Cash leaned forwards, slick with sweat from head to foot, hands caught between his knees, fingers laced tight. He was quivering all over, like a machine about to tear itself apart.
Another window popped open: the gamma-ray laser was charging up. And then everything went crazy. Everything but the visual feed died. Connections with proxies, the gamma-ray laser system, radar, flight control, everything. The visual feed yawed wildly, pitching down towards the ring plane, long arcs of dust and ice fragments smashing up, resolving detail, and then the slate flashed white, game over.
The colonel leaned back, studying him. Beside him, the civilian tech sat masked by his spex, monitoring the spark and flicker of Cash’s thoughts.
Cash clawed at the MRI cap, ripped it from his scalp, crushed it in his hands. He felt hollow and sick. There was blood in his mouth: he’d half chewed through the inside of his cheek.
‘I never before saw that,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where you got it, but it’s nothing to do with me.’
The colonel said, ‘Do you know a man by the name of Loc Ifrahim?’
Cash blinked, brought up short.
‘A diplomat,’ the colonel said.
Cash shook his head.
‘You have never met him.’
‘If I did, I can’t remember. What happened to the ship that was chasing that tug? It looked as if it was hit by some kind of electronic warfare.’
‘It refused to pull out of the attack that it was making on the tug, so it was neutralised. Loc Ifrahim. The name means nothing to you?’
‘I don’t remember meeting him.’ Cash was wondering if this was someone who’d got him in trouble. Someone he had crossed, or disobeyed. Wondering what it had to do with the aborted attack on the tug.
The colonel said, ‘You don’t remember a lot of things, Captain. Let’s go over this again.’
No one came for Cash the next day. The door of his hotel room was locked from the outside. A guard brought in his meals. Half the functions of the memo space were blocked, but he could watch TV. The government channel (all the channels were government channels: this was the official government channel) had a brief item about General Arvam Peixoto returning to Earth, including about two seconds showing the great man in a wheelchair, his face uptilted as he shook hands with an officer. Cash watched and rewatched it, feeling sick. It was obvious that he was being set up to take the general down. The general had made him a hero. A figurehead for the Quiet War. But according to the colonel, Cash hadn’t been killed out at Phoebe; he’d somehow survived and turned rogue, disobeying direct orders . . .
No one came for him the next day, either. The day after that, he was eating breakfast when the door opened and a grandfatherly officer in Air Defence blues came in and introduced himself as Lieutenant Colonel Marx Vermelho, Cash’s counsel.
‘I didn’t know I needed a lawyer. Have I been arrested?’
Cash was still maintaining his calm. He didn’t have any control over what was happening, and so far no one had told him why he was here, so he was going with the flow.
‘I’m not your lawyer, son,’ the lieutenant colonel said. He was a handsome old dude with dark brown skin and white hair clipped short around a horseshoe of bare scalp. ‘I’m your counsel. Here to help you prepare for your appearance in front of the Senate Subcommittee for Extraterrestrial Affairs. How’s that coffee? No, don’t you get up. I’ll pour myself a cup, and then we can take a look at your statement.’
It was a brisk resumé of the story that the OSS colonel had told Cash in the interview room. It described the action at Phoebe, and stated that Cash’s singleship had been damaged when it had been struck by debris from an enemy drone, but it had managed to repair itself and Cash had plotted a course back to the inner part of the Saturn System and selected a target. He had directly disobeyed orders to disengage, and his singleship had been shut down. It had ploughed through the plane of the rings, and that had been when it had taken a second hit. A speck of basalt had smashed through its nose and shattered into dozens of white-hot fragments. Most had harmlessly expended their energy in the temperfoam insulation that packed the voids in the singleship’s interior, but one had struck Cash’s virtual-reality visor and drilled a path through his brain.
Cash said that he’d never been anywhere near the rings. He’d been hit by a fragment of a drone. It had killed his ship. Killed him. Lieutenant Colonel Vermelho shook his head and thumbed the corner of his slate, flipping past the statement to a photograph of what looked like a miniature moon, dark and knubbly and pocked with craters.
‘That’s what did the damage,’ the lieutenant colonel said. ‘A forensic team picked it out of the inner casing of your singleship’s lifesystem. It’s basalt, son. Pyroxene doped with iron and nickel. Saturn’s rings are mostly ice, but there are rocky fragments dispersed all the way through them, and this is a tiny piece of one of those fragments.’
Cash felt cold, felt his skin trying to contract all over his body. Everything in the hotel room was bright and dead. The blue sky outside the tall windows as remote as Heaven.
Lieutenant Colonel Vermelho studied Cash with a kindly look, saying, ‘I know how you feel. I do. But you have to accept that what you think is the truth is only half the truth.’
‘This is about General Peixoto. You want to take him down, and you’re using me to do it.’
‘I want you to tell the truth.’
‘You want me to pretend that I remember things that I don’t remember.’
‘No, son. That isn’t how it’s going to work at all. I don’t want you to lie. I want you to tell the truth. But before you do, I want you to understand and accept that you were set up. That you were lied to. The general and his people needed a hero, and you fitted the mould exactly - aside from a troubling little episode where you disobeyed orders and got yourself killed. So they filed off that part of your story and concentrated on the part that made you seem like a war hero. And as far as we’re concerned, that’s what you are. You were flying a ship that had been badly crippled, but you were still doing your damnedest to go after a legitimate target, and you had no way of knowing that the order to abort your attack was genuine. You did what you had to do, in the heat of battle.
‘But, son, you have to come to terms with the fact that you were used. General Peixoto and his people used you. They covered up the truth for their own purposes. Their forensic team recovered the fleck of basalt that killed you, and they kept the black box from your singleship, too. They knew what really happened, and they covered it up because it was inconvenient. You may not remember going after that Outer tug and being switched off, but I can assure you that that is exactly what happened.’
‘And if I don’t?’
‘You aren’t in a position to make a deal, son. This is airtight. We can do it with or without your cooperation. And if you don’t cooperate, we’ll have to believe that you were part of the conspiracy. That you went along with it willingly. But if you do the right thing and stand up in front of the subcommittee and make your statement, then you’ll be treated leniently. The conspiracy charges will be dropped. You’ll be a free man. So, how about we go over this again,’ Lieutenant Colonel Vermelho said, flipping his slate back to the statement, ‘and make sure you understand everything.’
They went over it again. And again. Two days later, Cash stood up in front of the Senate Subcommittee for Extraterrestrial Affairs and gave his sworn statement. He managed to answer the questions put to him by one of the senators, all rehearsed, all pointing towards a grand conspiracy involving the mysterious Outer tug. Afterwards, he banged straight into the nearest bathroom and threw up. Lieutenant Colonel Vermelho took him back to the hotel, ordered a bottle of brandy from room service and drank a glass with Cash and told him that he would have to stay in Brasília for the next week or so, ready to answer any supplementary questions that the subcommittee might have.
Cash waited three days. He drank the rest of the brandy the first night, and in the morning ordered up a bottle of whiskey and started in on that. He wanted to stay numb. He didn’t want to think about what he’d done, what had been done to him. The morning of the third day, two OSS troopers roused him from his bed, stuck him under a cold shower until he yelled uncle, dressed and shaved him, and escorted him to a transport plane that flew him back to Monterey. General Arvam Peixoto was dead. After he had been formally charged with war crimes that included the unnecessary killing of civilians during the battle for Paris and failure to rescue the crews of disabled Outer ships immediately after the end of the war, he’d been released into the care of a senior member of his family. And the very same day had shot himself in the head with his service revolver.
Two weeks later, Cash was brought in front of a court-martial that lasted just twenty minutes. He was stripped of his medals and rank and given a dishonourable discharge. He drifted north from city to city along the Gulf Coast to Texas, fell in with a gang who smuggled antibiotics, weapons and equipment liberated from Reclamation and Reconstruction Corps stores. Cash and another ex-Air Defence pilot took turns flying the gang’s plane, a little single-prop job with an alcohol-burning motor, all around the edge of the Great Desert. He was drinking pretty hard, cutting back when he was on the job, cutting loose when he wasn’t.
One day he was in a cave-like cantina in a flyblown town north of the ruins of Wichita. Sitting at the plank bar and working on a bottle of red whiskey. Outside, the sky was yellow with dust lofted from the badlands of the Great Desert. A hot wind blew billows of dust down an ancient highway, past a broken string of flat-fronted buildings patched together from salvaged lumber and standing amongst empty lots like broken teeth. Plastic sheeting over the cantina’s single window billowed and snapped. Dust whirled in at the open doorway and hissed across the stamped-dirt floor. Dust was a hot itch under Cash’s shirt, in his hair. He’d grown out his hair, kept it back from his eyes with a bandanna. He was half-watching the screen up in the corner, the rolling news coming around again to a report about a raid on some nest of rebel scientists in the Antarctic, when someone sat beside him and said, ‘Been a while, cousin.’
Cash turned, started to say he wasn’t anyone’s cousin, and saw that the man, tall and rangy in the green shirt and blue jeans of the R&R Corps, was Billy Dupree. His second cousin and his best friend, back when they’d been kids in Bastrop. Smiling at him, saying, ‘So, you been doing anything ’sides growing out your hair?’
They burst into laughter at the same moment, grabbed each other, pounded each other’s back. Billy asked the barkeep for a glass and poured himself a shot of Cash’s whiskey and toasted him with it and knocked it back and poured himself another. Cash asked Billy what he was doing out here in the asshole of Hell, and Billy reckoned he might ask Cash the same thing.
‘Oh, I’m waiting on some business. Looks like you got yourself enlisted.’
‘And I heard they turned you into some kind of superman when you were out there flying those space planes.’
‘Well, I’m grounded now,’ Cash said and held up his right hand, palm flat. ‘See that?’
‘Looks steady as a rock to me.’
‘Yeah, but you should see it when I’m sober.’ They drank and played catch-up. Cash had last seen Billy when his mother had died, carried away by a massive heart attack in her sleep, Christ, more than ten years ago. Cash had been flying air-support missions for General Arvam Peixoto’s campaign against bandits in and around the ruins of Chicago. He’d been granted compassionate leave, hitched a ride in a Tapir L-4 to Atlanta, flown from Atlanta to Bastrop in a creaky old R&R Corps turboprop, attended the funeral in his dress blues, and returned to Chicago the next day.
He had a pretty good idea why his cousin had come looking for him now, and he also knew that Billy would get around to it in his own good time. Meanwhile, he was happy to ramble on about the good old days, talk about what had happened to the other kids they’d run with and the characters who’d hung out at the gym. He told Billy that he wasn’t unhappy with his work. The hours weren’t regular and neither was the pay, but he got to travel all over, see all kinds of places. ‘I was married for about a month, in Chihuahua. Hell, I believe I might still be married. We found out we weren’t suited to each other so quick we split without bothering with the formalities. Only time I settled down. Now I’m either on the road or in the air.’
Billy told Cash that he’d married a while back, had a son three years old.
‘Are you really in the R&R Corps?’
‘I really am.’
‘So where are you stationed? Out here?’
‘Not hardly. No, I’m in the transport division, stationed back home in good old Bastrop. Me and Uncle Howard and a few others, we signed up a while back.’
‘Transport as in flying?’
‘Some. Also road trains.’
‘This has to be some scam of Uncle Howard’s,’ Cash said.
Billy studied Cash. There were deep creases either side of his pale blue eyes, salt in the outlaw moustache that lapped his mouth. They’d grown up a fair bit since they’d hung out together on the block, wasting hours watching the daily street carnival, trapping racoons for the five centavos each pelt brought, running errands for the guys who hung out at their grand-aunt’s boxing gym. They’d sparred after hours any number of times on the taut patched canvas of the ring, Billy, with his long reach and sharp quick jabs and hooks, generally getting the better of Cash. He was smarter than Cash too, but he didn’t have the application or the jones for maths that had given Cash escape velocity, sent him to the Moon and beyond, to the Saturn System and the Quiet War.
Billy said now, with a sly sideways smile, ‘I guess you’re wondering how we bumped into each other.’
‘I guess it wasn’t by accident.’
‘Fact of the matter is, we’re always on the lookout for good pilots.’