Hellburner (34 page)

“It’s Porey we have to make a dent in.”

“Good luck with that,” Trace said.

“We can not show up tomorrow. The whole lot of us.”

Dekker shook his head, made a wave of his hand, suddenly struggling to get control of his jaw. “N-no. This is a m-man m-makes ex-examples. Trust me that I kn-know.”

“God, the man’s freezing,” Trace said. “Get him a sheet or something.”

“I kn-know what I’m t-talking about. You don’t pull a st-strike—he’ll p-pick one of you—“ Pauli got past him into his room. But he kept looking at Mitch. “Guy’s a control freak. I m-met him. F-flew out here with him...” A blanket settled around him. He made a stiff, half-successful grab after it. But it did nothing for his chill. He let Pauli pull him back toward the bunk, while Mitch said, “You guys go on. Let’s get his door shut....”

Mitch stayed, and Pauli did, and Jamil and Trace. Dekker sat down on the bed, tucked the blanket around him. Mitch said: “The man’s making an example, all right—he’s going to kill you, you understand that? High team gets the next run. That’s us or that’s you, Dek. You can kill yourself in sims, if one of those girls screws up.”

“They aren’t damn b-bad...”

“Listen, Pollard may know what he’s doing, Pollard had a background, but they hauled these girls in here for no other reason than they were with you in the action out there and they’re somewhat famous in the Belt. They’ve got no place in the program, Fleet’s listening to helldeck gossip, no solid background in hours—“

“They survived.”

“Yeah, they survived whoring their way around helldeck. That’s what they did for a living, Dekker, I don’t know if you heard, but that’s the plain truth.”

He didn’t believe he’d heard that. That was how it got as far as it did. “Screw you, Mitch, you keep your opinions to yourself.”

“All right, all right, they’re friends of yours, I’m sorry. But you came in there new. You ask Pollard where these girls got their credit. With him, with Morrie, with any ship they ever handled... no bad karma for it, but they didn’t make their keep with the runs they made—“

“You stow it, Mitch. I worked with them.”

“You never flew with them. Never knew shit what they could do, and now because they were with you, they got a rep the Fleet takes for granted—‘ ‘

“They passed the Aptitudes, Mitch, the examiners shoved them right into the board sims, you’re telling me any of us sailed through into the sims?”

“Hey. Maybe their brain-tape works. Maybe you can program human beings to act just like a robot—just like the damn AI they tried to hang over our heads. They don’t build one, they make us one. But what happens under fire, Dek? What happens when the answer isn’t in any damn tape, and those girls don’t know it? That’s when it’s going to make a difference....”

“Meg’s the coolest head under fire I ever saw. Meg saved our asses on R2, and you weren’t mere, Mitch, you couldn’t get to us, if you want me to bring that up—“

“Well, you can thank God she caught a bullet, because if Meg Kady had been flying, she might have taken out the Hamilton. Don’t blind yourself, Dek. She was a second-rate miner jock who got caught running contraband—she’s got a helldeck rep and now they’re going to hype her and Aboujib and Pollard on some tekicie tape and put you head to head with us. I don’t want to see you crack up. I don’t want to see those girls hurt. I don’t have a personal grudge against them, I just have a real gut reaction when I see somebody running totally on rep and getting somebody else fuckin’ killed, Dek, and sending this program down the out-chute.”

“Maybe we’ll see,” he said, set his jaw and looked elsewhere, because he didn’t have anything left to say on the subject and he was too tired and too shaken to punch Mitch out. There were things he could say, like firstly, Where were you, Mitch, when we were depending on you? But he didn’t honestly know that answer, he’d been too charitable to ask; and he didn’t want a war with Mitch.

Mitch is a mouth, he told himself, Mitch was born with an Attitude—he wouldn’t deal with me, except I’m the competition, and he has to take me seriously. It’s Shepherd, that’s all it is—Meg’s insystemer and she’s flash and they don’t like her style, that’s the problem—

Jamil said, “Dek, you have to protect yourself. I don’t personally know whether Kady and Aboujib have got it, I think Pollard probably does, but not the way they need to have it now. The examiners didn’t bust them through into the sims because they’re good, they busted them through because they were told to, that’s the truth, Dek, and we’re worried, we’re worried for you, we’re worried for your crew, we’re worried for the reason that we signed up for this program in the first place, because we’re in the center of some serious games, here—we got congresses playing games with a ship we could fly if they’d get the hell off our backs and quit screwing with the way we work—“

“We don’t want to see you killed,” Mitch said. “We don’t want to see anybody else killed. You better find out what’s going on. You better find out what your crew’s capable of—before you put your lives on the line out there, that’s what I’m saying. The lieutenant hasn’t got any power to do anything about anything right now. But he might tell you the truth and he might listen. And he might pass what he knows to the captain—who is the only authority we can think of who might pull the plug on this damned tape—‘ ‘

“It’s what they use Unionside,” Trace said. “That’s where they got the tech. They don’t even know what they’re doing with it, that’s my guess, they just got it, they can’t eome up with a fix on the program, and now they’re going to try this, they’re going to make you the guinea pigs. You’ve got to lay back, Dek. Lay back and lay out and don’t try to take those guys realtime...”

Mitch took Jamil’s arm, hauled him to the door. Trace lingered, just stood there, the only female in the group, with, he suddenly uncharitably surmised, other intentions than argument.

“Go on,” he said, “out.”

“Dek, I know they’re friends of yours, that’s what—“

“Trace. Get the hell out. Now. And turn out the lights.”

She turned out the lights. She left. He fell back on the wreckage of the bedclothes and felt the cold hit his chest and stomach—thought about getting up and putting the bed back in order, but he didn’t, right now, have the fortitude.

He just rolled over in the blanket and tried to fall unconscious, if sleep was out of reach; but images rolled over and over like riot behind his eyes, the argument with Meg about her flying, Graff sitting mere and telling him Get over to Testing, Porey saying, You’re meat, until you prove otherwise.... But the sequencing of events didn’t make sense. They’d brought Meg and Sal here to wake him up, they’d had to start from the Belt directly after the accident, directly after he ended up in hospital—-they’d brought Ben from closer in and Ben had gotten here faster, that was all, but they must have started at the same time.

They’d had the hearing, Graff had said, and they’d wanted him to testify. But he hadn’t. And still Porey had come in to take the program over. And they had tapes. Tapes they’d made off Pete and Elly and Falcone on the mission, leading up to the wreck—

Union tech, then, the same deep-drug tech that they’d sworn once they could beat—but the ship wasn’t up to specs and the program was screwed and they had to keep their funding going, had to keep getting the ships built—

So the Fleet had seized control and they had to have another pony show? They swore to somebody they’d get the program turned around and to do that they had to hold out some brand new tekkie trick that was going to win the war so they couid get the money?

They wanted to try out the tech on unbiased crew—and for that, they hauled in Meg and Sal clear from the Belt, pulled in Edmund Porey and a carrier, blasted away from Sol Station like a bat out of hell an hour after the riot in the messhall landed him and half the program in the brig?

Then Porey had wanted to talk to him, personally, when he hadn’t, that he knew, talked to Mitch, or any of the other recruits in any private interview?

Porey knew him—personally, at least insofar as they’d met during his trip out from the Belt in the first place; Porey had ferried him out from the Belt—it wasn’t impossible that Porey had had his hand on his career long before this ... maybe even suggested him for the program when they enlisted him: he had no idea, but Porey had been in a position to have done that. Maybe that was why the interview in the office, that had gone so badly; maybe Porey was justifiably angry that he’d been in the center of controversy, when Porey had brought him here specifically to keep him out of media attention, because of the Salazar mess—

Then his mother, devoutly noninvolved, got fired—and went after MarsCorp; and peacer groups showed up with lawyers to back her suit?

He lay shivering in his bed, thinking, Why? on the frenetic edge of exhausted sleep. Everything looped back, as if he was the gravity well nothing could escape....

There were so many things that didn’t make sense. There were so many pieces of his life being gathered up and shaken—everything that went wrong from here to Pell seemed to have his name on it, in bright bold caps. Paul F. Dekker.

A guy couldn’t have that kind of luck, no way in hell one stupid miner-jock could just chance to be where carriers moved and officers intervened—

And Graff just happened to care so much he went to all the trouble to collect his friends to rescue him?

Like hell. Like hell, lieutenant, sir.

. “What was I going to say to him?” Graff asked. “Ask these people and they might give you what you want, but dammit, you don’t deal with them like that.”

Demas said, in his null-g unmonitored sanctuary in the heart of the carrier, “Nothing you can do, J-G. No way to stop it even if you’d known in advance. This was decided at much higher levels.”

“Did you know? What do you know?”

Demas shook his head. “I don’t and I didn’t. I would guess there was consultation. I would hope there was consultation of more man Porey with his own captain, but knowing what Mazian decides these days, I have some trepidation on that account. But who knows? Tape-tech works for Union.”

“Not at the cost,” Graff said, and looked left at a sound that in no wise belonged in this place. “Saito, —“

“Medicinal,” Saito said. The bottle. Saito had just uncapped broke five regulations Graff could think of immediately: it was glass, it was private property in an ops area storage, it was liquid, it was alcoholic and it probably hadn’t passed local customs.

It was, however, null-stopped, and Saito sailed it his direction. “You’re not on call. Jean-Baptiste is on the line, we’re still on stand-down. You need your sleep and your morality won’t let you. So join the rest of us and turn it in.”

“So where do you do that? Fleet HQ? There must be a waiting line. It seems a damned busy traffic this year.”

“There’s nothing we can do. No help to the boy, ruining yourself. If we were attacked this instant you’re worthless. Best you know it beyond a doubt.”

He took a sip and made a face at the sting; and in the midst of his indignation, realized flavors still evolving on his tongue, an unfolding sensory sequence, the way Earthly flavors tended to do—nothing simple. Nothing exactly quantifiable. From instant to instant he liked and loathed the taste. He found it significant that the sensory overload could reach even through his present mood to say it was rich, it was expensive, it was—if you could synthesize it—only one of endless variations on which a whole trade flourished— from a gravity well in which Conrad Mazian had been sunk for weeks.

“This place corrupts,” he murmured. “It’s the motherwell of corruption. When did we forget what we came here to prevent?”

“Take another, J-G. Edmund Porey is in charge of the people in charge of the tape. He brought the tape, he brought the applications techs. They’re officially Carina crew.”

“What are we fighting to keep away from? What in hell are we fighting to keep out of Sol System?”

Demas caught the bottle that drifted from his hands, took a sip and sent it on to Saito, third leg of their drift-skewed triangle. Demas said, “I earnestly recommend sleep, J-G. Perhaps a night of thorough debauch—we might manage that. There’s absolutely nothing else we can do.”

“We can help the boy. We can at least do something about his next-of ‘s situation.”

“Technically Ingrid Dekker is not, you know, next-of. Pollard is. Dekker explicitly took her out of mat status...”

“For her safety. He knows the situation. That’s why he didn’t call on her.”

Saito frowned, cradled the bottle in her arms. “I’ve been over and over the Dekker file. There is a remote possibility someone at Sol One leaked the story about Dekker’s accident. The information was at Sol One via FleetCom and one can never assume there was no leak. One hopes not. But it’s remotely possible she might have found out, and she may have learned about Salazar’s proceedings against her son. She might have taken action of her own—but there is that last, troubling letter from the mother to Dekker—in his file....”

“In which she tells him not to communicate? But he disregarded it.” . “He doesn’t know we monitor these things.”

“He should suspect. —You think she may have attacked MarsCorp, in revenge for her son?”

“Difficult. Difficult case. Neither Cory Salazar nor Dekker had a father of record—not an uncommon situation for Mars, much less so for Sol One. Sol’s still very tied to the motherwell. In all senses. Ingrid Dekker had a son. Had she named a father, tests would have established paternity. That man would have had financial and legal liability—under local law.”