Devil to the Belt

CHAPTER 7

MAINDAWN and in the office early, trying, before the mainday rush hit, to make sense of the reports from the designers and the sims check. Graff took a slow sip of vending machine coffee, keyed the next page on the desktop reader. The report writer liked passives: ‘will be effectuated,’ ‘will be seen to have incremented,’ and especially convolutions: ‘may have been cost-effective in the interim while result-negative in the long-range forecast—’

Graff keyed the dictionary for ‘forecast.’ It said something about 1) terrestrial weather patterns and, 2) prediction. The latter, he decided, but keyed it up; and found something, as he’d suspected, different than his own definition of ‘prediction.’ These were the people who designed the computers and the software that ran the sims, for God’s sake, and they were giving him messages about Old Earth weather patterns and fortune-telling?

He tried to read these reports out of Tanzer’s staff. He felt responsible in the captain’s absence. He worried about missing something. He worried about not understanding Tanzer face to face, and these were the only lessons in blue-sky usage on his regular reading list.

‘Effectuated/ he could guess from particles. And he didn’t have that small a vocabulary. He didn’t use that many semicolons in his reports; he wondered was his style out of fashion; and he wished not for the first time that he’d had at least one of the seminal languages—given the proliferation of derived meanings, that was what Saito called the problem words, cognates; and metaphor. All of which meant a connection between ‘forecast,’ planetary weather, and the Lendler Corp techs who, between working on the sims and writing reports, danced a careful and convolute set of protocols between his office and Tanzer’s—’effectuate,’ hell. Obfuscate’ and ‘delegate’ and ‘reiterate, but nothing effectual was going to happen with that investigation except Lendler Corp gathering evidence to protect itself against lawsuits from the next of kin.

Save them the trouble. Stick to Belters. Belters didn’t sue Corporations, Belters didn’t have the money or the connections to sue Corporations.

But come into their territory—

Lendler didn’t want to do that. Didn’t want to interview the Belters. Even when he had it set up.

The phone beeped. He hoped it was Saito coming on-line: he could use a linguist about now—and he could wish Legal Affairs hadn’t left their office to a junior: the Fleet needed to enlist a motherworld lawyer, was what they needed, maybe two and three of them, since they never seemed unanimous— he’d had the UDC counsel on the line last night, talking about culpabilities and wanting releases from the next-ofs—

“Lt. Graff?” Young male voice. Familiar male voice. “Col. Tanzer on the line.”

He’d never been in the habit of swearing. But association with the Belters did suggest words. He kept it to: “Put him on, Trev.”

Pop. “Lt. Graff?”

“Colonel?”

“I’m looking at the file on Paul Dekker. Just wondered if you had any last-minute additions, before we write our finish on this accident business.”

“I’d appreciate that, colonel, as soon as we finish our own investigation.”

“Dekker’s been released from hospital, I understand, on your orders.”

Possibility of recorders. Distinct possibility. “Released to Fleet medical care. His blood showed high levels of tranquilizer and pain medication. My medical staff says it was excessive. Far excessive. The word malpractice figured in the report.”

A moment of silence. “Blood samples taken after he was in your doctors1 care, lieutenant. I’ll inquire, but you’ll excuse me if I choose to believe our own personnel. File a separate report if you like. Call the Surgeon General. It’s completely of a pattern with the rest of your actions. But you may find some of those chickens coming home to roost very shortly.”

Another one for Saito. But the gist of it got through, quite clearly.

Tanzer said: “The phone isn’t the place for this discussion. I’ll see you in my office in ten minutes. Or I’ll file this report as is, without your inspection, and add your objection in my own words.”

Moment of silence from his side. A moment of temptation to damn Tanzer for a bastard, hang up, and call the captain on uncoded com. He might be a fool not to have done that: Tanzer made little moves, niggling away at issue after issue, day after day; damn the man, he could be recording the conversation right now. But caution won. Follow the forms. “I’m on my way,” he said.

The sojers had this perverse habit called reveille, which meant after the com scared hell out of you and you hauled yourself bleary-eyed awake, you ran for the breakfast line before the eggs disappeared—Meg had gotten into that routine on the ship coming here, got a few days spoiled on the shuttle, and here she and Sal were again—standing in line, the only females in sight, with two guys who drew their own kind of attention.

Orientation, the lieutenant had told her, outside hospital. Keep him busy. Push him, but not too hard. Don’t let him off by himself.

Which meant they were a kind of bodyguard, she supposed. Against what, she wasn’t sure—against Dek’s own state of mind, high on the list: too much death, Sal put it, for anybody to tolerate. Everybody he’d gotten really close to, except Ben and her, had died; he’d watched it happen every damned time; and last night he was telling her to try to de-enlist, get out of his life?

Only convinced her how seriously she meant to follow the lieutenant’s orders and keep a tag on him.

So Dek was supposed to show them around, get them acquainted with the classrooms and the VR labs and the library, get their own cards picked up. Lab schedule, soon as they could get settled, hell and away different than she’d learned flying, but that was the way they did it in the Fleet: Dek said you took a pill and they hooked you up to a tape and they fed the basics of the boards into you by VR display like programming some damned machine—

“Confuses you at first,” Dekker was telling them, in the breakfast line, the other side of Ben. “Reactions cross what you know, you face it the next day and you don’t remember learning something new—-your hands know. They use it just to teach you the boards. The brain takes a while to get used to it—a while to know it knows. Handful of people can’t take the pills. But it’s rare.”

She listened. She tried to imagine it.

“They’re experimenting with that stuff over at TI,” Ben said. “Hell if they’re going to mess with my head. I’m a Priority 10. Programmer. Security clearance. Damn chaff, feat’s what’s going on, it’s that screwed-up EIDAT they’re using—drop me in here and my level isn’t in the B Dock system, oh, no, all it knows is pilots and dock monkeys, so I got to be one or the other, right? Right.” Dollop of synth eggs onto Ben’s plate. “So it lets some damn keypusher screw with my assignment. Does somebody over at Sol wonder where I am? Not yet. Personnel isn’t supposed to think, oh, no, they trust the EIDAT. I got a post waiting for me, God hope it’s still waiting. —What the hell is that stuff?”

“Grits,” Dek said.

“Was it alive?”

“It wasn’t alive.” Dek slid his tray to the end of the line and drew his coffee.

“You want me to carry that?” Meg asked.

“I’m fine,” Dek said, and stuck his card in the slot. “That’s present and accounted for. Laser scans the bottom of the containers, figures your calories and your allotments— dietician’s worse than—hell.” Reader’s read-line was blinking.

“You have a message,” the checkout robot said, as if Dek couldn’t read.

“Scuse.” Dek carried his tray over to a corner table, quiet spot, Meg was glad to note, following him, while Ben waited for Sal to check through—a skosh too many Shepherd eyes in this place for her personal comfort, all picking up every move they made. Hi, Dek, they’d say soberly, sounding friendly enough. Giving her and Sal the eye, that was a natural—women being severely scarce here; and sort of glossing Ben.

But me UDC boys looked at Ben and looked at them and heads sort of leaned together at tables, she could see it going on all over that other corner of the hall, thick with UDC uniforms.

Dek set his tray down. “I’ll check that message blinker. Probably your stuff. Hope it’s your stuff.”

As Sal and Ben showed up with their trays and set them down.

“What’s he doing?” Ben asked with a glance over his shoulder. “You don’t ask what a message is before breakfast, you never ask what a message is before breakfast—”

“Thinks it could be our accesses.” Meg set her tray down and cast a glance at Dek over by the phone, a skosh anxious, she couldn’t even tell why, except Dek had had this edge in his voice: he was On about something, she read it in his stance and his moves, and she hadn’t been able to read all the codes that had popped up. She said, still on her feet, “Ben? You capish the code on that blinker?”

“Accesses stuff,” Ben said, sitting down.

“Uh-oh,” Sal said.

Understatement. Serious understatement. Dek hit the phone with his open hand. “Scuze,” Meg said, and went that direction.

Dek snatched out his card, and ricocheted into her path. “What is?” she asked, catching at his arm. “Dek?”

“They clipped me, Tanzer’s fuckin’ clipped me, the son of a bitch.” Dek shoved her and she didn’t know whether to hang on or not—her hand stung as he blazed past her. But that didn’t matter. Dek going for the door like a crazy man—that seriously mattered. Dek knocking into guys inbound—

Mitch, for God’s sake—

Dek got past. Hot on his track she hit the same obstacle, who didn’t give way a second time. Neither did the other guys. “Kady,” Mitch said, not friendly. “I heard they’d gotten desperate.”

“I got a seriously upset partner—out of my way, dammit!”

“So what’s with Dekker?”

“Something about getting clipped.”

“Shit!” Mitch said, and: “Pauli,” to the big guy behind him, Shepherd from the hall yesterday. She remembered. “Haul his ass back here. Fast.”

“What’s going on?” Sal asked as she and Ben showed up with a handful of other curious.

“Dekker’s been clipped,” Mitch said. “Just calm down, we’re going to see what the lieutenant says about this.”

Hell if she understood ‘clipped,’ she didn’t know Pauli from trouble, she knew Mitch too damn well, but Mitch’s outrage at least sounded to be on Dek’s side and stopping Dek seemed to be a priority on their side too. Pauli-whoever took out in the direction Dek had gone, and she went with, at a fast walk.

First comer showed an empty hall; but Pauli broke into a jog for a side corridor as if he knew where he was going, she caught up, and spotted Dek, all right, traveling at a fair clip himself.

“Dek!” she called out; and he stopped, took a damn-you stance and stared at them cold as cold.

All right. That was the surly young sumbitch she knew. She panted, “You got friends, chelovek, capish? Slow down. Deal with people.”

Dek looked half poised to walk off. Pauli said, “Is it true? They pulled you?”

“Yeah.” Dek’s mouth didn’t look to be working real well, he clearly didn’t want to talk; but about that time Ben and Sal showed up with some of the other Shepherds from the messhall, Ben with:

“What’s going on? —Dekker, are you being a spook?”

“Ben,” Meg exclaimed. Sal said the same. But Dek made a disgusted wave of his hand and managed to unlock his jaw.

“Nothing’s wrong, nothing’s the hell wrong. Sorry I got you here. Sorry I got you into this.”

A sane woman had to get things off personals. Fast. “Ben, Sal, this is Pauli, friend of Mitch’s; Pauli: Ben Pollard, Sal Aboujib. Say how-do, and somebody answer a straight question, f God’s sake. What’s going on here?”

“The damn UDC,” Dek said, “that’s what’s going on. Tanzer’s just tossed me out of the program.”

“He can’t do that,” Pauli said. “Screw him. He can’t do that.”

Somebody else said, “No way, Dek.” And another one:

“Mitch is on his way to talk to the lieutenant right now. No way that’s going to stick.”

Dek wasn’t highly verbal. He was white, and sweating. Sal said, quietly, with her arm in Dek’s: “You want to go back to the room, Dek?”

Ben said: “Screw it, he’s got a breakfast sitting back there, we all got breakfast back there, if nobody’s grabbed h.”

Leave it to Ben. Sal had a crazy man halfway turned around and stopped from strangling the colonel and Ben wanted his effin’ breakfast. Dek was looking at Ben like he was some eetee dropped by for directions.

“You mind?” Ben asked him impatiently.

“Yeah. All right,” Dek muttered. And went with him.

God, both of them were spooks.

“I’m looking at Dekker’s record,” Tanzer said, tapping a card on his desk, “right here: the medical report and his disciplinary record—including his violent behavior here in hospital, his defiance of regulations in the sims—”

“His behavior, colonel, was thoroughly reasonable, considering the level of drugs in his system. Drugs with possible negative psychological impact considering his history— which is in that file. That from my medical experts. He has grounds for malpractice.”

“This is the accident report.” Tanzer shoved a paper form across the desk at him. “Sign it or don’t, as you please. I’ll spare you the detail. I’m not calling the hospital records into question, I’m not charging him with flagrant violations of security with that tape, I’m not charging him for disregard of safety regulations. I am concluding there was no other person involved in the sims accident but Ens. Dekker.”

He kept every vestige of emotion from his face. “How ate you proposing he got into that pod?”

“I’m supposing he got in there the ordinary way, lieutenant, the same as any fool can climb in there. He just happened to be on trank. These are the records of his admission—he was flying before he got in there.”

“Was put in there.”

“He was in illegal possession of a tape that should have been back in library—”

“He had license to possess that tape, colonel. He’d been in hospital, he’d just been released, in condition your medics knew when they let him out with a prescription drug in his system—”

“Whatever drugs were in his system, he put there, before he decided to go on a sim ride.”

“Pardon me if I don’t rely on those doctors’ word, colonel, or their records.”

“Rely on whatever you like. I’ll tell you one thing: Dekker’s barred from the sims.”

“He’s going in there on my orders, colonel.”

“Check your rules, lieutenant. The sim facility and its accesses are under UDC direction.”

“You restrict one of my people from the sims, colonel, and the case is going clear to the Defense Department.”

“Then you better start the papers moving, lieutenant, because he’s barred. And if you give a damn for your program you won’t fife—that’s my unsolicited advice, because you don’t want him in public. Take my word for it you don’t want him in public. But until I get cooperation out of your office, you don’t get cooperation out of mine.”

“Do I understand this as blackmail? Is that what you want? My signature, and Dekker’s back in?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way. But let’s say it might signal a salutary change of attitude.”

“No deal. No deal, colonel. And you can stand by for FleetCom to be in use in fifteen minutes.”

“Good. About time you woke up your upper echelons. Tell them they’ve got a problem with Dekker. A serious problem.”

Trays were still sitting. They came into the mess hall and guys stopped and stared in that distant way people had when they were trying to spy on somebody else’s trouble. Talk stopped, mostly, and started again, and Dek didn’t look at anybody, didn’t talk to anybody, just sat down at his place at table and put the straw in his orange juice.

Ben gave her a tight-jawed look. Table was still all theirs. Pauli and the guys had gone off toward the breakfast line, but they hadn’t made it: they’d gotten snagged, talking to guys over by the wall, all Shepherd. There were UDC guys on the fringes—tables were either UDC or they were Shepherd, Meg marked that suddenly: there wasn’t another mixed table in the whole damned hall.

She didn’t like the quiet. Didn’t like the feeling around them. Dek was having his eggs. Ben was having toast. Sal gave her a look that said she was right, everybody else was crazy but them.

Young woman, blond hair in a shave-strip, came up, set her tray down, said, “You mind, Dek?”

Dek shrugged. That one sat down. “Trace,” the interloper said, looking her way, and offered her hand across the tray as a dark-skinned Shepherd kid took the seat next to Sal: “Aimarshad. Friends of friends.”

Pauli sat down, him with no tray, and said, “It’s us Tanzer’s after. —Pollard, you mind to answer whose side you’re on?”

Hell of a question, Meg thought. She watched Ben frown and think, then say, with a cold sweet smile on his face: “Hell, I’m not in Tanzer’s command. I’m Security-cleared. I’m Computer Technical, out of TI. I’m due somewhere else, and if I get there, frying Tanzer’s ass’d be ever so little effort. So why doesn’t somebody get me out of here?”

“Hear you were a good numbers man,” Pauli said.

The frown came back. “Damned good,” Ben said. Ben wasn’t lying. “But I’m not flying with him. I’m not flying with you guys. I’m not friggin’ going near combat...”

“Small chance you’ll have in my company,” Dek said under his breath. “If they get this mess cleared, it’ll just be one more thing they find. Dammit, Pete and Elly—what in hell is it with me that—”

Pauli’s hand came down on Dek’s wrist and shut him up. Thank God, Meg thought. She didn’t know the danger spots here, but her personal radar was getting back severe oncomings.

Hadn’t even gotten back to the office before he had a hail from behind and a “Lieutenant, we’ve got to talk to you—”

No doubt what it was before Mitch and Benavides overtook him. Graff said, “Dekker’s banned from the sims, is that what this is about?”

“Tanzer’s doing?” Mitch asked—and didn’t ask was it his.

“Col. Tanzer,” he reminded them. “In the office, Mitch. Let’s keep it out of the corridors—”

“It’s in the corridors, sir, it’s all over the messhall. The UdamnDC doesn’t care where it drops its—”

“Mitch. In the office.”

“Yessir,” Mitch said meekly; and the delegation trailed him down the corridor and around the corner to his own door. He could hear the phone beeping before he even got the door open. He got to his desk, picked up the handset.

“Graff here.”

Saito’s voice. “J-G, we have a problem. Paul Dekker’s been restricted.”

“I’m aware, I assure you. Word to the captain. FleetCom. Stat. Code but don’t scramble. Tell the captain we’d urgently like to hear from him.”

“Aye.”

He hung up. He looked at Mitch. “Where is Dekker right now?”

“Messhall,” Mitch said. “Granted Pauli and Kady could catch him.”

“Catch him.”

“He wasn’t damned happy, and he was headed spinward.”

“You catch him. You sit on him if you’ve got any concern about this program.”

Quiet from the other side. Then: “We enlisted. We signed your contract. We’ve got plenty of concern about this program, lieutenant, we’re damned worried about this program, —we’re damned worried about a lot of things.”

“First time I’ve asked this, Mitchell, Follow orders. Blind. Just do it.”

Mitch looked at him a long time. So did the others. Finally Mitch said, “We’ll follow orders. But what the hell are they doing, lieutenant? D’ you hear from the captain? Do we know anything? What’s happening at Sol?”

“You want it flat on the table—I don’t know what the situation is, I don’t know whether (he captain’s tied up in the hearings or what. I’m asking you, I need you to go back to your labs, follow your orders, show up for sims—get everybody back to routine. Like nothing’s going on. Like nothing’s ever gone on.”

Long silence then. Long silence. And finally Mitch broke contact.

“Yeah,” Mitch said. “You got it. You got it. But Dek’s damned upset.”

“Tell Dekker my door’s open, I know what happened and I’m on it. May take a bit. But he’s going back in there.”

Opened his mouth on that one. If you made a promise like that to these men, you’d better plan to keep it.

Like dropping into system, he thought; sometimes you had to call one fast. He thought it over two and three times, fee way you didn’t have time to reflect on a high-v decision— bat the fallout from this one was scattered all though the future, and he didn’t know whether he was right to promise a showdown—for one man.

Damned if not, he decided. You could count casualties by the shipload—in an engagement. But if it was your own service taking aim—damned right one man mattered.

Whole roomful of tranked-out fools sitting at consoles, making unison reaches after switches, unison keystrokes, as far as Ben could tell. “Damn spacecases,” he said, with a severe case of the willies. Deepteach, they called it, VR with drugs and specific behaviors involved; and hearing about it wasn’t seeing thirty, forty people all sitting there with patches on their arms and faces and elsewhere and in private places, for all he knew: forty grown people making identical rapid moves like the parts of some factory machine. “Talk about Unionside clones.,..”

“Just basic stuff,” Dekker said. They were in the observation room, looking out through Spex that reflected their disturbed faces—disturbed, in his case, and Meg’s and Sal’s. Dekker, professional space-out, tried to tell them it was just norm.

“Spooky,” was Sal’s word too. “Seriously spooky.”

Ben asked uneasily, “They do computer work that way?”

“Basic functions,” Dekker said. “Basic stuff. For all I know, they do; armscomp, longscan—’motor skills/ they call it. They teach the boards that way. Some of the sims are like that, when there’s one right answer to a problem. Anything you can set up like that—they can cut a tape. It’s real while you’re seeing it. Damned real. But you move right. You do it over and over till you always jump right.”

Wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear. He said, “I’m not taking any damn pill. I’m already right. Righter than any guy this halfass staff has got, I’ll tell you. You let them muck with your head?”

“Just for the boards,” Dekker said, and cut the lights as they left. “Just to set the reactions. ‘Direct Neural Input,’ they call it. You do the polish in sims, and you do that awake—at least you’re supposed to...”

Two years he’d known the guy and he realized he’d never actually heard Dekker’s sense of humor. He decided that was a joke. A damned bad one.

Meg asked, “So what if it sets a bias that’s not right, once upon some time?”

“You aren’t the only one to worry about that. Yeah. It’s a question.”

“So what are they doing? Set us up to jump on the average we’re right?”

“That’s part of what they call ‘documentation’—meaning there’s nobody who’s flown the ship.”

“Nobody?” Sal asked; and Ben nearly managed unison.

“Docking trials, yeah. They got that part. Straight runs. Milk and cookies. Rotate and reorient. Do it in your sleep. But not with armscomp working. You got enough problem with system junk.”

“Like a damn beam-push through the Belt.”

“You got it. At that v it’s a lot like that. Only where we’re going—there aren’t any two-hundred-year-old system charts. You get stuff off the system buoy when you drop into a known system, where there’s regular traffic, but out at the jump points, there’s chaff you just don’t know’s there. And maybe stuff somebody meant to dump—ship-killers, scan-invisible stuff, you don’t know.”

“Shit.” Cold chill went down Ben’s back. “These guys ever made a run with Mama shoving you?”

“A lot of these guys have done it—if you mean the combat jocks. Yeah. That’s what it’s like. And we just run ahead and blow the sumbitches they dump out of the carrier’s path.”

“You’re kidding.”

“That’s what she does.”

“That’s the damn stupidest thing I ever heard!”

“That’s why they like us Belter types. Shipkillers and rocks—no difference. Same gut feeling for how rocks move— same thing that makes a good numbers man or keeps a Shepherd out of the Well, that’s what they want.”

“Hell if, Dekker, hell if. Not this Belt miner!”

“You a good miner?” Dekker had the nerve to ask.

“A live one! On account of I never let MamBitch boost us like a missile—except once. In which you figured, you son of a —”

Meg said, “Hell, Ben, they give you guns....”

“Yeah, and it won’t work—that’s what they’re doing in there, they’re brainwashing those poor sods, they brainwashed him, for God’s sake, blow rocks out of the way, hell! They got that on those tapes?”

“Not yet,” Dekker said, just as quiet and sober as if he was sane. “But they’d like to. Get the reactions right on one run, so they can bottle it and feed it into the techs— word is, that’s what they want to do, ultimately. Get one crew that can do it. And they’ll teach the others. Hundreds of others.”

“God,” Sal said, and hooked a thumb back at the human factory. “Like that!”’

Dekker shrugged. “That’s what they think.”

“That’s what they think,” Ben muttered. The human race was shooting at each other. Dekker said Union was building riderships, too—

“I thought the other side was where they wired you to a machine and taught you to like getting blown to hell. Not here. Not on this side, no way, Dek-boy. What the hell are we fighting for? That’s Union stuff in there!”

“They developed it, what I hear.”

“God.”

“ ‘Not yet,’ “ Meg quipped.

“Damn funny, Meg.”

Ben looked at Dekker, looked at Meg and at Sal, with this sudden sinking feeling—this moment of dislocation, that said he was surrounded by crazies, including the woman he went to bed with; including every hotshot Shepherd tight-ass in this whole establishment, and the CO, and the lieutenant.

“What’s it do to your reflexes?” Meg said.

Dekker said, “Screws ‘em to hell. Scares shit out of you. Like I said at breakfast. Hands move, you don’t know why, you threw a switch, you don’t know why. Moves are right. But you got to convince yourself they are. You can’t doubt.”

“Any chance it came around on this Wilhelmsen?”

Dekker didn’t answer that for a second or so. Ben wasn’t sure about keeping his breakfast. “Yeah,” Dekker said. “But that’s the one thing you never better think. You never mink about it. Not in the sims. Especially in the real thing—”

Dekker’s voice wandered off. He stood there with his band on a door switch and looked off somewhere, just stood there a breath or two—then drew a larger breath and said, “Worst enemy you’ve got—asking whether your moves are right. You just can’t doubt—”

“Yeah,” Ben said, with the sudden intense feeling they had to get him out of this hallway before a guard saw him or something. “Yeah, right. Why don’t we go tour somewhere else? Like what there is to do on this station?”

Dekker looked at him like he’d never thought of such a thing. “Don’t know that there is. This isn’t One.”

“What I’ve seen, it isn’t even R2. What do you do for life in this can? Play the vending machines?”

“Not much time for social life,” Dekker said faintly. Which reminded him there hadn’t been outstanding much in TI, either. Even attached to Sol One, where there was plenty.

“Not much where we’ve been,” Meg said. “Either.”

They walked down the hall in this place full of labs where human beings learned to twitch like rats, to guide ships that moved too fast to think about, and you couldn’t help thinking that helldeck on R2, for all R2’s faults, had been the good old days....

“So what do you want to do, Dek-boy? I mean, granted we all get our wants, —what’s yours?”

Scariest question he’d ever asked Dekker. And Dekker took a while thinking about it, he guessed, Meg sort of leaning up against Dekker, one visible hand on his arm— where the other one was might have something to do with his concentration....

But Dekker said, real quiet, “I want to be the one cuts that tape. I want to be the one that does it, Ben.”

He wished he hadn’t asked. Sincerely wished he hadn’t asked. Sincerely wished Meg would put her hand somewhere to disrupt the boy’s concentration and shake him out of his spook notions.

“There a chance?” Meg asked, quiet too; and he thought. God, it’s in the water, they got to put it in the water—

Dekker didn’t answer that one right off. “If they let me back in the sims, there is...” And a few beats later. “But I’m not doing it with you, Meg. I can’t do it with you.”

Silence from Meg. Then: “Yeah.”

“I don’t mean that.” Dekker stopped cold, took Meg by the shoulders and made her look at him. “I mean I don’t want to. I can’t work with you....”

Meg didn’t look real happy. Meg was about as white and as tight-lipped as he’d ever seen her. Meg shoved his hands off. “You got a problem, mister? You got a problem with me not being good enough, that’s one thing, you got a problem about setting me on any damn shelf to look at— that’s another. You say I’m shit at the boards, that’s all right, that’s your damned opinion, let’s see how the Aptitudes come out. I’ll find a team and I’ll fly with somebody, we’ll sleep together sometimes, fine. Or I’ll wash out of here. But you don’t set me on any damn shelf!”

After which Meg walked off alone down the hall, sound of boots on the decking, head down. Not happy. Hell, Ben thought, with a view of Dekker’s back, Dekker just standing there. Sal was with him—he wondered that Sal didn’t go with Meg; he was still wondering when Dekker lit out after Meg, walking fast and wobbling a little.

“You make sense out of either one of ‘em?” he asked Sal.

“Yeah,” Sal said. “Both.”

Surprised him. Most things came down to Belter and Inner-systemer. So maybe this was something he just wasn’t tracking. He asked, for his own self-preservation: “Yeah? I know why he’s following. I don’t know why she’s pissed.”

Sal said, “Told you last night.”

“He didn’t say she couldn’t fly. He said—”

“He said not with him. Not on his ship. She’ll beat his ass. That’s what he’s asking for.”

Talking was going on down the hall, near the exit. Looked hot and heavy.

Sal said, “She’ll pass those Aptitudes. You never seen Meg mad.”

He thought he had. Maybe not, on the other hand. Meg was still lighting into Dekker—boy was a day out of hospital, shaky on his feet, and he didn’t look as if he was holding his own down there.

Then Dekker must’ve said something, because Meg eased off a little.

Probably it was Yes. Probably. Meg was still standing there. Meg and Dekker walked off together toward the security door, so he figured they’d better catch up.

The other side of the door, Meg said, “We got it worked out.”

Ben said, “Not fair, man’s not up to this.”

Dekker looked as if he wanted holding on his feet, as was. But Dekker said, “Going to try for that tape, Ben. You want to test in?”

He threw a shocked look back at the doors, where roomfuls of walking dead were flying nonexistent ships. “To that? No way in hell. Non-com-ba-tant, do you read? No way the UDC is risking my talent in a damn missile. I’ll test for data entry before I do that—”

“What’s Stockholm got?” Sal asked. “They say Pell’s got a helldeck puts Sol to shame. Got eetees and everything.”

“Yeah?” He was unmoved. “I’ve seen pictures. Can’t be that good in bed.”

“Got real biostuffs, just like Earth. There’s Pell, there’s Mariner Station—”

“Yeah, there’s Cyteen going to blow us to hell or turn us into robots. Don’t need to go to Cyteen—our own service is trying to do it to us...”

Seriously gave him the willies, that did. Get into his mind and teach him which keys to push, would it?

A programmer didn’t need any damned help like that.

No answer, no answer, and no answer. Graff was beyond worrying. He was getting damned mad. And there was no place to trust but the carrier’s bridge, with the security systems engaged—but workmen had been everywhere, the UDC had very adept personnel as capable of screwing up a system as their own techs were of unscrewing it—and it was always a question, even here, who was one up on whom. “I know the captain knows about Dekker,” he said to Saito and Demas and Thieu—age-marked faces all; and the only reassurance he had. “Pollard, Aboujib, Kady all shipped in here—you’d think if he is moving them, they’d be couriering something, a message, two words from the captain—”

“Possibly,” Saito said, over the rim of her coffee cup, “he feared some shift of loyalty. Dekker is the key point. None of them have met in over a year. Friends and lovers fall out. And Pollard is UDC.”

“They came. Dekker’s leavetaking with Kady was— passionate to say the least. Pollard joined him here. Protocol says none of this is significant?”

“They’re not merchanter. That’s not what’s forming here.”

Puzzles, at the depth of things. Silence from the captain, when a word would have come profoundly welcome. He looked at Demas, he looked at Armsmaster Thieu, he looked at Saito. Com One. If Victoria spoke officially, it was Saito’s voice. If the Fleet spoke to Union or to blue-skyers, it was Saito, who made a study of words, and customs, and foreign exactitudes—and psychologies and expectations.

“What is forming?”

Saito shrugged. “That’s the question, isn’t it? I only point out—you can’t take our social structure as the end point of their evolution. Blue-skyers and Belters alike— their loyalties are immensely complex. Ship and Family don’t occur here. Only the basis for them. Difficult to say what they’d become.”

“Prehistory,” Demas murmured.

“Prejudice?” Saito asked softly.

“Not prejudice: just there’s no bridge between the cultures. The change was total. Their institutions are seminal to ours. But they don’t need kinships, they don’t need to function in that context. Their ancestors did. We’ve pulled our resource out of the cultural matrix—”

“Matrices. Wallingsfordian matrices.”

God, they were off on one of their arguments, splitting theoretical hairs. Demas was a hobbyist, and the carrier’s bulletin board had a growing collection of Demas’ and Saito’s observations on insystem cultures. He hadn’t come shipside for Wallingsfordians versus Kiimer or Emory.

“Saito. Is the captain setting up something you know about?”

A very opaque stare. “I’d tell you.”

“Unless you had other orders. Has the captain been in contact with you? Am I being set up?”

A moment more that Saito looked at him and never a flinch. “Of course not.”