Devil to the Belt

CHAPTER 4

THE hearing was set up in A 109, not the biggest of the classrooms—dressed up with tables and a couple of UDC guards with sidearms—to do what, Graff asked himself bitterly, shoot down anybody who’d tell the truth out of turn?

Limited seating, they called it. No public access. That meant the workmen and the mechanics that worked for the EC, the vendors and the man who sold meat pies on 3-deck were barred, and those of them with security clearances still had to pass metal detectors. It meant that any military personnel showed if the committee knew they existed, and sent them passes: that meant ranking officers and the few like himself whose names were on the duty list the hour of the disaster. But there were passes issued for aides and for official representatives of the several services. And that meant the Fleet had Saito and Demas.

And the Shepherd trainees had Mitch and Jamil. They’d taken off the jewelry, taken off the earrings—couldn’t hide Jamil’s tattoos, but Jamil’s single strip of black hair was braided tight against his scalp, and both of them were as regulation as the Shepherds could manage.

There were the various heads of department, maintenance chiefs, the ones who had security clearances. There was a big carrier schematic on one screen, others showing details of the docking ports. And an undetailed model on the table. Just the flat saucer shape. Mania shape, the blue-skyers called it. He’d seen a picture of the sea-dwelling creature and he saw why. Thin in one aspect to present minimum profile to fire or to high-v dust when it needed, broad and flat to accommodate the engines and the crew, and to lie snug against a carrier’s frame.

Black painted model. The real thing was grayer, reflective ceramic. But they didn’t advertise the coating. Thirty crew aboard when, please God, they got past the initial trials, thirty crew, mostly techs, mostly working for the longscanner. Core crew was four. The essential stations. The command personnel. The ones whose interfaces were with the active ship controls and the ones they had to risk in the tests.

The carrier dropped into a star-system and launched the riders—trusting that real space ships, launched like missiles, with more firepower than ability to maneuver at v, could do their job and make a carrier’s presence-pattern a far, far more diffuse element for an enemy’s longscan computers.

And trusting the human mind could keep going for four hours on intermittent hyperfocus at that v with no shields, only a constantly changing VR HUD display and a fire-power adequate to take out what threatened it—if reactions were still hair-triggered after that length of time immersed in virtual space; if human beings still had consistent right reactions to a dopplered infostream of threat and non-threat and every missile launched and potentially launched. A longscan of a fractional c firefight looked like a plaid of intersecting probabilities, overlaid cones or tri-dee fans depending on your traveling viewpoint; and you overran conventional radar, even orders from your carrier all you had was calc, com, and emissions.

Put an Artificial Intelligence above the human in the decision loop? Use a trained pilot for no more than resource to his own Adaptive Assist systems, with no power to override? Like hell. Sir.

He took a seat next to Demas and Saito, he cast a look down the row at Mitch and Jamil, and let the comer of his mouth tighten, surreptitious acknowledgment of their effort at diplomacy.

The committee filed in. Over fifty, Saito had said, and all male. Not quite. But the balance of the genders was certainly tilted. There were a handful of anxious execs from the designers and military contractors, from Bauerkraftwerke, who had designed the rider frame and some of the hardware; Lendler Corp, simulator software; Intellitron, which produced the longscan for both carriers and riders; Terme Aerospatiale, which did the Hellburner engines; and Staatentek, responsible for integrative targeting systems, computers and insystem communications. All of which could be pertinent. Lendler and Intellitron and Terme Aerospatiale were all Earth Company, but God only knew what side they were on. They’d doubtless been talking up the military examiners since last night: there’d been a UDC briefing.

“That’s Bonner,” Saito whispered, indicating a white-haired shave-headed UDC officer. Gen. Patrick Bonner, Graff understood. Tanzer’s direct CO. Ultimate head over R&D, not a friend. And what was he saying to an HI! contractor, both of them smiling and laughing like old friends?

People got to their seats. Bonner gave a speech, long and winding, a tactic, Graff thought, designed to stultify the opposition. Or perhaps his own troops. Not here to fix blame, Bonner said. Here to determine what happened and what caused it.

Introductions. Graff found himself focusing on the walls, on the topographic details of Bonner’s receding hairline, the repeating pattern in the soundproofing, on the nervous fingers of the rep from Bauerkraftwerke, which tapped out a quiet rhythm on the table.

Statement of positions: Bauerkraftwerke insisted there was no structural flaw, that its engineers had reconstructed the accident and there was nothing to do with failure of the frame or the engines. Terme Aerospatiale agreed. Lendler said its simulation software wasn’t at fault. Staatentek, the patent holder of the local AI tetralogic, maintained that the random ordnance software, the communications, the targeting software, had not glitched. Nobody was at fault. Nothing was wrong.

But a redesign in favor of the tetralogic control couldn’t be ruled out.

Bangs and thumps again. “Ben?” Dekker called out. Ben had said he would be there. But he waked up in a corridor, on a gumey, with restraints he didn’t remember deserving. “Ben!”

A nurse patted his shoulder and said, “It’s all right, your friend’s just outside.”

He hated it when the illusions started agreeing with him.

He lay still then, listening to the rattle and clatter. Someone said, from over his head, “We’re going to take you in, now,” and he didn’t know where. He yelled, “Ben! Ben!”

And somebody said, “Better sedate him.”

“No,” he yelled. “No.” And promised them, “You don’t need to.”

“Are you going to be all right?” they asked him.

“Yeah,” he said, and lay there getting his breath. But there was a whine of hydraulics and a clank, and they shoved him into a tube, telling him: “You have to stay absolutely still...”

Like a spinner tube, it was. Like back in the belt, in the ship. He lay still the way they told him, but it got harder and harder to breathe.

Flash of light. Like the sun. He heard a beeping sound that reminded him—that reminded him—

“Elly—Elly, Wilhelmsen, don’t reorient, screw it, screw it, you’re past—”

“He’s panicking,” someone said.

He screamed, at the top of his lungs, “Wilhelmsen, you damned fool—”

Fifteen-minute recess. Break for restrooms and the corridor and the hospitality table.

Mitch moved close enough to say, “They’re dithering, sir.”

Graff said, “Ease down. Not here.”

“They’re saying it can’t be flown. That’s a damn lie.”

“Ease down, Mitch. Nothing we can do out here.” He had Saito at his elbow. He could see Tanzer down the hall with Bonner, in hot and heavy discussion.

Demas came back from the phone in the office. Said: “A word in private.”

Graff said, “Mitch. Be good,” and took Saito with him, farther up the hall. “You get him?”

“Couldn’t get hold of Pollard. Talked to Higgins. The neurosurgeon wanted to run another brain scan. Higgins and Evans agreed. Dekker went off the edge, he’s under sedation. Higgins says he remembers the accident. Nothing further. He may never be able to remember how he got in that pod.”

“Damn.”

“You’ve got to tell it plain, Helm.”

“Break it wide open? We don’t know what the captain wants. We don’t know and if it were safe to use FleetCom he would.”

Saito said, “It can’t be worse. At this point I’d advise going past protocol. Worst we can do is alienate Bonner and a few handpicked legislators who came out here with him. This is a set-up. But it has records. The contractors are here defending their systems. And there may be a few line-straddlers in the senatorial party.”

That was a point. Bonner was already alienated. This was likely a breakaway group of legislators Bonner favored putting in here to hear what Tanzer put together—but the fact that they let him talk at all was either a try at getting something incriminating out of him; or maybe, maybe there were members of the group that wanted more than one view. “God only knows what we’re dealing with. No Pollard, no Dekker. It’s a small hand we’re playing. All right. I’ll tell Mitch. Wraps are off.”

Past lunch and beyond, and Ben paced the waiting room. He’d read all the damned articles available to the reader, he’d become grudgingly informed in the latest in microbiologic engineering, the pros and cons of seasonally adjusted light/ dark cycles and temperature in station environments, the ethics of psychological intervention, and the consequences of weather adjustment in the hurricane season to the North American continent, not to mention five posture checks for low-g workers. He’d occupied himself making changes in a program he had stored on his personal card, he’d been four times at least to Dekker’s room to see if he was out from under sedation—he’d lost count. You could hear the clangor and rattle of lunch trays being collected—they had a damned lot of hurt and sick: people in here, people that had let a welder slip or gotten in the way of a robot loader arm, one guy who’d taken a godawful number of volts closing a hydraulic switch—he heard the gossip in the corridors coming and going, he was saturated with hospital gossip on who was missing what and how the guy with peritonitis was doing today and what was the condition of the limb reattachment in 109?

While the orderlies were having lunch.

Another trip out to Dekker’s room. Can’t wake him, Higgins said. We’ve gotten the blood pressure down now. But he’s tired. He’s just tired—

“I’ve got a shuttle pulling out tonight—tell the lieutenant I’ve done everything I can do. I want to see him. I’ve got to get out of here.”

Higgins said, “He’s involved in a hearing this afternoon. I don’t know if I can reach him. I’ve left two messages with his office.”

“The hell! Doctor, my luggage is still lost, I’m out of money for the damn vending machines—I never got a cafeteria authorization and I’m sick of potato chips—I never asked to come here, Dekker and I never were friends, dammit, I don’t know why I’m his keeper!”

Higgins lent him five. Which wasn’t the answer he wanted, but it was lunch, at least, and he wasn’t going to offend Higgins by turning it down. Supper, he wasn’t even going to think about.

Tanzer’s turn with the mike. Nobody from the Fleet on the panel and no chance, Graff thought, of doing anything about that, except refusing to allow Fleet personnel to testify and trying to make an issue of it—but he was in a Position on that too, being one of the people on the list to testify; and he hoped the sweat didn’t show.

Demas’ advice, Saito’s, Armsmaster Thieu’s, for that matter, who might be called, was unanimous, and that it agreed with his only confirmed that if he was wrong and if he screwed this, the Fleet had to push him out the lock as a peace offering. That was one thing. He understood that kind of assignment.

But the thought that he could screw things beyond recall, offend the wrong senator, say something the media could get hold of and kill the riderships or bring the Fleet under UDC control—either of which would kill any hope of preventing the whole Beyond being sucked into Union’s widening influence—that was the possibility that had his bands sweating and his mind chasing random imaginations throughout Tanzer’s performance: he kept thinking, I’ve got to counter that; and, I’ve got to get that across to the committee, and, God, they’re not going to ask me the right questions.

No way Bonner’s going to let me answer those questions.

The general’s no fool. There’s something he’s got planned, some grenade planted and ticking, only where is it? With Tanzer?

Tanzer was saying: “It’s the task of this facility to evaluate prototype systems and to take them to the design limits. The essential step before we risk human life is advanced, exacting interactive assist simulation. The second step is automated performance testing. And again, the simulations are revised and refined, and procedures and checklists developed in hours of Control Integration Trials, a process with which many of our distinguished panel are intimately familiar. They are also aware that in the world of high-velocity craft we are exceeding human capacities to cope with the infostream. We’ve overrun human reaction time. We’ve long since overrun conventional radar. Hence the neural net AA, which adapts and shapes itself threefold, for the pilot’s past performance, enemy’s past, pilot’s current behaviors—and the longscan technique that extrapolates and displays an object’s probability. We’ve developed dopplered communications and communications techniques to receive information faster than human senses can sort it, computer assemblies to second-guess the pilot on multiple tasks. The faster we go, the more the pilot becomes an integral component of the systems that filter information via his senses and the Adaptive Assists into the ship’s controls. Right now the human is the highest vote in the Hellburner’s neural network; but we’ve long been asking the question at what point the sophistication of the computers to provide the information and the speed and power of the ship to react may finally exceed the engineering limits of the creator— that is, at what point of demand on human capacity to react to data, do we conceive a technically perfect and humanly unflyable machine?”

The questioner, Bonner, said, “Have we done that, in your opinion?”

Tanzer said, “Yes. In my opinion, yes.”

“Go on.”

“The EC militia came here with a design within the capabilities of the shipbuilding industry, and within the skills of its own pilots to operate. And the design for a companion ship they claimed could use off-the-shelf hardware and software—”

Damn him, Graff thought.

“—and serve as a high-velocity weapons platform. It was not, of course, operable as designed. The fleet insists that the unpredictability of human decisions without a tetralogic AI dominating the pilot-neural net interlink is essential to high-v combat. And we have six men in hospital and seventeen dead in the realworld discovery process.”

Hell.

“We’re putting crews into a ship that is in effect a high-v multilogic missile, with the sole advantage that the equipment is theoretically recoverable.”

There had been dead silence in the room. There was a small muttering now. Don’t blow, don’t blow, Graff wished Mitch and Jamil. We get our turn.

The gavel came down.

Tanzer went on: “A pilot with twenty years’ experience and no faults in the sims ran the course successfully for three hours, forty-six minutes and 17.4 seconds. The accident, which you’ve seen repeatedly, took place within seven tenths of a second. In the 17 ^thsecond Wilhelmsen missed one random ordnance target on the approach and reoriented to catch it on the retreat, which he did. At this point telemetry leaves us to guess what passed through his mind— perhaps the recollection he was entering the probability fan of a target in his path. Pulse and respiration has increased markedly over the previous ten minutes. The armscomper and the co-pilot simultaneously indicated alarm as the maneuver started. The armscomper fired off-profile as required and missed. In the next .7 of a second the pilot’s telemetry recorded three muscle twitches in conflicting directions causing the craft to undergo successive shocks, and one extreme reaction which caused the pilot and the crew to lose consciousness and sent the ship into a tumble.

“Possibly—Dr. Helmond Weiss will provide more specifics in his testimony—but possibly prolonged hyperception to a microfocused event like the double miss caused a spatial confusion....”

Pens on Translates took rapid notes. Graff kept his notes in his head. And said to himself, on the memory of his own system entries: Wilhelmsen panicked.

“Seven tenths of a second,” Tanzer said, “from first mistake to the ship entering a fatal motion. 4.8 seconds later it clipped a targeting buoy at .5 light. There is no recoverable wreckage. Our analysis of events rests entirely on telemetry—in which, ironically, the speed makes the microgaps significant data fallouts.”

“Meaning the instruments couldn’t send fast enough.”

“Meaning our data-gathering had two phases: an infosift rapid transmission and a more detailed concurrent total transmission that was running 28 minutes behind the condensed report. Machines can’t transmit that fast. More Important, human neurons don’t fire that fast. We’re using “” human brains to improve a missile’s kill rate at a sustained rate of decision that exceeds human limits. Meaning we can’t think that fast that long. We’ve tried an Assisted handoff to a human co-pilot and it’s not practical. The psychological stress is actually increased by the trade, and performance is critically reduced. Either we put an unexcepted AI override on the observed physical responses that preceded the incident, or we go back to design and put that ship Under a tetralogic AI with the pilot at the interface—as the heart, not the head, of the affair; or, unacceptably, we Outright admit that we don’t give a damn for human life, and we breed human beings to do that job and tape-train the fear and humanity out of them, the way they do in Union Space. There are no other choices.”

Down the corridor to the vending machines, a cheese sandwich and a soft drink. Cheese was edible. The fish wasn’t even to mention. It had something green scattered through it. Ben sat down, unwrapped the sandwich, tore the indestructible packaging on the chips and sipped his drink.

A guy came in, put chits in the machine. God, he didn’t want a couple of orderlies discussing kidney function during his sandwich....

But he caught the haircut and the uniform, took a second look, and found the shave-job staring back at him with sudden sharp attention.

“Pollard?”

The face almost rang bells, but he couldn’t place it. The haircut, pure rab, didn’t agree with the blue fatigues that said military. Civ docker, he thought. Then he thought; Dekker. Shepherd. And had a sudden notion in what packet of memory that face belonged.

“Mason?” he asked.

“Yeah!” the guy said, hands full. “Word is you’re here for Dekker, damn! How is he?”

“Like shit.” He indicated the place opposite him at the table and Mason brought his sandwich and his drink over and sat down. Ben asked, “What are you in for?”

“Therapy.” Mason wiggled the fingers of his right hand. “Gym floor jumped up and got me. —Dekker’s still bad, huh? He say anything?”

“Thinks he’s in the fuckin’ Belt most of the time.” Ben took a bite of cheese sandwich, thought about that shuttle leaving at mainday end, and how there wasn’t another til next week, wondered if there was a shortcut to the memory Graff wanted, and said, “Keeps asking for Bird and Cory Salazar. What in hell happened to him? Anybody know?”

Mason pulled a long face. “Just they pulled him out of a sim-pod bloody and beat all to hell. But we’d lay odds—” Mason looked at him about chest-high and stopped talking in mid-sentence. Mason filled his mouth with sandwich instead.

“—lay odds, what?”

Mason looked at him narrowly while he took time to chew the bite and wash it down with soft drink. “Nothing.”

“What, nothing? What’s that look mean?”

“You here as a friend of Dekker’s? Or officially?”

“Look, I’m a programmer, not a psych. I was minding my own business on Sol One. FSO hauled my ass out here because Dekker named me next-of-kin. Lt. Graff hands me his personals, doesn’t tell me shit else, asks me find out what happened to him, and that’s where I am, trying to find out why he’s lying there seeing ET’s and angels, so I can get back to Sol One before my posting’s gone. What’s that look mean?”

Mason said slowly, “You’re not here on Tanzer’s orders.”

“I don’t know Tanzer. The FSO jerked me over on a hush-up and hurry. Humanitarian leave, on account of Dekker wanted me. What’s the UDC got to do with it?”

“Uniform you’re wearing isn’t exactly popular in some quarters.”

“So what are we? Union spies? Not that I heard.”

“Say Dekker wouldn’t be lying in that bed except for the UDC CO here.”

Ben took a look at the door. Nobody around. Nobody listening, unless they routinely bugged the vending machines. “Mason. This is Ben Pollard. Ben who was Morrie Bird’s partner. Ben whose ass your ship saved once upon a while. You seriously mind to tell me what the hell’s going on and why Dekker rates all this shiz?”

Mason swallowed a bit of sandwich and sat there looking at him and thinking about it. “Say it’s a real pressured environment.”

“Yeah?”

“The UDC doesn’t like Belters. You must be the exception.”

Belters who might be old, exiled rab, Ben thought, Shepherds who looked like Mason—that haircut wouldn’t get a security clearance from the UDC, but he didn’t say so. He said, carefully, “There’s some feeling, yeah, but I never ran into it. Went into Tl, computer stuff—in no pain until they snatched me here. What’s this about Dekker and the CO?”

”Tanzer’s run the R&D for the UDC insystem stuff since Adam was an Earther, he’s got his System, and his friends in high places, til the Fleet signed us in to fly for them. The UDC wanted to do the test and documentation through their facility—all right, they had the set-up and the sims and the knowledge of the suppliers and the technical resources; which is how R&D’s got their hands on the ships and put their guys in the seats, because the U friggin’ DC is trying to get the Fleet demoted to a UDC command.”

“I’ve heard that. Mazian’s all over the news trying to get funds. The opposition wants it with strings.”

“You’ve seen the big ships. But the secondary stuff the Fleet’s building—top secret stuff, fast. UDC’s never flown anything this hot. Design screw-ups, spec screw-ups, materials failures. They cut the budget which means they go to the drawing-board again and make changes—no mind it costs another 150 million for a study and an 80 mil legislative session that could’ve made up the difference—no, that’s fine, that’s going in the damn senators’ pockets and feeding the contractors. We had one glitch-up with a pump that wasn’t up to specs, we got another because security’s so damn tight the company making a mate-up device can’t talk to the company writing the software, you figure that?”

“Must be the programmer that did the EC security system.”

“Listen.” Mason’s finger stabbed the water-ringed table-top. “Right now they’re six months behind schedule and talking about one damn more redesign on the controls. The UDC bitched and bitched about sim time, said Tanzer’s ‘boys’ were the ones to do the test runs because they had the hours and the experience—you want to talk to me about hours? Shit, I’m twenty-seven, that’s twenty fuckin’ years I’ve lived on the Hamilton, and they give me 200 hours at nav? 200 fuckin’ hours, you believe that? They won’t log anything you ran up before you were licensable at your post. I was nav monkey when I was seven, I was running calc when I was ten, I was sitting relief on the edge of the Well when I was twelve, and then they say they’re counting only a quarter of the time our ships logged us—as a compromise because it was civilian hours? Ninety days a tun, thirty heavy, and on call 24 fuckin’ hours a day in Jupiter’s lap for longer than these sim-jockeys would hold up, and they give me 200 hours? I was 2000 plus on my last run out from R2!”

“That’s crazy.”

“Yeah, but that’s UDC rules. You only get hours for the time you’re logged on. Who logs on? Who ever logs on? You do your fuckin’ job, you’re too busy to log on, with a load coming and the watch rousting you out of your bunk at 2100 to check you’re where you think you are, because somebody thinks we got a positional problem, shit if I’m going to log on as officer of record and get my fuckin’ hours for the UDC. Same shit they’re pulling on the merchanters. You know why they don’t count real hours on us? Because the UDC’s got four pilots can claim real hours on a par with us, and last week they had five.”

“The guy with Dekker’s crew?”

“Wilhelmsen.” Mason leaned closer, said, “Listen, —”

And stopped as a nurse came in and carded a soft drink. The nurse left. Mason said, “We’ve got a lot of pressure. You got maybe four, five hours at a run. Virtual space display. Neural net Assist. Real sensory overload. Hyperfbcus, non-Stop. And you don’t sub in some stranger in the last twelve hours before a run, you don’t have bad feeling between the pilot and the techs, you don’t plug in a guy with a whole different visualization system. You want to figure how much pressure Wilhelmsen was under to perform? Shit, he missed a target. He could’ve let it go. But he was too hot for that. He flipped back to get it, schitzed on where he was, and took three good guys with him. You know why Dekker’s in here? Dekker—Dekker told Wilhelmsen’s crew to their faces that he could have done it.”

“Shit.”

“No kidding. Wilhelmsen’s navigator took severe exception, there were words—”

“Before or after they sent Dekker to hospital?”

“Let me tell you about that, too. Yeah, Dekker was in shock. He was watching it in mission control. But he didn’t need any hospital. They wanted him quiet. They wanted him not to say a thing in front of the senators and the VIPs they had swarming around the observation area.”

“They.”

“The UDC. Tanzer. They doped him down and let him out after they got the last of the VIPs on the shuttle out of here. And twelve hours later they haul Dekker out of the sim that’s been running for six—”

Evans walked in. Stood there a moment, then said, “Lt. Pollard. Getting the local news?”

Ben remembered to breathe. And shoved back from the table. “We knew each other, back when. Old news. —Nice seeing you, Mason.”

“Nice seeing you,” Mason muttered, and got up himself, Ben didn’t wait to see for what. He chucked his plastics in the bin and walked out, with a touch of the pulse rate and the cold sweats he’d used to feel in the Belt, when the Company cops were breathing damned close to them.

Infighting with the UDC? A major Reel project going down the chute and the blue-sky UDC fighting to get its boys in the pilot seat and the Earth Company militia under its command?

He wished he were in Stockholm.

“Lt. Graff?” Bonner said, and Graff got up from beside Demas, walked quietly to the table and swore to tell the truth.

“State your name, rank, citizenship, service and age,” the clerk said.

“Jurgen Albrecht Graff, Fleet Lieutenant, EC Territories, ship merchanter Polly d’Or, assigned militia ship Victoria, under Captain Keu, currently Helm Two on the ECS8, uncommissioned, age thirty-eight.” Heads perusing documents, drowsing on hands, came up and looked at him with dawning close attention.

Gen. Bonner said, “Will you state your approximate actual age, for the record, lieutenant?”

Son of a bitch, Graff thought. “Actually, sir, I haven’t calculated it since I was fifteen. But I was born in 2286, Common Reckoning, and the first EC president in my memory was Padriac Melton.”

“Would you agree you’re approximately early twenties, lieutenant, in terms of actual years?”

“I’ve no access to those records, sir. And it’s not relevant to my experience.”

“What is your logged experience?”

“Since I was posted to Helm—ten years, six hours a Shift....”

“Logged hours, lieutenant.”

“—conservatively, 18000 hours, since posting. Not counting apprenticeship. Not counting working during dock, which is never logged.”

Bonner’s face was a study in red. “Logged records, lieutenant. Answer the question as asked or be held in contempt.”

“As far as I know, there are documents behind those hours, sir. The Polly d’Or is likely somewhere between Viking and Pell at the moment, and she maintains meticulous log records. Victoria’s whereabouts the Fleet commander could provide, if you’d care to query—”

“I doubt this committee has the patience, lieutenant. And let’s state for the committee that your logged hours on Sol Two records are substantially less. Can we at least agree that you’re not a senior officer, and you were in physical control of the carrier during the test run?”

“General.” Salto’s quiet voice from behind him, mild registered on the faces of the panel. “Una Saito, Com One, protocol officer on Victoria. —Lieutenant, as a matter of perspective, where were you born?”

Bonner said, “Ms. Saito, whatever your rank may be, you’re in contempt of this committee. Be seated before I have you ejected.”

Graff said, looking at all those frowning blue-sky faces, “Actually, sir, if it’s relevant, I was born on the sublighter Gloriana, on its last deep-space run.”

There was a murmur and a sudden quiet in the room. Graff sat there with his hands folded, not provoking a thing, no, and Bonner, give him credit, gave not a flicker.

“So you would maintain on that basis your experience is adequate to have managed the carrier on a critical test run.”

“I would maintain, sir, that I am qualified to take a starship through jump, an infinitely riskier operation.”

“You’re qualified. Have you done it?”

“Yes, sir. I have. Once on initiation, eighteen times on hand-off on system entry.”

“Yourself. Alone.”

“Helm on Victoria is backed by 49 working stations, counting only those reporting in chain of command to Helm.”

“I’ll reserve further questions. Senator Eriksson?”

“Thank you.” This from the Joint Legislative Committee rep. “Lt. Graff, Eriksson from the JLC technical division. Medical experts maintain that hyperfocus is not sustainable over the required hours of operation.”

“It’s routine for us. If—”

“Let me finish my statement, please. Medical experts have stated that the ERP Index indicates mental confusion— stress was taking its toll. As a starship pilot you have systems which defend against impacts. You have an AI-assisted system of hand-offs. You have a computer interlock on systems to prevent accidents. Based on those facts, do you not think that similar systems are necessary on these ships?”

“Senator, all of those interlocks you describe do exist on the rider, but let me say first that a starship’s autopilot override is at a 2-second pilot crisis query in combat conditions, the rider’s was set at 1 for the test, and that while the carrier does have effect shields, the size of the rider makes it possible to pass through fire zones in which the carrier’s huge size makes such passage far riskier. The armscomp override isn’t necessary, of course, because a rider’s available acceleration isn’t sufficient to overtake its own ordnance, but it does have a template of prohibited fire to prevent its ordnance hitting the carrier or passing through a habitation zone. The Al-driven autopilot did cut on when it detected a crisis condition in the pilot, which, as I said, was set at 1 second for this test. The AI queried the pilot—that’s a painful, attention-getting jolt. It waited a human response—long, in the AI’s terms, again, 1 second before it seized control. It was already tracking the situation on all its systems. It knew the moves that had caused the tumble. It knew the existence of the next target. It knew it was off course, but it had lost its navigation lock and was trying to reestablish that. The buoy’s existence was masked for the test, but the AI realized it couldn’t save the test: it entered another order to penetrate the virtual reality of the test to sample the real environment, accessed information concealed from the pilot and reckoned the position of the target buoy as potentially a concern, and correctly assigned it as a hazard of equal value but secondary imminence to the threat of the ship’s high-v tumble. It reasoned that elimination of the target required the arms function, while evasion of the target required the engines, and that the motion exceeded critical demands of the targeting system. A subfunction was, from the instant the AI had engaged, already firing engines to reduce the tumble, and tracking other firepaths. It was doing all (hat, and attempting to locate itself and its own potential ordnance tracks relative to interdicted fire vectors—realspace friendly targets. Fire against me target was not set for its first sufficient window: the condensed telemetry of its calculations is a massive printout. The AI was still waiting for the window when its position and the target’s became identical.”

Took a moment for the senator to Figure what that meant. Then an angry frown. “So you’re blaming an AI breakdown?”

“No, sir. Everything from the AI’s viewpoint was coming optimal. A human with a clear head couldn’t have outraced the AI in targeting calculations or in bringing the ship stable enough to get a window. A human might have skipped the math and discharged the chaff gun and the missiles in hope of destroying the object by sheer blind luck, but the AI had an absolute interdiction against certain vectors. It didn’t even consider that it could violate that— that range safety could have taken care of the problem if it arose. Somebody decided that option shouldn’t be in its memory, and this being a densely populated system maybe it shouldn’t have been. But that ship was effectively lost from the moment the pilot reacted to his crew’s apprehension. That communications problem was the direct cause of the accident—”

Bonner said, “Excuse me, senator. The lieutenant is speculating, now, far outside his expertise. May I remind him to confine himself to what he was in a position to witness or to obtain from records?”

He didn’t look at Bonner. “A communications problem set up by a last-minute substitution of pilots.”

The committee hadn’t heard that. No. Not all of them had, at least. And from Shepherds he knew were back there in the room, there was not a breath, not an outcry, just a general muttering, and he couldn’t turn his head to see expressions.

The senator said: “What substitution, lieutenant?”

“The crew trained as a team. The Fleet pilot was replaced at the last moment by a UDC backup pilot the colonel lifted out of his own crew and subbed in on Fleet personnel. The Fleet captain in command objected in an immediate memo to Col. Tanzer’s office—”

Bonner said, “Lieutenant, you’re out of line. Confine yourself to factual answers.”

“Sir. That is a fact upheld by ECS8 log records.”

Somebody yelled from the back, “Do they show the Fleet laid those targets and set that random ordnance interval?” Several voices seconded, and somebody else yelled, “You’re full of it, Jennings, you don’t break an ops team! You never sub personnel! Tanzer killed those guys sure as a shot to the head!”

The gavel came down.

Somebody shouted, over the banging, “The Fleet set up the course. Check the records! The Fleet had orders to set the targets closer together to screw the test!”

And from nearer the front, as the MP’s and Fleet Security moved in, “Wilhelmsen screwed the test—those targets were all right! He lost it, that’s all!”

Bonner was on his feet shouting, “Clear the room. Clear the room. Sergeant!”

Institution green. Ben had seen green. Had eaten real lettuce, drunk lime (orange juice was better) and had real margaritas the way they could make them on Sol One, but he still wasn’t sure why inner system liked that color that mimicked old Trinidad’s shower paneling, whether that shade was what Earth really favored. He sincerely hoped not. He honestly hoped not. But if Earth was that color wall to wall he’d take it over B Dock hospital corridors and vending machine suppers.

Dekker was still hyperbolic—swung on an intern, threatened the nurses, called the CO a psychopathic control junkie—

“How many fingers?” the intern had asked, holding up two, and Dekker had held up his own, singular—which was Dekker, all right, but it hadn’t won him points. The intern had checked his pulse, said it was elevated—

Damned right it was elevated. “You’re being a fool,” Ben said, while they were waiting for the orderly with the trank. He grabbed Dekker by the arm and shook him, but Dekker wasn’t resisting. “You know that, Dek-boy? Use your head. Shit, get us out of this place!”

“Sorry,” Dekker said listlessly, “sorry.” And stared off into space until Ben shook him again and said, “You want to spend your life in here? You want a permanent home here?”

Dekker looked at him. But the orderly came in and gave him the shot. Dekker didn’t fight it. And after the orderly went away Dekker just lay there and stared past him.

“Dek,” Ben said, “count their fingers. Walk their damn line. Remember how you got in that damn sim. Maybe the lieutenant can get you out of here. Just play their game, that’s all.”

And Dekker said, while Dekker’s eyes were glazing, “What’s the use, Ben? What’s the use anymore?”

That wasn’t like Dekker. Wasn’t like him at all. But Dekker was out men, or so far under as made no difference. They said people drugged out could hear you, and that under some kinds of trank maybe you didn’t have the same resistance to suggestion: Ben squeezed Dekker’s arm hard and whispered, right in his ear, “You’re going to do what they say and get yourself out of here. Hear it?”

Dekker didn’t give any sign he did. So it was out to the hall again, 1805h, and no likelihood Dekker was going to come around again this evening.

He might lie to the doctors, Ben thought, he might tell them Dekker had remembered, make something up—prime Dekker with it and hope Dekker had enough of his pieces screwed together to remember it. If he could figure out what they wanted to hear. Say it was Wilhelmsen’s crew that attacked him, that was the signal he was picking up. That was what the Fleet wanted.

But not what the UDC wanted. And what the Fleet wanted wasn’t any ticket to Stockholm, no.

Damn, damn, and damn.

Meanwhile Dekker got crazier, no knowing what drug they were filling him full of or what it was doing, and if he could get hold of Graff he’d tell him check the damn medication for side effects, it wasn’t helping, it was making Dekker worse; he’d stopped trusting Higgins, and Evans hadn’t been available since yesterday—

He’d seen this before, damn if he hadn’t when an organization got ready to throw a man out with the garbage—some skuz in power had taken a position and bet his ass on it, and now the skuz in power had stopped wanting the truth, since it didn’t agree with the positions he’d taken—

So you trashed the guy who knew what was going on; you pinned the blame on him as far as you could; you shunted out anybody who might be sympathetic—Evans’ departure from the scene—and from where Ben Pollard was standing it didn’t look as if Graff or the Fleet had any serious influence left in the hospital—not enough at least for Graff to get his ass in here and ask Dekker himself, which signal he should have picked up from the beginning if he’d had any antennae up.

Not enough to do a thing about the stuff they were shooting into Dekker, who, if the Fleet knew it, wasn’t outstandingly sane to start with.

Triple damn.

“Good night,” some nurse said to him. “G’night,” Ben muttered, half looking around. Good night was what Earthers said to each other. Good night was where this guy had come from. The place of green and snow and rain. Tides and beaches.

He’d seen growing plants. Been into the herbarium on Sol One. Amazing sight. Guided tours, once a week. Keep to the walkway, don’t pick the leaves. But the Guides demonstrated how some of them smelled. Flowers would take your head off. Leaves smelled strange. He wasn’t sure he liked it. Grease and cold metal smelled one way, and that was home. This hadn’t been, hadn’t smelled quite edible, not quite offensive, not at all smell like anything he’d known. The ocean was what he wanted, not any damn woods full of stinking plants: snow that was water freezing, not methane, or the scary stuff you got when a seal was chancy.

Snow was the result of weather, which was the result of Coriolis forces, which he understood, and atmospheric rollover, which he theoretically understood—he thought about that, pushing the button for another damned cheese sandwich, he thought about a city that was like helldeck without an overhead, with the tides coming and going against its edges and snow happening—that was what he thought about for company on the walk home.

Didn’t think about Dekker lying trank-dead in bed, or Dekker saying, What’s the use, Ben? What’s the use anymore—

When Dekker had hung on to life harder than any son of a bitch of his acquaintance. And when other sons of bitches were playing games with a defense system they called important—dammit, the services played games, with a war on? And the whole human race could find itself in a war zone if the Fleet didn’t keep the mess out past the Oort Cloud?

The Earth Company was playing damn games again, that was what, in another of its corporate limbs, the friggin’ Company and the UDC and the Fleet, that couldn’t find his luggage, was politicking away as usual and throwing out a guy like Dekker who was sincerely crazy enough to want to fly a ship like that into combat.

He’d fought fools in administration before. And they were beatable, except there was such a supply of them.

He’d fought Systems before, and they were beatable, if you knew the numbers, or you could get at them. But damn, he’d tried to stay clean. Even with that EIDAT system, that begged for a finger or two in its works. Use the numbers he had to get to Graff?

Graff couldn’t do anything or Graff would have done it. Possible even that Graff had screwed him from the start of this.

Get to Keu’s office? Not damned easy. And no guarantee the Fleet even at that level could do anything.

Go to the UDC CO and screw Dekker by blowing his own service’s hope of getting him back?

Walking the corridor to his so-called hospice quarters, he thought how if going to Tanzer would get him a pass out of here on the next shuttle, damned if it wasn’t starting to look like a good idea. Screw Dekker? Dekker was already screwed. So what was one more, given he couldn’t help the guy?

He held sandwich, chips, and drink in one arm, fished his card out of his pocket with his right hand and shoved it into the key slot.

The message tight was blinking on the phone, bright red in the dark. He elbowed the button on the room lights, shut the door the same way, and went to the nightstand to set his supper down—

Found his luggage, maybe. He couldn’t think of a call else he had in, unless Dekker’d taken a spell of something.

Couldn’t be he’d broken anybody’s neck. They had him too far out for that. Please God.

He plugged in his personal reader—never use a TI card in an unsecure device—and keyed up playback.

TECH/2 Benjamin J. Pollard

CTVSS/UDC 28 DAT 2

CURRENTLOC: UDC SOL2B-HOS28

1719JUN20/24 SN P-235-9876/MLR 1923JUN20/24

TRANSFER TO: ACTIVE DUTY: UDC SYSTEMS TESTING

RANK: TECH3/UDC SOL2D-OPS/SCAN G-5: PILOT RATING C-3 WITH 200 EXPERIENCE HOURS LOGGED.

REPORT TO: 2-DECK 229, BARRACKS C: JUN21/24/ 0600h: ref/ CLASSIFIED: OUTSIDE COMMUNICATION SPECIFICALLY DENIED.

He sat down. He had that much presence of mind. He punched playback again with his thumb, and the same damned thing rolled past.

Transfer? Systems Testing? Pilot rating?

Shit!

The committee wanted another go. Immediately. The shuttle was two days on its way from Sol One, due in at maindawn, and, informed it wouldn’t be held, senatorial demands notwithstanding, the committee decided to keep going through maindark, if that was what it took. You didn’t snag a senator for a five-day to Sol Two—no famous restaurants, no cocktail lounges, no ‘faculties1 the way they legendarily existed downworld: the senators had important business to do, the senators wanted out and back to Sol One and down to Earth and their perks and their privileges, and they’d talk with the company reps over gin and tonic the whole way back.

Graff had hoped, for a while, after things went to hell, that some few members of the committee might want to ask him questions over gin and tonic, if they had the clout to ask him in for a go-over; or rec-hall coffee, if they had the clout just to get past Bonner. He’d kept his phone free. He’d hoped until he got the notification of the resumption of the sessions—the committee wanted a chance to review testimony and wanted certain individuals to ‘stand by’ a call.

Demas and Saito weren’t on the list. Much and Jamil certainly weren’t. No audience. No guarantee mere would be any questions Bonner didn’t set up. Graff sat there tapping a stylus on the desk and thinking about a fast call to Sol One via FleetCom; but that was still no use—if the captain hadn’t noticed a shuttle-load of senators, contractor executives, and UDC brass headed to Sol Two’s B Dock, there was no hope for them; and if the captain hadn’t known something about the character and leanings of said senators and contractors and Gen. Patrick Bonner, Fleet Security was off its game. So the lieutenant was still left out of the lock without a line, and the lieutenant had to get his butt out there right now and give the senators what they asked as best he could.

So the lieutenant in question put his jacket on, straightened his collar, and opened the door.

“Mr. Graff.”

Face to face with Tanzer.

“I’d like a word,” Tanzer said as he stepped into the hall.

“About my testimony?” He didn’t have an Optex, didn’t own one and it wasn’t legal for a private conversation; but he hoped Tanzer would worry.

Tanzer said, “Just a word of sanity.”

A trap? A smear, if Tanzer was carrying a hidden Optex. He could refuse to talk; he could tell Tanzer go to hell; but he had to face Tanzer after the committee was long gone. “Yes, colonel?”

Tanzer said, quietly, “You could screw this whole project. You’re a junior, you don’t know what you’re walking into. And you could lose the war—right here, right in this hearing. I’m advising you to answer the questions without comment—no, I’m not supposed to be talking to you, and no, I can’t advise you about your testimony. By the book, I can’t. But forget that business in the office. We both want that ship. We don’t want it canceled. Do we? —Can we have a word inside your office?”

No, was his first thought. There were aides milling about down the hall. There were potential witnesses. But not knowing what Tanzer wanted to tell him could be a mistake too. Bugs, there weren’t, inside. Not unless the UDC was technologically one up, and he didn’t think so. He opened the door again, let Tanzer in and let the door shut.

Tanzer said, directly, “The companies aren’t going to support finding a basic design flaw; that’s money out of their pockets, do you understand me? That’s not what we’re going to push for.”

Tanzer and a 4-star? Politicking with a Fleet j-g? What in hell was going on at Sol One? “I wasn’t under the impression that was seriously at issue.”

“You don’t understand me. Those companies don’t want the blame. They’re perfectly willing to put the accident off on the service. To call it mishandling—”

Oh-ho.

“A control redesign, existing technology—that, they’ll go for. As long as it’s our design change, out of our budget. You listen to me. This is critical. We’ve got some Peace-nows kicking up a fuss—they want to grab that appropriation for their own programs. They’re talking negotiation with Union. Partition of the trade zones. They’ve got some tame social scientists down in Bonn and Moscow talking isolation again.”

They’d talked it off and on for two hundred years. But Union was very interested in Earth’s biology. Very interested.

“They won’t get it.”

“They can dither this program into another five-year redesign with political deals. The Earth Company can end up deadlocked with the UN. We need the AI on top to let us get some successes with this ship—make it do-able, so we can go public as soon as possible. The thing can have another model, for God’s sake, build the old design and lose ships to your heart’s content, after we’ve got the first thirty out of the shipyards and trained pilots who know its characteristics. Prove your point and have your funerals, it’ll be out of our hands, but let’s get this ship online.”

“The effect will be training your pilots to pull it short—to worry when they’re taking a necessary chance. Combat pilots can’t have that mindset; and you can’t train with that thing breathing down your neck.”

“You’re not a psychiatrist, lieutenant.”

“I’m not an engineer, either, but I know the AI you’ve got won’t accommodate it, you’re talking about a very complicated software, a bigger black box, and that panel’s already crowding armscomp, besides the psychological factors—”

“Cut one seat. One fewer tech. The tetralogic’s worth it.”

“That’s ten fewer objects longscan can track, and that’s one damned more contractor with an unproved software and another unproved interface to train to.”

“That’s nothing getting tracked if the ship doesn’t get built, lieutenant, come down to the point. You’re not going to get everything you want.”

“If you want to cut a deal, you need to talk to the captain, I’m under his orders.”

“What are his orders?”

“To keep that ship as is.”

“Or lose it? You listen to me. You don’t have to agree. Just don’t raise objections.”

“Talk to my captain. I can’t change his orders.”

Tanzer was red in the face. Keeping his voice very quiet. “We can’t reach your captain.”

“Why?”

“We don’t know why. We think he’s in committee meetings.”

“Go to Mazian’s office, colonel, I can’t authorize a thing.”

“We’ve been trying to reach him, lieutenant, and we’ve got your whole damned program about to destruct on us, out there—you’d better believe you’re in a hot spot, and I wouldn’t take you into confidence, you or your recruits, but we can’t afford another shouting match for the committee. We’re trying to save this program, we’re not arguing the value of human hands-on at the controls: you know and I know there’s no way Union’s tape-trained clones are any match for real human beings—”

“They’re not that easy a mark. Azi still aren’t an AI with an interdict.”

“They’ll crack. They’ll crack the same as anybody else. Their program’s going to have the same limitations.”

“They won’t crack, colonel, they’re completely dedicated to what they’re doing, that’s what they’re created for, for God’s sake—”

“You listen to me, lieutenant. I was in charge of the program that put your Victoria out there and I don’t need to be told by any wet-behind-the-ears what a human pilot is worth, but, dammit! you automate when you have to. You don’t hold on to an idea til it kills you—which this is going to do if you screw up in there. You can lose the whole damned war in that hearing room, does that get through to you?”

“Colonel, in all respect to your experience—”

“You go on listening. Yes, we had to have a show, yes, I subbed Wilhelmsen. Your boy Dekker’s got problems. Serious problems.” Tanzer pulled a datacard from his breast pocket.

“What’s that?”

“A copy of Dekker’s personnel file. It’s damned interesting reading.”

Damn, he thought. And hoped he kept anxiety off his face. It couldn’t be Reel records—unless mere was a two-legged leak in the records system.

“Reckless proceeding and wrongful death.” Tanzer pocketed the card again. “You want the reason I subbed him? There’s a grieving mother out there that’s been trying to get justice out of that boy of yours. Rape and murder—”

“Neither of which is true.”

“I had, if you want to know, lieutenant, specific orders to pull Dekker off that demo, because Dekker’s legal troubles were going to surface again the minute his name hit the downworld media—and it would have.”

“On a classified test. He lost a partner out in the Belt. The incident isn’t a secret in the Company. Far from it. Don’t tell me you didn’t know that, if you’ve got that record.”

“The name was going to surface, take my word for it. He’s politically hot, too damned hot to represent this program— that’s why I pulled him from that demo, lieutenant, and you had to ignore my warning. Stick to issues you’re prepared to answer and leave Dekker the hell out of this. Cory Salazar. Does the name mean anything to you?”

“ASTEX politics murdered Salazar.”

“Tell that to the mother. Tell that to the mama of the underage kid Dekker seduced out there.”

“That wasn’t the way it happened, colonel.”

“You want to tell Salazar’s mother that, —lieutenant? You want to tell that to a woman who’s on the MarsCorp board? I couldn’t put him in front of the media. I had to pull him off that team. You understand me? I’m trusting you right now, lieutenant, with a critical confidence, because, dammit, you’ve raised the issue in there and you’d better have the good sense to back off that point, waffle your way out of it and come into line if you want to keep your boy , inside these walls. If he gets to be a media issue, he’s dead. You understand that?”

“I understand Wilhelmsen died, I understand a whole ciew died for a damned politicking decision—”

“You mink I don’t care, Lieutenant? Your boy Dekker’s got a political problem and a mouth. And we’ve got a ship that kills crews and somebody’s mother breathing down our necks, wanting your boy’s head on a platter. You hear me? I didn’t screw Dekker. Your captain put him in that position, I didn’t. Damned right I pulled him from what was scheduled to go public, and damned right I shut him up before he got to the VIPs we had onstation.”

“By shoving him into a pod unconscious?”

“No, damn you. I didn’t.”

Not lying, if he could rely on anything Tanzer said. Which he was far from sure of. “You told him why you pulled him?”

“Trust that mouth? No. And don’t you. Hear me? He got into that pod on his own. Leave it at that. Attempted suicide. Who knows? I won’t contest that finding. But you shut it down with that. I know he’s popular with your emits. I know you’ve got a problem. But let’s use our heads on this and you quieten matters down and get off that issue.”

Damn and damn. Call the captain, was what he needed to do. But they weren’t sure the UDC wasn’t eavesdropping. And if Keu was currently caught up in committee at Sol—

Ask Tanzer if FleetCom was secure? Hell if.

“We’d better get in there,” Tanzer said and opened the door and walked out.

Son of a bitch, Graff thought, what do I do? Demas is on board, Saito’s on her way up there....

He walked out, shut the door. Tanzer was down at the corner of the hall with Bonner, the two of them talking. He looked at his watch. One minute from late, the committee was about to convene. He could no-show, he could send Bonner word he was going to be late.

They could say any damned thing without hindrance then, finish the meeting without him in the time it would take to get FleetCom, let alone confer with the captain.

He’d faced fire with steadier nerves. He’d made jumpspeed decisions easier with a ship at stake. There was no assurance Tanzer had told him the truth, or even half of it. There was no assurance they had ever tried to get Keu, or Mazian, mere was no assurance it was anything but a maneuver to silence him and ram something through, and there was not even absolute assurance they’d told the truth about political influence stalking Dekker, but if it was, God, somebody had found a damned sensitive button to push. If the Fleet didn’t back Dekker, if the Fleet let Dekker take a grenade—the likes of Mitch and Jamil wouldn’t stand still for it, there’d be bloodshed, no exaggeration at all, the Belters would take the UDC facilities apart first and work their way over to Fleet HQ. Betray them—and there was no trusting them, no relying on them, no guarantee the metal and the materials were going to go on arriving out of the Belt, and damned sure no crews to handle the ships.

Now he didn’t know what Bonner was going to do in that hearing room. Or Tanzer. And he wasn’t in a position to object—he felt he was heading into a trap, going in there at all, but he followed them in and sat down in a decimated ;ring.

Not a friendly face in the room. Not a one.

Bonner called the session to order, Bonner talked about high feelings over the tragic accident, Bonner talked about the stress of a job that called on men to risk their lives, talked about God and country.

Blue-sky language. Blue-sky thinking. Up to an Earther didn’t refer to phase fields, war was two districts on a plane surface in a dispute over territory, and the United Nations was a faction-ridden single-star-system organization trying to tell merchanter Families what their borders were: explain borders to them, first.

You had to see a planet through optics and think flat surface to imagine how ground looked. He hadn’t laid eyes on a planet til he was half-grown. He never had figured out the emotional context, except to compare it to ship or station, but there was something about being fixed hi place next to permanent neighbors that sounded desperately unnatural. Which he supposed was prejudice on his side. Bonner talked about a righteous war. And he thought about ports and ships run by Cyteen’s tape-trained humanity, with mindsets more alien than Earth’s.

Bonner talked about human stress and interactive systems, while he thought about the Cluster off Cyteen, where startides warped space, and a ghosty malfunction on the boards you hoped to God was an artifact of that space, while a Union spotter was close to picking up your presence.

Bonner got Helmond Weiss on the mike to read the medical report. Telemetry again. More thorough than the post-mortem on the ship. Less printout. Four human beings hadn’t output as much in their last minutes as that struggling AI had. Depressing thought.

Then the psych lads took the mike. “Were Wilhelmsen’s last decisions rational?” the committee asked point-blank. And the psychs said, hauling up more charts and graphs, “Increasing indecision,” and talked about hyped senses, maintained that Wilhelmsen had gone on hyperfocus overload and lost track of actual time-flow—

... making decisions at such speed in such duration, it was pure misapprehension of the rate at which filings were happening. No, you couldn’t characterize it as panic....

“... evidence of physiological distress, shortness of breath, increase in REM and pulse rate activated a medical crisis warning with the AI—”

“The carrier’s AI didn’t have time to reach the rider?” a senator asked.

“And get the override query engaged and answered, no, there wasn’t time.”

Playback of the final moments on the tape. The co-pilot, Pete Fowler, the last words on the tape Fowler’s, saying, “Hold it, hold it~”

That overlay the whole reorientation and firing incident, at those speeds. The panel had trouble grasping that. They spent five minutes arguing it, and maybe, Graff thought, still didn’t realize the sequence of events, or that it was Fowler protesting the original reorientation.

You didn’t have time to talk. Couldn’t get a word out in some sequences, and not this one. Fowler shouldn’t have spoken. Part of it was his fault. Shouldn’t have spoken to a strange pilot, who didn’t know his contexts, who very well knew they didn’t altogether trust him.

The mike went to Tanzer. A few final questions, the committee said. And a senator asked the question:

“What was the name of the original pilot?”

“Dekker. Paul Dekker. TVainee.”

“What was the reason for removing him from the mission?”

“Seniority. He was showing a little stress. Wilhelmsen was the more experienced.”

Like hell.

“And the crew?”

“Senator, a crew should be capable of working with any officer. It was capable. There were no medical grounds there. The flaw is in the subordination of the neural net interface. It should be constant override with concurrent input from the pilot. The craft’s small cross-section, its minimum profile, the enormous power it has to carry in its engines to achieve docking at highest v—all add up to sensitive controls and a very powerful response....”

More minutiae. Keep my mouth shut or not? Graff asked himself. Trust Tanzer? Or follow orders?

Another senator: “Did the sims run the same duration as the actual mission?”

Not lately, Graff thought darkly, while Tanzer said, blithely, “Yes.”

Then a senator said: “May I interject a question to Lt. Graff.”

Bonner didn’t like that. Bonner frowned, and said, “Lt. Graff, I remind you you’re still under oath.”

“Yes, sir.”

The senator said, “Lt. Graff. You were at the controls of the carrier at the time of the accident. You were getting telemetry from the rider.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The medical officer on your bridge was recorded as saying Query out.”

“That’s correct.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means she’d just asked the co-pilot to assess the pilot’s condition and act. But the accident was already inevitable. Just not enough time.”

Blinks from the senator, attempt to think through the math, maybe. “Was the carrier too far back for safety?”

“It was in a correct position for operations. No, sir.”

“Was the target interval set too close? Was it an impossible shot?”

“No. It was a judgment shot. The armscomper doesn’t physically fire all the ordnance, understand. He sets the priorities at the start of the run and adjusts them as the situation changes. A computer does the firing, with the pilot following the sequence provided by his co-pilot and the longscanner and armscomper. The pilot can violate the aimscomper’s priorities. He might have to. There are unplotteds out there, rocks, for instance. Or mines.”

“Did Wilhelmsen violate the priorities?”

“Technically, yes. But he had that choice.”

“Choice. At those speeds.”

“Yes, sir. He was in control until that point. He knew it was wrong, he glitched, and he was out. Cold.”

“Are you a psychiatrist, lieutenant?”

“No, sir, but I suggest you ask the medical officer. There was no panic until he heard his crew’s alarm. That spooked him. Their telemetry reads alarm—first, sir. His move startled them and he dropped out of hype.”

“The lieutenant is speculating,” Bonner said. “Lt. Graff, kindly keep to observed fact.”

“As a pilot, sir, I observed these plain facts in the medical testimony.”

“You’re out of order, lieutenant.”

“One more question,” the senator said. “You’re saying, lieutenant, that the tetralogic has faults. Would it have made this mistake?”

“No, but it has other flaws.”

“Specifically?”

“Even a tetralogic is recognizable, to similar systems. Machine can counter machine. Human beings can make decisions these systems don’t expect. Longscan works entirely on that principle.”

“Are you a computer tech?”

“I know the systems. I personally would not go into combat with a computer totally in charge.”

The senator leaned back, frowning. “Thank you, lieutenant.”

“May I make an observation?” Tanzer asked, and got an indulgence and a nod from Bonner.

Tanzer said: “Let me say this is an example of the kind of mystical nonsense I’ve heard all too much of from this service. Whatever your religious preferences, divine intervention didn’t happen here, Wilhelmsen didn’t stay conscious long enough to apply the human advantage. Human beings can’t defy physics; and the lieutenant sitting behind his carrier’s effect shields can maintain that spacers are somehow evolved beyond earthly limitations and make their decisions by mysterious instincts that let them outperform a tetralogic, but in my studied and not unexpert opinion, there’s been altogether too much emphasis in recruitment based on entry-level skills and certain kinds of experience— meaning a practical exclusion of anyone but Belters. The lieutenant talks about some mysterious unquantifiable mentality that can work at these velocities. But I’d like to say, and Dr. Weiss will back me on this, that there’s more than button-pushing ability and reflexes that make a reliable military. There is, very importantly, attitude. There’s been no background check into volunteers on this project...”

Dammit, he’s going to do it—

“...in spite of the well-known unrest and the recent violence in the Belt. We have a service completely outside the authority of the UDC trying to exclude the majority of Sol System natives from holding a post on weapons platforms of enormous destructive potential, insisting we take their word—” Tanzer’s knuckles rapped the table. “—that the policies and decisions of the UN, the world governments, and even Company policy will be respected and observed outside this system. It’s imperative that these ships not remain under the control of a cadre selected by one man’s opinion of their fitness for command, a man not in any way native to Earth or educated to Earth’s values. The Fleet is pushing qualifications arbitrarily selected to exclude our own military in command positions, for what motive leaves me entirely uneasy, sirs.”

Some things a man couldn’t hear and keep his mouth shut. “General,” Graff said. “I’d like to make my own statement in answer to that.”

“This isn’t a court of law, lieutenant. But you’ll have your say. In the meantime, the colonel has his. —Go on, colonel.”

Graff let go a breath and thought, I could walk out, now. But to what good? To what living good? I’m in it. The Captains can disavow what I say. They can still do that. But Tanzer wanted to cut a deal. Tanzer wanted me to agree on the redesign and what good is my agreement to them, what could it possibly influence if this committee’s already in their pocket?

Tanzer said, “There are two reasons why I favor a tetralogic system. This ship is too important and too hazardous to civilian targets to turn over to personnel in whose selection our values have never been a criterion. I’ve been asked privately the reason for the substitution—”

My God, here it goes.

“In the recess I’ve also been asked the reason for the morale difficulties in this old and time-tried institution. Gentlemen, it lies in the assumption that these machines are flyable only by super-humans personally selected by Conrad Mazian and his hand-picked officers. Earth is being sold a complete bill of goods. Conrad Mazian wants absolute control of an armada Earth is sacrificing considerably to build. What’s the difference—control of the human race by a remote group of dissidents—or by a merchanter cartel with a powerful lobby in the halls of the Earth Company administration? These ships and the carriers should be under UDC command and responsible to the citizens of the governments that fund them, not to a self-appointed committee of merchantmen with their own interests and their own priorities.”

Bang went the gavel. The growing murmur from the committee and the aides and witnesses ebbed down, and Tanzer went on:

“You’ve seen an unfortunate incident in this hearing room, resultant from what the Fleet calls discipline, beginning with the concept of command by committee and ending with the uniform variances that permit Belter enlistees to dress and act like miners on holiday. The carrier that is allegedly on operational alert at this moment for the protection of Earth itself doesn’t even have its senior pilot at this facility, while Captain Keu is on an indefinite leave to Sol One. Junior lieutenant Graff insists he’s qualified in an emergency—but his heads of station outrank him, a prime example of merchanter command order, and if he says decisions have to come at light speed, and he can’t have an AI breathing down his neck, what does he say about a committee of senior officers calling the shots for him on the flight deck?”

He stood up. “I object, general.”

“Sit down, lieutenant.” The gavel banged. “Before I find you in contempt of this committee and have you arrested.”

He sat. He was no good in the brig. The captain and the Number Ones needed to hear the rest of it. Accurately.

Tanzer said: “We need a disciplined system that can let us substitute a pilot, a tech, a scan operator, anybody in any crew, because this isn’t the merchant trade we’re running, ladies and gentlemen, it’s war, in which there are bound to be casualties, and no single man is indispensable. There has to be a chain of command responsible to legitimate policies of the Defense Department, and in which there is absolutely no leeway for personalities too talented and too important to follow orders and do their job.”

He couldn’t stay quiet. “You mean downgrade the ship until cargo pushers can fly it!”

Bang went the gavel. “Lieutenant!”

Echoes in the core. High up in the mast sounds came faint as ghosts; not like R2 where half-refined ore shot through zero-cold, and thundered and rumbled like doom against the chamber walls. In this vast chamber sims whirled around the chamber on mag-levs and came like tame, dreadful flowers to the platforms, giving up or taking in their human cargoes—

You carded in before you launched. The pod’s Adaptive Assists recognized you, input your values, and you input your tape for the sim you were running. You fastened (he one belt that locked the others. But something was wrong. The pod started to move and he couldn’t remember carding in, couldn’t think through the mounting pain in his head and the force pinning him to the seat—

“Cory!” he yelled. Tried to yell. “Cory, hold on!”

But he couldn’t reach the Abort. Couldn’t see it, couldn’t reach it, and the damn sim thought the belts were locked. “Mayday,” he called over com, but it didn’t answer. Someone had said he’d earned it. Maybe Ben. Ben would have. But he didn’t think Ben would have done this to him...

“You’re a damn screw-up!” someone yelled at him. “You screwed up my whole damn life, you son of a bitch! What’d I ever do to deserve you?”

Sounded like his mother. But his mother never grabbed him by the collar and hit him. That was Ben. Ben was the way out and he tried to listen to Ben, it was the only chart he had that made any sense now...

Ben said, “What day is it, damn you?” And he honestly tried to remember. Ben had told him he had to remember.

“I object vehemently,” Graff said, calmly as he could, “to the colonel’s characterization of myself, my captain, my crew and my service. I challenge the colonel’s qualifications to manage this program, when he has had no deepspace experience, no flight time at those speeds, no experience of system transit at those speeds; and neither have any of the medics who’ve testified. This—” He clicked a datacard onto the table, and remembered with a cold chill the one Tanzer was carrying. “This is my personal medical record. I call that in evidence, on reaction times and general qualifications.”

The gavel came down. “I’ll thank you to reserve the theatrics, lieutenant. This committee is not impressed. You’ve asked to make a statement. Make it. I remind you you’re under oath.”

“Yes, general. I call the general’s attention to the fact that he did not so admonish the colonel. Can we assume it was an oversight?”

He expected the gavel. Instead Bonner leaned forward and said very quietly, “The colonel knows he’s under oath. Make your statement.”

“It’s very brief. The colonel ordered me not to tell the truth to this committee.”

There was a moment of silence. Bonner hadn’t expected that shot. He should have. Bonner said, then, “Are you through, lieutenant?”

“No, sir.” He thought of Dekker. And the bloodied sim-pod. And wondered if he would see another day in this place. “I intend to answer the committee’s questions. If it has any.”

A long silence, subjective time. Then a senator asked, “You think you could have flown the rider?”

“If I were trained to do that, yes, ma’am.”

“You couldn’t, say, step from the carrier into the ridership. Given the familiarity with the interfaces.”

“I’ve had years of training for the mass and the characteristics of a large ship. Cross-training could confuse me. Jump makes you quite muzzy. You’re riding your gut reactions quite heavily in those first moments of entry. Certainly so in combat.”

Another “You think a training program can produce that kind of skill, here, in a matter of months.”

“No, sir. Not without background experience, I don’t. That’s why the Fleet didn’t recruit from the local military. Test pilots like Wilhelmsen—he could have done it. I’ve no wish to downplay his ability. He was good. We’d have taken him in a moment if the UDC had wanted to release him. Or if he had wanted to go.”

“Are you doing the recruiting, now?” Bonner asked. “Or speaking for Captain Mazian?”

“I’m agreeing with the colonel, sir, based on ray knowledge of Wilhelmsen’s ability. But that ability can’t be trained in the time we need; we need prior experience. We particularly need crews that can feel insystem space. The Shepherds and the miners and insystem haulers aren’t trainees as the term implies; and they’re not eighteen-year-old recruits who think a mass proximity situation is an exam problem.”

“What is a mass proximity situation, lieutenant?”

God.

“A collision alert, sir.” It was the least vivid description that leapt to his mind. He had no wish to offend the senator. The senator laughed, like a good politician, and leaned back.

Another asked, “Lieutenant?”

“Yes, sir.”

“To what government do you hold loyalty?”

A handful of days ago he would have said something about historical ties, a center for the human species. But he didn’t want to get into abstracts. Or create any apprehension of an outsider viewpoint. He looked the senator in the eyes and said quietly, “To Earth, sir.”

But the answer appeared to take the man aback; and it struck him then for the first time that he was looking at Earth, at this table: a row of incomprehensible special interests. None of them could see Earth from the outside— the techs from subsidiaries of the Earth Company; the senators from the Pan-Asian Union and Europe. Bonner, from the Western Hemisphere. (Who first defined east and west? he wondered, hyperfocusing, momentarily as bereft of referents as they were, taking in everything. Politics of dividing oceans? And why not north and south—except the ice?)

The same senator asked, “And these recruits from the Belt? To whom are they loyal?”

Touchy question. A good many Belters were political exiles from Earth. He said, “I’m sure they’d tell you, individually, whatever their concept is. The human race, certainly. The one that nature evolved on this planet, not UK one from labs on Cyteen.”

“Loyalty to themselves, would you say?”

He quoted Bonner. “Isn’t that the issue of the war, senator? Freedom of conscience?”

Silence from Bonner. Deathly silence.

“If this design goes AI,” Graff continued quickly, wishing for Saito’s eloquence, “so the enemy can predict it; or if some legislative compromise replaces our command with officers who don’t know jumpspace tactics—we’ll the, ship by ship. Then let the UDC hold the line with no carriers, no deepspace crews. Lose us and you won’t have the merchanters. You won’t have the far space stations. We’re the ones that have risked everything carrying out your orders, trying to hold the human race together. What’s on Cyteen isn’t like us.”

Bonner said, “Lieutenant, tell me, what do you care if Earth ceases to exist?”

He said, halfway into it before he remembered whose quote it was, “ ‘If Earth didn’t exist, we’d have to create one.’ “

Emory of Cyteen had said, a now-famous remark: “We all need to be from somewhere. We need a context for the genome. Lose that and we lose all common reference as a species.”

But the committee didn’t seem to recognize the source. Likely they couldn’t recall the name of Cyteen’s Councilor of Science—or conceive of the immense arrogance in that statement. Cyteen was terraforming, hand over fist. Ripping a world apart. Killing a native ecology, replacing it—and humanity—with its own chosen design. He’d seen the classified reports. And he wasn’t sure Bonner had. Mazian was taking those records to the highest levels of the Company and the UN.

A senator said, “We’re here to discuss technology. The fitness of a machine.”

“The fitness of the men who fly it,” Bonner said, “is also at issue.”

The pod reoriented. Flesh met plastics. Dekker tried to defend himself, but something grabbed his collar, held him. Someone shook him, and said, “Straighten up, you damned fool, or I’ll hit you again.”

“Trying to,” he told Ben’s hazy image, and tasted blood in his mouth.

“Why in hell?” Ben asked him. “Why in hell did you have to ask for me?”

“Dunno, dunno, Ben.” Blood tasted awful. He tried to get his breath and Ben shoved him back against the pillows. Ben looked like hell.

Ben still had his fist wrapped in his collar. Ben gave him another shove. “I can’t blame whoever shoved you in that simulator. You’re a pain in the ass, you know that? You’re a damned recurring pain in the ass!”

“Yeah,” he said. He didn’t want his lips to tremble, but they did, and tears stung his eyes. A long, long time he’d been alone. There’d been others, but they’d died, and Ben hadn’t, Ben wouldn’t, Ben was too hard to catch and Ben wouldn’t get himself killed for anybody. He trusted Ben that way. Ben was too slippery for the sons of bitches.

Someone shadowed the doorway.

“Need to check his blood pressure, sir.”

Somebody had said something about Have a nice trip. Someone who’d told him go to hell....

He caught at the bed. Caught at Ben’s arm as Ben started to get up and turn him over to the nurse. “No.”

“Your blood pressure’s getting up, Mr. Dekker.”

“Screw it. —Ben, —”

“Lieutenant.”

He swung his legs off the bed, made a try at getting up and the room went upside down. The nurse made a grab after him, he saw the blue uniform, and he elbowed it aside. He caught himself with a grip on the edge of the bed.

But Ben was gone. Ben had left him, and the nurse got a hand on his shoulder and his arm. “Just lie down, Mr. Dekker. Lie down. How’d he get in here, anyway? Visitors aren’t supposed to be in here.”

He didn’t know either. But a lot of things happened here that shouldn’t. And he hadn’t been dreaming. Ben had been there. He had a cut inside his lip and a coppery taste in his mouth that proved it, no matter what the nurse said about visitors. He lay down and ran his tongue over that sore spot, thinking, through the shot and everything, Ben’s here, Ben’s here... and knowing it was Sol Two where Ben had found him: Ben hated him; but Ben had got here, Ben talked sense to him and didn’t confuse him. Even if Ben wanted to beat bell out of him. He liked that about Ben—that for all ; Ben wanted to go on beating hell out of him, Ben hadn’t. Ben had held on to him. Ben had shaken him and told him where right side up was and told him to get there. Only advice he’d trusted in days. Only voice he’d wanted to come back to, since— since his crew died. Died in a fireball he wasn’t in. Couldn’t have been in, since he wasn’t vapor.

Somebody’d said, later, Enjoy the ride, Dekker.

He couldn’t remember who. Someone he’d known. But the voice had no color in his mind. No sound. And he couldn’t recover it.

They said, shadows leaning over him, “Need to keep that blood pressure down, Mr. Dekker,” and he said: “Screw all of you, I don’t need your help,” and kept his eyes shut.

Whine of mag-Ievs. You got that through the walls. There was light out there, but it didn’t diffuse, despite the distances across the huge sim chamber, where a solitary pod was working. There was a safety stand-down in effect. Lendler Corp techs were doing an inspection on this shift, remoting the pod from the number two access. You could see the light on, far across the chamber.

Easy ways to get hurt out there. Pods pulled a lot of g’s,positive and negative. Graff touched the cold plastics of the dead panel, drifting in the zero g, antagonizing an already upset stomach, and watched the pod, figuring how hard a body could hit, repeatedly, doing that gyrating course. Dekker was strong for his slight frame. Only thing that had saved him. God only knew how conscious he’d been, but enough he’d protected his head somehow. And his neck and his back and the rest of his bones. The meds who hadn’t seen the inside of the pod had said the belts must have come loose. But the belts had been locked together under Dekker, deliberately to fool the safety interlocks, by somebody who hadn’t left prints—unless it was the last man to use the pod, and that was Jamil, who hadn’t a motive that he knew. Belts locked underneath Dekker—otherwise the pod wouldn’t have moved. The MP’s report had said, Suicide is not ruled out.

Suicide, to have a MarsCorp councilor on your case?

Suicide, to call Tanzer a bastard?

Don’t let it get to you, Saito had said, when he’d called the carrier to tell them the hearing was over. Midge had hand-carried his report to the ship and a long transmission had gone out to the captain by now. Tanzer was going to rebound off the walls tomorrow.

But the report was at Sol One by now. So far as what he dared send the captain, the most urgent matter was one name, of everything related to the accident: Salazar. The rest was in Dekker’s file. Beyond that, Keu needed to know how Bonner and Tanzer had run the hearing; needed to know how his Helm Two had answered the questions, right or wrong.

Helm Two had underestimated Tanzer, that was the fact, Tanzer had thrown him a last-minute set of choices in which his refusal to go against Keu’s orders, and a lone lieutenant’s blind run through a mine-field, Tanzer had said it, might just have lost the program tonight, lost the war for the whole human race, literally, right in that hearing room this evening—if somebody wiser and better at politics couldn’t somehow take the pieces and put them together with more skill than he had mustered in front of that committee.

He was tired, God, he was tired, and he had had no business coming here. He wasn’t doing entirely rational things now, he’d sent word with Midge where he was going and put com on alert, but he hadn’t come to the Number Ones for aid and comfort and he was refusing to, knowing nothing they could tell him was of any use, since they didn’t know any more than he did what was going on. He’d made some critical judgments left and right of the course he’d hoped to hold in the hearing and in his dealings with Tanzer, and he was avoiding their input til he’d mapped out the sequence and sense of those judgment calls, that was what he suddenly realized was pushing his buttons right now—he wanted to know the answers; and if he could shove Bonner and Tanzer into a move of some kind, even an assassination attempt, he’d know, all right; he’d have proof: more than that, the senators might have it, before they left here at maindawn: Explain that one, cover another attempted murder, Bonner, while the committee’s still on station...

Otherwise, if Tanzer was only tracking him and more innocent than he judged, let Tanzer sweat what he was up to—looking for clues, maybe, trying to find something to prove Dekker’s case, something politically explosive. Legal troubles in Dekker’s past—it was all backgrounded, solved, just one of the connections Dekker had had and left when he left the Belt. He didn’t go off Sol Two, he took no leaves, but there had been no particular reason for Dekker’s name to rouse any anxieties in Defense—certainly no reason to fear him getting to the media. Dekker was allergic to cameras and microphones, Dekker certainly didn’t want publicity bringing his name up again, any more than Defense did; and evidently there’d been a decision to take Hellburner public if the test succeeded. So someone high in the Defense Department had said pull him.

That being the case—the line certainly led to Salazar; and Salazar lived behind the EC security wall, the same EC that they were fighting for. That was a worry, and a real one, if the woman had penetrated security channels and found out what Dekker was working on, and where he was.

There was—top of the list regarding Dekker’s injuries— Wilhelmsen’s crew. Dekker hadn’t been tactful. Dekker was, Pollard had said it, volatile. There was a lot of that in the crews they’d recruited—including the UDC test pilots. You could begin to wonder was it a pathology or a necessary qualification for this ship—or was it the result of ramming crews together in a handful of years, the few with the reflexes, the mental quickness—the top of the above-average in reaction time, who didn’t, even on a family ship, necessarily understand slower processers, or understand that such slower minds vastly outnumbered them in the population? He’d told Tanzer, You can’t train what we need ... he hoped he’d gotten that across at least to one of the committee, but there was no knowing—he’d never excelled, himself, at figuring people: he’d certainly failed to realize how very savvy Tanzer could be in an argument.

He had his pocket com. The captain might send him word at any hour, please God, and give him specific instructions, either for a bare-ass space walk or a steady-on as he was bearing and he’d rather either right now than chasing might-have-beens in circles. After a jump you got a solid Yes, you’d survived it. But right now he could wonder whether the FSO was still operating on Sol One, or whether something might have gone wrong at levels so high the shockwave had yet to hit Sol Two. For all he knew the committee had been the shockwave of a UDC power grab and he’d just self-destructed in it.

Or why else hadn’t they heard anything? Or why, according to the news that he had heard before he’d left the office, was Mazian still smiling his way from council to council in the European Union, and making no comment about the accident, except that a ‘routine missile test’ had had a problem.

The pod flashed by, unexpectedly, filling the view port.

His heart jumped. He watched the pod whip across the far side and felt queasy after the visual shock. Dekker’s pod had been running on the mission tape. Dekker had seen the accident. They’d treated him for shock, he’d gotten out of hospital and turned up here, at shift-change, in a pod repeating the exact accident set-up. On loop. Was there anything in that, but vindictiveness?

Higgins said only that Dekker had lucid moments. No recollection, most times no awareness even where he was. Cory Salazar had died out in the Belt. Dekker was back in that crack-up. Over and over and over.

Check-in records had listed no UDC personnel as in the area. The mission sims tape was checked out to Dekker—as mission commander, he’d had one in his possession. Dekker had been in hospital. One would have expected that that tape had been with his effects. Security should have collected it, with the tapes in all crews’ possession, living and dead. But Library hadn’t checked Dekker’s in: Dekker was alive, and unable to respond to requests for the tape, Security said, they’d decided not to seek an order to get it from his effects—which would have had the Provost Marshal’s staff going into Dekker’s locker while Dekker was alive, a violation of policy in the absence of charges.

A hatch door crashed and echoed at the distant end of the access tube. The lift had just let someone in. The Lendler Corp techs, maybe, moving up to this bay. But the light was still on over there. And the pod was still running, the mag-levs whiting out anything but the loudest sounds.

Damn, he thought, Tanzer might be a fool after all. He might have his answer, all right: and if he and his didn’t make the right moves now, he might become the answer. He’d gotten colder, standing here, and he had a sudden weak-kneed wish to be wrong about Tanzer—he hadn’t thought through what he’d done in the hearing yet, he wasn’t ready or willing to make gut-level choices in a physical confrontation. He closed his fist around the bolt in his pocket—he’d collected that from the desk; he drifted free and took out the pocket com he’d collected too. “D-g, this is 7-A11, sim bay 2. QE, C-2-6, copy?”

“7-All, this is Snowball, C-2-6, on it, that’s 03 to you, dammit, seat that door!”

Saito was on com. Saito must be lurking over Dan Washington’s shoulder and the pocket com was wide open now and logging to files on the carrier. Saito wasn’t as accepting of harebrained excursions as Dan was, Saito must have gotten uneasy, and, onto Helm Two’s side excursion, was probably calling Demas in, besides having Security closer than he’d set them. But they would or wouldn’t come in, depending on what Saito heard. Meanwhile he watched the hand-line quiver along the side of the lighted tube. Someone was on it, now, below the curve of the tube. Several someones, by the feel as he touched it.

First figure showed in the serpentine of lights, monkeying along the line. Not UDC. Their own. Flash of jewelry, light behind blond hair.

Friendly fire incoming, then. Not UDC: Mitch. He drew a breath, focused down off the adrenaline rush toward a different kind of self-protection, said to the com, “Snowball, easy on,” before Security came in hard. More of them behind Mitch: Jamil, Almarshad.. .Pauli. A delegation. The Shepherds didn’t have access to query over com. Saito was sure to give him hell; the Shepherds had tracked him, never mind Tanzer’s ‘boys’ might have—it wasn’t a good time he was having right now; and he hoped it wasn’t a breaking problem that had brought them here. He couldn’t take another.

He held his position as the Shepherds gathered in front of the open door, drifting hands-off on the short tether of their safety-clips, in the frosty-breathed chill and the low rhythmic hum of the mags. “Hear it was bloody,” Mitch said.

“How did you hear? What’s security worth in this place?”

Jamil shrugged, tugged at the line to maintain his orientation. “2-level bar. Aerospattale guys with a few under their belts. Saying Bonner’s pissed. Tanzer’s pissed. Bonner told some female committee member it wasn’t really important she understand the technicals of the accident, or the tetralogic, she should just recommend the system go AI.”

“Damn,” he said, but Jamil was grinning.

“Happens Bonner mixed up his women and his Asians. Turned out she’s Aerospatiale’s number two engineer.”

He had to be amused. He grinned. And he knew that via his open com, Bonner’s little faux pas was flying through the carrier out there, for all it was worth. So the J-G wasn’t the only one who could talk his way into trouble.

But that was one engineer and one company, with no part of its contract at issue: Aerospatiale was the engines, and they weren’t in question.

The Belter trash, as they called themselves, wanted to know how it had gone. Correction, they knew how it had gone. He didn’t know how they’d found him, didn’t know what they expected him to say. He hadn’t delivered. Not really. They couldn’t think he had.

“What are you guys doing here?”

They didn’t know how to answer, evidently: they didn’t quite look him in the eye. But maybe he halfway understood what was in their minds—a feeling they’d been collectively screwed, the way the Belters would say. And that together was better than separate right now.

“How did you find me?”

Mitch said, “Phoned Fleet Security. They knew.”