Hellburner (19 page)

“You fly it?”

A memory chased through his nerves, oxygen high and an adrenaline rush, hyper-focused—

“Yeah,” he said, voice gone shaky with memory. “Yeah. Mostly the sims. But twice in the ship.” And he knew why he wasn’t going to take a Medical. Better to burn, Meg had said. And he did that. He did burn.

Door opened. “Mustard or ketchup?” Sal’s voice. “Got one each way....”

“Mustard,” he said, grasping after mundane sanity. The smell ought to make him sicker than hell, the hospital food hadn’t smelled of grease and he’d all but heaved eating it. But maybe it was the company: maybe it was the smell that conjured the cafeteria and the sounds and shoptalk over coffee: he suddenly wanted the burger. He took a real chance with his stomach and his head and hitched his shoulders around against the wall so he could sit up to eat, and handle the milkshake. A sugar hit, carbohydrates and salt, a guaranteed messhall greaseburger with dill pickles, chili sauce, tomatoes and mustard—

“How can you eat that?” Ben asked. “God!”

Meg said, “Shut up, Ben,” and took the ketchup burger herself.

Earth system, Meg had to be, then. Rab, rad, and, Meg had said it once, falling behind the wave of change on Earth: go out into the Belt and you stepped back a century at least—old equipment, a hodgepodge of antique fads and fashion—rab-rad gone to Shepherd flash and miner Attitude. But Meg was old genuine rab, he believed it, the rab they’d gunned down at the Company doors when he was a kid. So Meg had come home to hamburgers and ideas she was so far out of the current of, he hurt for her. And he was scared for her.

Damn right she was a pilot. The Fleet was raking up all the recruits they could beg or bribe away from the Shepherds, and they’d evidently made her an offer, given her her hours—a fool friend, an almost-lover near young enough to be her son, cracked up in hospital, needn’t have been any part of it. Couldn’t go by what Meg said. Couldn’t. She had a lot of virtues, but strict accounts wasn’t one of them. It was enough she’d come to the hospital to get him. It was enough she’d stand there and risk arrest and losing everything to get him out. Meg was like that. Might go, might stay. But if she stayed—

if she stayed—

He got most of the hamburger down. He got down half the shake and half the fries. He sat there in a room with Ben and Sal talking about computers and the UDC, and Meg wolfing down the first hamburger she must have had in years, and looking not a bit changed—a few more lines around the eyes, maybe. And when he had to put the rest of his shake aside, he shut his eyes for just a moment and sat there, and thought about Cory. He thought about Bird, and the Belt. He thought he was there for the moment, but it wasn’t a serious drift, just remembering. Safe.

Want to break his damn neck, Ben thought. Skuz ate the mess and went out cold, no wonder. Poor dead cow. Fish weren’t intelligent. Thank you.

Sal leaned on his arm and whispered a thoroughly indecent proposal, which reminded him what he hadn’t gotten in the last year, what with the course work and the computer time and all—a proposal that didn’t make a man think all that clearly about the value of his life and the necessity of getting out of this hellhole ...

“Yeah,” he said thickly, directing thoughts to getting his ass out of here and snagging Sal into the TI—and down to Stockholm. Sal was damned good. In several senses. “Yeah. —Meg, hate to leave you with the skuz there, —d’ you mind sitting on him?”

“Any way he can make it,” Meg said smugly. “Us freefallers are adaptable—how’s yourself, Ben?”

He was out of practice. Polite society did that. He actually felt his face warm. “Hell, ask Sal in a while.”

Sal hooked her arm in his and said, “Details later. Serious interpersonal relations. —You got a notion where, mate?”

“Whole damn room to ourselves,” he said. And elbowed the door open.

Dek said, “You want to dispose that?” and handed Meg the remnant of the milkshake. She went to the bath to dump it and came back to find Dek on his feet rummaging a locker—his, she figured, and hoped he wasn’t thinking of getting dressed. Her own back ached with the g-shift off the shuttle—she’d gotten soft, living on the Hamilton’s c-forced decks. It was the little muscles that hurt, the ones you used pulling your body around in freefall, a lot of them in unusual places, and she seriously didn’t want to face the guys outside....

“You’re not going to walk,” she said; he ignored the question, lifted a stack of folders in the top of the locker and said, sounding upset, “The tape’s gone.”

“What tape?”

“Sim tape. I guess they took it back to library. Damn sure they’ve been through here.”

“They?”

“MPs. Crash investigators. Whatever.”

“They already had the hearing, Dek. VIPs left this morning.”

He was looking white. He leaned one-handed against the locker frame and looked at nowhere. “I’m tracking, Meg.”

Meaning quit treating him like a spacecase. Joli jeune rab, face like a painted angel and a body language that said Screw you—in any sense you wanted to take it.

A lot like herself, truth was. But there had to come a moment in a lifetime when a person looked in the mirror and knew age had happened; and Dek was her mirror—that body and that face that carried all its worry-lines in muscle, not engraved permanently beside the mouth or around the eyes. Age had sneaked up on her; and Dek’s mama wasn’t older, she’d bet on it. So might be he didn’t want any forty-year-old woman putting the push on him. With his looks he’d have his pick of anybody out there, and probably had had, all his life—probably had damned well enough of everybody who saw him wanting him, and no few laying uninvited hands on him—pretty guy had that problem no less than anybody else; maybe more, because he was supposed to like it.

So back off the kid, Magritte Kady, and shut the hell up— he’s tired, he’s probably sick to death of being hit on, probably thinking hard how to finesse a middle-aged woman out of his bed tonight; and not doing real well with the words, is he?

Dek didn’t say anything. He wandered into the bath, ran water, came out again with his face and the front of his hair wet, and looked at her with eyes like a lost, battered kid’s.

She said, “Nothing comes with the package. I came here to haul your ass out. Not laying claim to it by any right. Isn’t as if I didn’t get something—I got back to inner system, didn’t I? So no debts. I owed you.”

Disturbed him, that. She saw the frown. He said, “How’s title arm?”

Half-thinking, she rotated the hand, lifted the arm. “Works.”

“Reflexes?”

She shrugged, moved the thumb that was a little stiff. “Age is, jeune rab. It does hit us all.”

“K?u aren’t old, Meg.”

Gallant jeune fils, too. She didn’t let the face react. Just the gut felt pain. She told it shut up and laid out the truth.

“Still not saying I should have been at the controls, on my best day. You pulled our asses out of a bad one, Dek, you got what I never had: if you want me on your team, all right, I’ll back you; or if you want me or Sal off it, you say mat too, right now, plain as plain, because I owe it to Sal. I’m forty and counting, arm isn’t what it used to be and it won’t be again. Sal’s young but she’s got experience to collect. That’s what you get. Can’t lie to you. No good doing that....”

He came closer. Looking into his face was a send-off; looking into his eyes was the deep dive, gravity well, painful as slow compression. His face went out of focus as he leaned and kissed her on the cheek—deeper hurt, that. But the jeune fils didn’t, couldn’t know....

“Call it even,” he said, then, “Paid is paid,” —but his hands traveled down and behind her. Came a light kiss on the mouth that shook a forty-year-old’s good sense. Another one that—

God.

“Don’t do that,” she said shakily, when she had a breath, and meant to crack some half-witted joke about their relative ages, but he said, “Bed, Meg,” and pulled her down on the bunk with him.

Not real copacetic, no, the jeune fils had far more ideas than substance left, but clothes and covers went one way and the other, boots mumped out from under the sheets, and a bunk that wasn’t designed for two meant real caution about putting an elbow into his sore spots. She did. But he said never mind, hell with the ribs, he didn’t care, if he was hallucinating he didn’t want to wake up, she could fly him to hell and gone, he’d take the nip—

Didn’t care. That was the operative word, that was the danger word she was hearing from him—but she didn’t know what to say on the instant but to punch him on the leg and say, “I’m damn well here, jeune rab. Shut up.”

Struck him funny, somehow. Didn’t recall as she’d ever seen him laugh like that, and there wasn’t much healthy about it; but he sort of snuggled down then, hugging her close, said, “Anything you want, Meg, whatever you like,” and started drifting out, little at a time.

Murmured, finally, “Cory, —“ But she didn’t take offense. Man’d busted his ass trying to save Cory Salazar, done everything for his partner a man could do and then some, and what would you want in a man—that he’d forget, now, and switch Cory off like a light?

Not any partner she’d ever give a damn for.

So she ruffled his hair, said, “Hush, it’s Meg,” and he said, with his eyes shut, “Meg, for God’s sake get out, go back, don’t get mixed up in this, dammit, you had a berth—“

“Yeah. They were going to make me senior captain. You got my knee pinned, you want to move over, Dek?”

Bed with Aboujib was a long, long experience. You didn’t get away easy—technique, Sal called it; and he didn’t know—he was here, where the competition back at TI couldn’t eavesdrop; and Sal wasn’t a critic, Sal just took what was—Sal was all over you and kink as hell, maybe. You couldn’t be ice with Sal, maybe that was why he was thinking suddenly, amid his attentions to Sal, that he truly didn’t want Stockholm to see this side of Ben Pollard— that wasn’t real sincerely in his right mind, feeling as he did for the moment that he’d actually missed R2’s sleaze and neon, that he’d missed Mike Arezzo’s synth-egg breakfasts and the noise of helldeck—

Stockholm was a VR image, Stockholm was special effects, there wasn’t an Earth and you couldn’t get to it, the Company only made it up to explain the universe—got its Earth-luxuries out of fancy tanks, it was all synth for all he knew, what the hell difference whether it was a cow or a tank culture, he wasn’t going to eat what had blood running through it—hell, Earth was full of eetees no less than Pell, and what was Ben Pollard doing trying to fit in with people who ate hamburgers and ran a department that bought a damned EIDAT?

Ben Pollard was trying to stay alive and stay out of the war, that was what he’d been doing. Ben Pollard was back on helldeck, the bubble had burst, and what turned up but Sal Aboujib, the Fleet’s own damnable doing, screw the bastard who was responsible for this—

Hell, when it came down to it, Dekker was responsible for it, it didn’t matter the UDC and the Fleet had gotten their shot in, Dekker could reach out from the hereafter and screw his life up with one little touch, the way he’d screwed Cory Salazar’s—way he’d screwed the program up—

Off chance that part wasn’t his fault, but you didn’t protect yourself by figuring a mess of this magnitude that Dekker just happened to be in the middle of—didn’t have Dekker’s fingerprints all over it. Wasn’t mat the guy necessarily did anything, he didn’t have to do it, he just was. Like gravity and infall, things went wrong in his vicinity... .

Sal cut off his air, and lights went off a while. When he came down he was halfway tranquil, catching his bream, and said—it still bothered him: “You know, you could’ve written once.”

Sal didn’t answer that one right off. She came over on top of him and made a cage out of her elbows beside his head. Her braids hit him in the face. Her lips brushed his nose.

“That’s no answer.”

“Didn’t figure you wanted one,” Sal said.

Fair answer, one he hadn’t thought of. Fact was, when he was trying to settle in with inner-system pets and sorting the threats from the bottom-enders he hadn’t had but a few twinges of regret for helldeck—tried to clean the Belt out of his language, tried not to dream about it, just wanted to see those clean green numbers in his head, different life, Aboujib. Different aims... .

So he didn’t answer that. He just said, “Here’s seriously screwed. Dekker’s involved. Thought you had better sense. Thought Meg had. I can understand her, maybe, got to be hell getting seniority out there, but you’re Shepherd, you got the connections, you didn’t have to dump and come—“

Sal slid down, slid over, rolled onto one elbow, all shadow, braid-clips a-wink in the dim light. Eyes eclipsed and looked at him again.

“Weren’t treating her right, Ben. She took it. But, tell the truth, she wasn’t seriously happy on the Hamilton.”

“Personalities?”

Sal traced something with a long fingernail on the sheet between them. Second eclipse. And glanced up. “Could say. Guys put the push on her. Guys said—“ Shift of the eyes toward the door and a lowered voice. “Said it was damned good she’d got shot, it put Dek at the controls....”

“Shit.”

Sal shrugged. “Probably true. She says it is. But that’s the Attitude, you understand? She took the jokers. She took the shit. But they said she’d got an affinity for gravity wells, didn’t want her flying in Jupiter’s pull—big joke, right?”