doubt whatsoever the company’d back him against us when we did find the body—just like the bumpings, just like that, bad blood, a way of shedding some of the fallout on us—because we couldn’t prove a damned thing. Even with a body—because there’d be no record. There’d be some story about a ’driver accident. Nothing would get done. It’s been that way since they put company crews on those ships. And the company keeps them out there years at a run. They’re bitter. They’re mad. They’re jealous as hell of our deal with the company. They blame us for the company losses that mean they’d been told they were staying out additional weeks. But they’re not totally crazy. They had absolutely no idea you could possibly survive. It was clerks that handled the distress signal, they’d already said too much to Bird and Pollard before they’d had any higher-ups involved, and my guess is they just decided they might as well bring the ship in, get it off the books— they just didn’t want Bird and Pollard telling how there was some ghost signal out there that BM didn’t know about. War jitters. Nervous Fleet establishment. They decided to go on it, they panicked when they found out you were alive—but do them credit, they didn’t even think of having you killed. In their own eyes they weren’t killers, it really was an accident, and they weren’t going to have you die in hospital or on the ’deck. Too bad for them. Good for us. A lot of people are very grateful to you, Mr. Dekker. —Let me tell you, no matter Cory’s mother’s influence, no matter anything we could do—without you staying alive, without you holding out against the company, there d have been nothing but a body at the Well. Nothing we could prove. Ever. So you did do something. You did win. You’re a hero. You and Morris Bird. People liked him. People truly liked him…”
Hard even to organize his thoughts. Or to talk about Bird. He couldn’t.
“You’re the ultimate survivor, Mr. Dekker. That’s something near magical to Belters—and the rest of us who know what you were up against. But there’s a time—maybe now— to quit while you’re still winning.”
“What do you mean?”
“You have an enemy, one very bad enemy.”
“Manning?”
Sunderland shook his head, hands joined in front of his lips. “Alyce Salazar. She’s not being reasonable. Her daughter’s death—the manner in which she was found—hasn’t helped her state of mind. You’re not behind a corporate barrier any longer. The EC’s already tried to reason with her. She pulled strings to get the UDC to investigate ASTEX, she wanted ASTEX resorbed—simply so she could get at its records, and so she could get at you. In effect, that order was under consideration, stalled in the EC’s top levels, but it was lying on FleetCommand’s desk principally because Alyce Salazar called in every senatorial favor she owned—favors enough to tip the balance, corporately and governmentally. And she wants you on trial, Mr. Dekker. The military’s sitting on the records. It doesn’t want this ASTEX situation blown up again, it doesn’t want a trial, the EC doesn’t want it, but the civil system can’t be stopped that easily. Financial misconduct is the likeliest charge she’ll try for; but she’s trying for criminal negligence.”
It hurt. For some reason it truly hurt, that Cory’s mother was that bitter toward him.
“She doesn’t have to be right, of course. She doesn’t even have to win. The damage will be done. She has the money for the lawyers and she has the influence to get past the EC. They honestly don’t want you in court—for various reasons. They don’t want you arrested, or tried, or talking to senatorial committees—and they don’t want the fallout with the miners and the factory workers and us, at a very strategic facility. But most certainly they don’t want you on a ship headed into the Well—when R2 knows about it. They might come after us. But they damn sure won’t let you take the ride.”
It was going somewhere that didn’t sound good. Same song, his mother had used to say—different verse. He asked, in Sunderland’s momentary silence, “So what are they going to do?”
“Our rescue? That ship that’s coming after us? —They’ll pull us out. Save our collective hides. But you aren’t going back to R2. They want you: the Fleet wants you. That was the sticking point the last ten hours. We tried. We’ve stalled, but they’re moving now. We’ve no other options but them. God knows we can’t run. And if we don’t turn you over, they’ll board—I have that very clear impression. In which case anything we do is a gesture, we’ve risked the ship, and various people can get hurt.”
He had trouble getting his breath. He couldn’t feel his own fingers. “Am I under arrest?”
“They tell me no. The fact is, you’ve been drafted.”
The bottom dropped out of his stomach. “Shit!” he said before he thought who he said it to—and told himself he was a fool, they were pulling him out of the Well, they were rescuing a hundred plus people, he had damn-all reason to object to the service—
—to getting thrown into the belly of a warship and getting blown to hell that way.
“May not be altogether bad. They tell me they’re interested in you for reasons that have nothing to do with the EC. They want you in pilot training.”
“They want me where I won’t talk. They think that’ll get me aboard. I’ll be lucky if they don’t arrange a training accident. A lot of people get killed that way.”
“You’re a suspicious young man, Mr. Dekker.”
“Well, God, I’ve learned to be.”
“And I’m one more smiling bastard. Yes. I am. —And I’m sorry. I don’t like the role I’ve been cast in. I hate like hell what they’re doing. But we don’t have any choice. I risked my crew and my ship getting you away in the first place, because you were that important, I hung on in negotiations as long as I could, and, bluntly put, we’ve gotten as much as we can get, we can’t help you, and it’s time to make a final deal. In some measure I suspect certain offices would rather see all of us dead than you in court: in some negotiations the compromises get too half and half, and sanity can go out the chute. People can get shot trying to protect you. Two ships can go to hell. Literally. You understand what I’m saying?”
He did understand. He thought about the kid who’d helped Meg with the vodka bottles. The fool who’d habitually lost his temper over things he couldn’t even remember the importance of, this side of things. Damned fool, he thought. Damned, dumb fool. I can’t even get mad now. The mess is too complicated, too wide, it just rolls on and over people. Like Bird. Like Meg.
Sunderland said, more gently, “If they’re not on the level, I think you can put them that way, you understand? What they tell me, your reflexes are in the top two percentile— you don’t train that. That’s hardwired. They tell me… the speeds these FTLs operate at… even with computers doing the hands-on ops, the human reaction time has to be there. Mentally and physically. Whole new game, Mr. Dekker. And I’ll tell you another reason they don’t want to antagonize us. The Fleet’s looking at the Shepherd pilots, the Shepherd techs—as a very valuable resource. I’m not eager for it. I’ll do what I’m doing the rest of my life, and it’s what I want to do. But the young ones, a good many of the young ones— may do something different before they’re done.”
He was in flow-through. Sunderland spoke and he believed it because he wanted to believe it. Sunderland stopped speaking, the spell broke, and he told himself Sunderland was a fool or a liar: there were a lot of reasons for the military to want Sunderland to believe that—a very clear reason for Sunderland to want him to believe it.
He said, in the remote chance this man was naive: “I’ll be wherever it is before you. I hope it’s all right.” Hear me, man. Watch me. Watch what happens. It’ll be important to you—”
I don’t trust anyone’s assurances. Maybe Meg’s. But you have to know her angles.
Meg knew a whole lot more than she told Bird. And Sal knew more than she ever told any of us. And Ben’s figured that. That’s why it’s gone cold between them… that’s why, in the shakeout, it’s only partners that count.
Mine’s paid out, now. Done everything I could, Cory…
The interview was over. He got up, Sunderland got up. Sunderland offered his hand. He found the good grace to take it.
Hard adjustment—they hadn’t had problems except the fact they were out of fuel and falling closer and closer to Jupiter, and in consequence of that, the morbid question whether they’d fry in his envelope before they got there or live long enough to hear the ship start compressing around them. Intellectual question, and one Meg had mulled over in the dark corners of her mind—speculation right now hell and away more entertaining that wondering what the soldier-boys were going to do with the company, and what it was going to be like in this future they now had, living on Shepherd charity.
Sal and Ben might be all right—Ben was still subdued, just real quiet—missing Bird and probably asking himself the same question—how to live now that they had a good chance they weren’t going to die.
Point one: something could still go wrong. When you knew you were diving for the big one, hell, you focused on trying things, and you lined up your chances and you took them in order of likeliest to work and fastest to set up. But when you knew you were going to be rescued by somebody else’s decisions and that it was somebody else’s competency or lack of it that was going to pull you out or screw everything up, then you sweated, then you imagined all the ways some fool could lose that chance you had.
Point two: Sal was just real spooky right now—scared, jumpy: Sal had held out against her fancy friends once before when the Shepherds were trying to drive a wedge between them, and Sal had all the feel of it right now, wanting them so hard it was embarrassing to watch it—and Sal was hearing those sons of bitches, she was damn sure of it, saying, Yeah, that’s all real fine, Aboujib, but Kady’s an albatross—Kady’s got problems with the EC, that we’re trying to deal with in future—
—Only thing Kady can do is fly, they’d be saying; and meaning shit-all chance there was of that, with their own pilots having a god complex and seniority out the ass. Might be better to split from Sal, get out of her life, quit screwing up her chances with her distant relatives, and go do mining again—maybe with Ben, who knew?
But, God, it’s going to be interesting times. So’jer rules, more and more. They’ll make sweettalk with the miners til they got a brut solid hold on the situation, then they’ll just chip away at everything they agreed to.
Dek—Dek could come out of this all right; but, God, Dek maybe hadn’t figured what she was hearing from the meds, how he’d gotten notorious, how he was so damn hot an item it was keeping the pressure on the EC to get them out of this—couldn’t drop Dekker into the Well, not like some dumb shit Shepherd crew that got themselves in trouble. Dekker was system-wide famous, in Bird’s way of saying. And that was both a good thing and a bad one, as she could figure—majorly bad, for a kid who’d just got his pieces picked up and didn’t get on well with asses.
Lot of asses wanted to use you if you were famous. Piss one off and he’d knife you in the back. She’d got that lesson down pat.
Good, in that consideration, if the Shepherds kept him on the Hamilton. But she didn’t think they would—kid with no seniority, a lot of rep, and a knife-edge mental balance… coming in on senior pilots with a god-habit. Critical load in a week. And if they put him back on R2, God help him, same thing with the new management.
That left Sol and the EC. And that meant public. And all the shit that went with it.
She was severely worried about Dek. She kept asking herself—while from time to time they were telling each other how wonderful it was they weren’t going to die and all, and Ben and Sal looked more scared right now than they’d been in all this mess—
—asking herself, too, what they were telling Dekker, somewhere on the ship.
Giving him an official briefing on his partner, maybe. Everybody’d been somewhat busy til now; and the heat being off (literally) the senior staff was probably going down its list of next-to-do’s.
Or maybe they were telling him something else altogether.
The door opened. Dek came back quiet and looking upset.
“What was it?” Ben asked, on his feet. (God, she’d strangle him the day she got the cast off.)
But Dekker looked up at Ben the way he’d looked at her when she’d found him on the ship: no anger. Just a lost, confused look.
Maybe for once in his life Ben understood he should urgently shut up now.
But Dekker paid more attention to walking from the door to the end of the bed—getting his legs fairly well, she thought, better than she was, the little they let her up.
He said, “Got an explanation, at least. Pretty much what we guessed, about Cory. And it’s solid, about the ship on its way. We’re all right.”
“You all right?” she asked.
He didn’t answer right away. He looked down at the blanket. There was too much quiet in the room, too long. Sal finally edged over and put her hand on his shoulder.
He said, “I’m real tired.”
Meg moved her legs over. “There’s room. Why don’t you just go horizontal awhile? Don’t think. It’s all right, Dek.”
He let out a long slow sigh, leaned over and put his hand on her knee. Just kept it there a while and she didn’t know what to say to him. Sal came and massaged his shoulders. Ben lowered himself into the chair by the bed and said, “So is this ship going to grapple and tow us or just pick us off?”
“Tow,” Dekker said. “As I gather. Thing’s probably not doing all it can, even the way it’s moving.”
“Starship,” Meg said, thinking of a certain flight. “I’ve seen ’em glow when they come in.”
“Freighters,” Sal said. “This thing’s something else.”
An old rab had a chill, thinking about that “something else” next that one pretty memory. Thought—Earth’s blind. Earth’s severely blind.
Feathers on the wind. Colonies won’t come back.
Kids don’t come home again. Not the same, they don’t.
Lot of noise. Dekker had no idea how big the carrier was, but it had a solid grip on them, and they could move around now, get what they needed before they sounded the take-hold and shut the rotation down for the push back to R2.
But before that, they had a personnel line rigged, lock to lock, and he had an escort coming over to pick him up. The Fleet wasn’t taking any chances of a standoff—while they were falling closer and closer to the mag-sphere.
Hadn’t told Meg and Sal. Hadn’t told Ben either. He intended to, on his way to the lock. Meanwhile he wanted just to get his belongings together. The Hamilton had had their personals out of Trinidad before they freed her, Bird’s too: they’d been packed and ready to go, all the food and last-to-go-aboards stowed in Trinidad, that being where they’d enter and where they’d ride out the initial burn. It was all jumbled together now—Hamilton had had no idea who’d owned what—and he found an old paper photo—a group of people, two boys in front, arms around each other, mountains in the background.
Blue-sky. He didn’t know what these people had been to Bird. He thought one of the boys looked a little like Bird. He didn’t know what mountains they were—he knew the Moon better than he knew Earth and its geography—another class he’d cut more than he’d attended.
But he looked at it a long time. He didn’t think it was right to take what was Bird’s—he hadn’t had any claim on him. Ben did. But you could put away a picture in your mind and remember it, years after.
If there were years after.
He took what was his. Put on the bracelet Sal had bought him—he thought that would make her happy. He didn’t know, point of fact, whether they’d let him keep anything. Worth asking, he thought.
“Dek?” Sal asked.
About finished, anyway. He stuffed a shirt into the bag, wiped his hair out of his eyes and caught his balance against the lockers as he stood up.
All of them—including Meg. Sal was holding her on her feet. Ben, behind them.
“Meg, God, I wasn’t going to skip out—the meds’ll have a seizure.”
Meg said, “Thought we’d walk down to the lift with you.” In that tone of voice Meg had that didn’t admit there were other choices. “Hell of a thing, Dek.”
“Yeah, well, I wasn’t going to worry you. —Walk you back to your cabin.”
“Doing just fine, thanks. Going to check these so’jer-boys out. See if we approve the company they’re putting you into.”
He picked up his duffel, put a hand on the wall and came closer. Familiar faces. Faces he’d gotten used to seeing— even Ben. And Meg. Especially Meg.
He leaned over, very carefully kissed her on the cheek. Meg said, “Oh, hell, Dek,” and it wasn’t his cheek she kissed, for as long as gave him time to know Meg wasn’t joking, and that close as he’d been with Cory, it wasn’t what he felt right now.
Sal kissed him too, same way. But not the same. He couldn’t talk.
Ben said, holding up a hand, “If you think I’m going to, you’re wrong.”
You never knew about Ben. Ben saved him losing it. He got a breath, halfway laughed, and picked up the bag again, hearing the lock operating.
“Sounds like my appointment,” he said. “Better move, so they can get us all under way. Risky neighborhood.”
“Yeah, well,” Meg said, following him, on Sal’s arm. Hard breath. “They better take care of you. Letters are a good thing.”
“May be a while,” he said, glancing back as he walked. Not good for the balance. “But I will. Soon as I can. Soon as I have a paycheck. Don’t know whether I’ll be at the shipyard or where. Sol, maybe. I just can’t say.”
Trying to pack every thought he had into a handful of minutes. Thinking about the Fleet’s tight security, and the tighter security around him.
“Maybe if you ask the Shepherds they can find out where I’m stationed. Maybe the captain can get a letter to me, even if I can’t get one out. My mother’s Ingrid Dekker, she’s on maintenance at Sol—write to her, if that doesn’t work. She may know where I am.”
Or maybe not, he thought, as they came into the ops area, where the lift was, to take him up to the lock. Fleet uniform on the blond and two marine MP’s, with pistols. Standing with Sunderland. He hoped they didn’t take him off in handcuffs. Not in front of Meg, please God…
“Mr. Dekker?” the crew-type said—young, insignia he couldn’t read. Outheld hand. He took the offer. Didn’t read any threat. “Name’s Graff. Going to take you across and see you signed in.”
Didn’t sound like a threat. It wasn’t handcuffs at least.
Graff said, “This your crew?”
“Meg Kady, Sal Aboujib, Ben Pollard.” He spotted Sam Ford over to the right, Ford with his arm in a sling. “Sam Ford. Ran the com for us.” He wasn’t sure Ford liked the notoriety. Maybe he shouldn’t have opened his mouth. But damn-all the Fleet was going to do about the rest. They were getting the one they’d bargained for, and Graff didn’t look like a note-taker. He shook hands with the captain, waved a small goodbye at his shipmates, took Graff’s signal they were going.
Lift took him and Graff and one guard. That was all that would fit. Graff said, on the way up, “Ops training’s real glad to get its hands on you. Move of yours gave the lieutenant an attack. You didn’t hear that.”
He looked Graff in the face. Saw amusement. Saw the MP biting his lip.
Lift let out at the dock. Cold up here. He stood and shivered, thought then to ask, “They going to let me keep my personals? Or should I leave them?”
“Put them in stowage. Few months, you can get them back.”
The lift was coming up again. It opened.
Ben came out with the other MP.
“Thought we said goodbye,” Dekker said.
“Yeah, well,” Ben said, and said to Graff, “Got room for another one?”
Different kind of ship. ECS5 was her designation—didn’t have a name yet, and wouldn’t, til she was commissioned. Gray and claustrophobic, huge flexing sections on the bridge. Instruments he didn’t understand. Most of it was dark. The crew was minimal, evidently, or the boards weren’t live yet. The personnel ring wasn’t operational—it was acceleration that let them walk the deck, g-plus at that, with the Hamilton’s mass. Graff had said he’d do a walk-around with them.
Real quiet walk-around. It was a working ship. They didn’t belong here. They weren’t under arrest. Graff, Dekker got the idea, was doing a sell-job. “Good program,” Graff said, about flight training. “They don’t want you to come in with a lot of experience—new tech. Whole new kind of ship. Can’t talk about it. Can’t talk about it covers a lot we deal with.”
He didn’t know what he thought. The machine around him wasn’t anything he’d even seen photos of.
Wasn’t the only thing that puzzled him. He said to Ben, while Graff was talking to one of the techs, “Are you sure what you’re doing?”
Ben gave one of his shrugs. Ben looked pale in the dark, in the light off the monitors. Sweating a little and it wasn’t warm in here. “No way to get ahead. You lost the ship, Dek-boy. Debt up to our necks… but a man with my background—there’s a real chance in this stuff. Military’s where the edge is, the way R2’s going now. Fleet’s the way up, you remember I said it. There’s an After to this war.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“Officer before I’m done. Brass pin and all. Damn right, Dek-boy. You remember you know me. You fly ’em and I’ll be sitting in some safe office in Sol HQ telling ’em how to do it. Odds on it?”
“Out of your mind,” Dekker repeated under his breath; and looked around him at things he wanted to understand, thinking, he couldn’t help it: God, Cory should have seen this…
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