Devil to the Belt

CHAPTER 10

INSERT card please,” the neutral voice said. The phone clicked. Dekker held the receiver and waited. And waited. Meg and Ben and Sal were in Testing. His day didn’t start until 1015, when he had an appointment with Evaluations. Which meant he could go to the gym to try to settle his breakfast and his nerves; or try a phone call, see if he could get a personal call through to Sol One, on FleetCom, in spite of the security crackdown.

“Ens. Dekker.” Human voice this time. “Is this an official call?”

“I’m trying to call my mother.” He hated to sound like a strayed six-year-old. Mother always felt strange to him. Mama he’d long outgrown, though it came naturally to Belter ears. “It’s a next-of. There was something on the news. —Look, can you put me through to Lt. Graff? He knows the situation.”

“—I’m not being obstructionist, Ens. Dekker. I’m aware of your situation, but I am required to get an authorization for personal calls.”

God, everyone in the solar system knew his business. “Yeah, well, can you do anything, FleetCom? The lieutenant’s not outstanding easy to find this morning.”

“I’ll page him.”

“Everybody’s paged him,” Dekker muttered. “I’ll card in every little bit, I’m going down to gym 3A.”

“I’m sorry. The gym is now off limits to Fleet personnel. Use the one on 3-deck, section 2.”

“How do I get my clothes out of the locker in 1A?”

“Check with the office on 3-deck.”

Everything was on its ear. “Thanks,” he said glumly, and went four sections and took a lift in—it was about as much exercise as he wanted, just walking it. But one thing he’d learned in his tour in the Belt, if you could crawl to the gym, you crawled there and worked out; and if you got the spooks or the nerves—you went there and burned the chill off, you didn’t let your mind go in loops—never let that start, not when you worked in cold, dark places, with things that went bang all too commonly.

The office there had his gym clothes, everything in sacks with old locker numbers. They had his name on the gym records. They had lockers already assigned to him and his crew....

He hadn’t had a run of things that worked in weeks. It gave him a moment of ridiculous cheerfulness. He had the whole gym to himself for the hour, everybody else being in sims or in special briefings—he wasn’t fondly looking forward to his own session with the meds upcoming. Warm up the sore spots and go in there with the adrenaline burned out of him, was the plan—lunch on carbohydrates and go into Evaluation at 1300 warmed-up and hyped, and blow hell out of their damn tests... he could do it. The doctors had kept him flat on his back too long, he’d dropped five kilos on the hospital food, and Custard Charlie Tyson had gotten a couple of good hits in, but he could do it if he could get the chill out of his bones.

Light workout with the hand weights raised a sweat.

Coordination was shot. That wasn’t good. He leaned on his knees a moment, trying to get his wind back and the rubbery feeling out of his arms, getting madder and madder at the meds, at the UDC, at the Fleet that had busted Graff over to a desk job and put in a bastard with an Attitude—

Temper wasn’t helpful. Demas would say that. Calm down, Dekker. Use your head. Adrenaline’s for speed, not stomach acid.

Yeah. But it didn’t help when the knees wanted to cave in, when you had serious worries about three fools who’d gotten themselves into a Situation for his sake, and had a CO who’d flat warned him he didn’t give a damn for their survival—

Stomach acid, hell, he wanted to beat the shit out of Porey, that was why he was shivering. And if he did that, with all the esoteric consequences of people he knew and didn’t know, it wouldn’t stop bastards from being bastards, and wouldn’t get Porey out of here, he’d only make it worse.

He didn’t want to be in this situation. He didn’t want to be anybody anyone else relied on for anything: he was schitz as hell. He was crazy. Ben knew it. He didn’t see why Beet Command couldn’t see it. He didn’t know why he’d ever been made an issue, or put where they’d put him, except the Shepherds had needed somebody crazier than they were to press their differences with the insystemers— and people who wouldn’t have given a damn about him back in the Belt, found a use for him here. He wasn’t Paul Dekker to them: he was this to one group and that to another and nobody really knew shit about him....

Hi, Dek, good to see you, Dek, how you doing? He couldn’t stand it any more—because Ben was right, they didn’t know him, didn’t know he was a screw-up, a damn dumb pusher-jock who didn’t think before he opened his mouth. Only value he had to anyone, the fact that his nerves jumped faster than average. Only thing he was good at, that ship—that was all that had mattered to him; Pete and Elly and Falcone had had themselves, and they’d gone together— the Fleet had thrown them together, they’d tested high, that was all. And they were good and they’d worked together, but he was burned out this morning, he didn’t even know whether he’d ever felt anything with them but comfort, and that was cheap—

He didn’t know why Ben had decided to take the damn test this morning. Ben had skuzzed out on him. If Ben had held out, Ben might have persuaded Sal and Sal might have reasoned with Meg—

Like hell. He hadn’t seduced Meg out here. At least Meg and Sal weren’t his fault. The ship had done that. Some lying bastard in the Fleet had done that, who’d told Meg they’d give her a chance—

Yeah. A chance. Thanks.

Drug made you seriously spaced. You had sensor spots patched all over you, in places that made a body most emphatically wonder if it was procedure or the femme tech having a few loose circuits of her own—

“Do it where?” she remembered asking. But the examiner, that was a guy, nice-looking greyheaded man, asked her to match up all these shapes and holes—God, she hadn’t done this one in years. “I’m not good at this,” she said. “I don’t fly little cubes.”

Neither did he, he said. At least he had a sense of humor. So she ran the test and she tracked on discrimination stuff that flashed on screens, they moved her to another station and belted her in and the computer spun her around and around—easy piece, nothing hard at all. Til the floor dropped out from under her and then the thing went through its paces.

Wanted you to draw a straight line? Right.

Wanted you to get up and walk one?

Yeah. Maybe.

Sit in the spin chair again. Wait for the light and press the button while the chair spins?

Siren blast. Right before the light flash.

Dirty trick, sumbitch. Dirty trick. Flash again. Flash, flash. Pause. Flash.

Hold the yoke and the toggles, make the VR lines meet? This was a good one. Hadn’t done this one before....

Weight escaped his balance and bounced. Dekker ended up on one knee, caught a breath and waited for the room to stop spinning before he went to pick it up and rack it and lock it in. Good show he was going to make for the meds in an hour. He drew long breaths, sat down and felt after the towel to mop his face.

Stars came out of a vast dark. Lights on the panel glowed with information....

It was in his head, the same as, in the Belt, you got to seeing rocks in your sleep, not rocks as they existed in the deep dark, but the way they were in the charts, the courses they ran, falling sunward, faster and faster, and then more and more slowly outward—

He wiped the sweat that stung his eyes. He heard somebody come in, challenged at the office for numbers and names. “Yeah,” he heard someone say, far away and a door shut...

Echo. Door opening and closing. He’d seen a shape. He’d talked to someone. But he couldn’t remember to whom. He chased the memory. But the voice that came back lacked all tone:

Just checking. Do what you were doing....

Who in hell would he take that answer from?

Piece of nonsense. He could screw this test. They wanted him to discriminate a damn lot of advancing lines and dots? Easier if the sensors didn’t itch.

He muttered, “Quick way to solve this. Who programmed this?”

Examiner said, “Don’t talk.”

“This is a piece of shit, major. Begging pardon.” Zap. “Damn arcade game.”

“Watch that one.”

“This is fuckin’ armscomp! I’m not testing for this—”

Zap.

“You’re not damn bad, lieutenant... But you’re not real modest, either.”

“I’m damned good. But I’m not killing things.”

“You have a moral objection?”

He put hands and eyes on autopilot and left them to search for screen-generated threats. At definable intervals. Random number generator in the virtuals, for God’s sake. “I got a moral objection. I got a moral objection to getting shot at.”

“Exactly what we’re looking for.”

He thought about that reasoning. He thought about screwing the test, while he was zapping stupid dots. Faster now. “Screw it, you severely got a pattern in here.”

“I’ve been telling them that.”

“Tell you something.” Zap. “I’m supposed to be in Stockholm. Somebody skuzzed my records.” Zap. “Matched me up with the lunatic.” Zap. Zap-zap-zap. “Oh, hell.”

“See? Not all a pattern. You missed that one. Getting cocky, were you?”

Faster now. “Son of a bitch,” he said.

“You have two hands, two keysets. Brain can do both operations. Hands can. How good are you?”

“Damned moonbeam partner of mine,” he muttered. “You give me programming. I’m telling you—anywhere else is a waste—” Zap. “I don’t want combat. —I know what this mother’s doing—”

Zap/zap/zap—

Hand on the other pad. Interrupt to Command level and invoke the chaos o/i off the internal generators. Obsolete as a security device, but certainly an improvement on this antique.

Resume. Let them figure that one. Let their techs come in and patch it if they didn’t like it.

“Where did you get that code?”

“Telepathy,” he said. “Sir. I told you. I belong in Stockholm.”

Watch the lights, track the dot, do you have any blurring of vision, Mr. Dekker?

Have you had any headaches?

Stand here, stand there, look at the light, bend over, Mr. Dekker...

He escaped with a grudging Release on his card and an admonition to take his mineral supplements, got to a phone outside the med station and put the card in to check the readout for messages. Lunch, he thought, might bring people to check then- messages. Might get a phone call, however muzzy, from Meg, telling him how she was doing.

None from Graff; none from Meg or Ben or Sal. No authorizations. Just a reminder of his appointment in Evaluations.

And a note from the gym that he hadn’t carded in his preferred time slot and was he interested in team volleyball?

Hell.

Marine guards at every intersection. Corridors everywhere had a decided chill. God, there were even guards in the messhall....

He started in, saw Mitch and Pauli and the guys at the tables and they saw him.

Upset him. He couldn’t say why. He walked by for politeness’ sake—”Sit down,” they said, offering him a chair. But he couldn’t face lunch of a sudden, in this place—too many faces in the room, too many people trying to be friendly who didn’t know all that was going on with him, and the guards and the UDC watching him from the other end of the room. He muttered, “No, I’m on medicals right now, just time for a soft drink, thanks.”

“Got anything back on the tests?”

Wasn’t a thing stirred in C-barracks but what everybody was in it. “No. Not yet.” He patted the back of Mitch’s chair and made his escape to the rec-area foyer, where he could card a soft drink and a granola bar that tasted like cardboard and hit his stomach like lead.

They probably were talking about him back mere. And he couldn’t talk to them, couldn’t deal with them until he knew what he was, whether he was going to clear the tests himself, whether his partners were passing theirs—he wasn’t anyone, until he knew who he was working with, what he was, where he’d be, what they’d assign him to—

Fly again, yeah. Porey would see to that. Front of the line-up. Or the bottom—at Porey’s discretion. He’d opened his damned mouth, he’d forgotten for a critical second he had partners who could be in danger from what he did or promised—

Couple of UDC guys came over and carded a candy bar. Names were Price and McCain. Techs. They hardly even looked at him, but he was sweating. He kept thinking, If I’d kept my mouth shut, if I’d done what the colonel wanted, if I’d only once ducked my head and played the game—

Tray banged somewhere. The room felt cold. His mother had said, Paul, what is it with you? Why do you always end up in the middle of it?

He wished to God he knew that. He wished to God he could go over there with the other guys and sit down and be what they wanted him to be, but he couldn’t even tell them what he’d done or what he was waiting to find out—

Please God, they’d Aptitude somewhere down the list, somewhere out of immediate usefulness, and he could go maybe to Chad’s crew, patch things up with them, he couldn’t think of a match-up else he could make that might have a chance. He should have offered that to Porey, Porey wasn’t crazy—he didn’t want to lose another ship, for God’s sake: Porey probably would have called it a good idea— good for morale, pull the program together. UDC and Fleet.

He should still propose that to Porey—talk to Chad’s guys himself in advance, if he could get them to talk to him...

God, why couldn’t he think about people? He was all right with machines, all right with anything that reacted in just one way when you touched it—-he could understand that. He just—

couldn’t figure how to stop himself before he said things. When he opened his mouth it was wrong, when he didn’t say anything it was wrong, he never got it figured out, some people just understood him and most didn’t, and the ones that did were always in trouble because of the ones that didn’t. Sum of his life, that. Evaluations said he was smart. So why couldn’t he get that right? Like go in there and apologize to Porey and take what he had coming?

Because when he walked up against a guy like that something went snap inside, he went hyper and he couldn’t think, that was the whole damn problem—

So calm down, don’t do that?

It was why the Fleet had recruited him, it was what they trained him to do, split-second, hyped and half crazy, and they wouldn’t understand he didn’t come with an off switch...

Except maybe Graff understood. But Graff wasn’t answering pages today...

Damn him.

A little hyped. They said, You can relax now. But there wasn’t any sleep. Just the boards, alive with lights. Hands knew where to go and went there. Hell of a way to teach. But they said, “This is a sim tape. Familiarization. It won’t prioritize for you. Just give you the handedness of the boards....”

“Got it, yeah. No trouble.”

“Don’t fight the sims, Kady. You want to bring that pulse down.”

“Yeah. I’m not fighting it.” Happy as hell. God. I want this thing, don’t want to screw it up—God, I don’t want to screw it—

“Calm.”

“Yeah, yeah.” So don’t get excited, Kady, don’t go after it, ride with it, just float and enjoy it—

“Lot better, lot better, Kady. How’re you doing?”

She laughed. Laughed like an idiot.

“You all right there? You know what you’re doing?”

Her hands were reaching. She wasn’t doing it. But she didn’t object. The sequence made complete sense. “Jawohl, mate, piece of easy, there.”

Clumsy direction, then. Her hand shook. “Shit!”

Boards went dark. Direction stopped. She grabbed for the B-panel and the fuse conditions, and the examiner said, “Abort, abort, it’s all right.”

“What did I do?” Her heart was going half light. The drug made her light-headed and she hated the sensation.

“Tape error. Not yours. Relax.”

Made her mad. They had no right to screw up. But you didn’t get mad while you were at the boards, you paid attention. All attention. Save mad for later.

“Ms. Kady.” New voice. “That was a system abort. Don’t worry about it. You can stand down.”

“Thank you.” Cold and calm. Same as you did when something went seriously wrong. She flipped the board-standby switch. Habit. Fool, she thought. It was a toy-board anyway.

“Thank you.” Another delay. “You can get up. Go to the room with the red light showing. You are in .9 gravity.”

“I think I can remember that,” she muttered.

“Some don’t.”

“Thanks.” Anger was the immediate reaction. She was embarrassed to beg; but, putting her foot off the platform: “Do I get another try on that abort?”

A hesitation. Somebody had blanked a mike. Then: “How are you feeling?”

“Good enough for another try.” Self-disgust. “If I can get one.”

“Get back in the chair, then.”

Thank God. She was all but shaking. And damped that down. Fast.

“Pulse is up, Ms. Kady.”

“Yeah. Re-start.”

“Hyped as hell,” came a mutter from the earplug. Faint. Then at normal volume: “The yoke is an automated assist. It is changing its responses. Do you perceive that?”

“Yeah.” Absolute relief. They hadn’t told her the sim could do that. “But I got my own numbers. Let’s shorten this. What are you, IMAT?”

“IMAT or CSET. A or B, select your format, input your actual license level.”

“No problem.” She took B, ran her numbers in, hoping she remembered them, hoping she was still that sharp, and watched the readout for response profiles. “Shit! Excuse.” 12.489 sudden g’s on a tenth of the yoke range. She cut it back, re-calced in her head, thinking she could have a seriously pissed examiner if she dithered too long, but dammit, she needed the fine control on that hairline correction in the sims and you had to have it wide enough if they threw you an emergency. Hell of a thrust this sim was set for—different than shuttle controls by a long way...

Forgot to ask if time counted. Too late to spare a neuron. You did it right, that was all, you did it real, hell with them... set the controls to your own touch and take the time it took, they should have effin’ said if there were criticalities not on the instruments—it was a new kind of adaptive assist, piece of nice, this was.... All kinds of interlocks and analyses it could give you. Mining in the Belt, you adapted your jerry-built and most egregiously not AI ship by whittling a new part out of plastic, and what you saw on your boards was a whole lot of hard-to-read instruments, not an integrated 360° V-HUD with the course plot and attitudes marked in glowing lines. This thing was trying to find out your preferences, arguing with you when its preconceptions thought it knew you. But it would listen. —Damn it, machine, soyez douce, don’t get cheek with me ... used one of these things ten plus years ago, she had, but, God, that had been an antique, against this piece...

“All right.” She calmed her breathing rate. Panel lights lit. Scopes lit. “Go!”

Numbers hemorrhaged.

“God!”

“Nothing yet?” Dekker asked the desk on his mid-test break; and the secretary in Testing said, “No, sir. No result yet.”

“Are they out yet? Have they left?”

“I don’t think so, sir.”

He tried FleetCom. He had a new comtech and had to explain everything again. “I just want to know if the lieutenant’s ever checked in.”

“He’s in a meeting,” FleetCom said.

“Has he gotten his messages?”

“I think He has. Excuse me....”

On hold again, when all he wanted to do was hang up; and he didn’t want to offend FleetCom by doing that before the tech got back to him. He wished he hadn’t called. Five-minute break from his own Evaluations, it was 1456 by the clock, the granola bar and soft drink were wearing extremely thin, and he was regretting it. //he could get off the phone, he could get down the hall to the vending machines.

No word on his partners. Aptitudes was a four-hour session. You could take a little longer coming out from under the trank if you reacted....

God, he didn’t know what to—

“Ens. Dekker? Sorry to keep you waiting. I did get hold of the lieutenant. He says see him in his office at 1400. That’s 21a, Admin.”

“I’m in Evaluations til 1700. I’m in the middle of tests—”

“Excuse me....”

Hell!

He put a hand over his eyes, he leaned against the counter and waited. Looked pleadingly at the secretary across the desk, then. “Do they ever take this long on Aptitudes?”

“I don’t know, sir. I’ve only worked here for four...”

“Ens. Dekker? I’m sorry.... the lieutenant says he can’t talk at 1700, he’s got another meeting.”

“Will he clear a phone call for me to One? That’s all I want.”

“I think he wants to talk to you about that.”

Shit. “Look—” He shut out the light and the secretary’s presence with the palm of his hand. Tried to think. But he kept seeing fireballs. Hearing that door clank. “Is that all he wants? The phone call? Or does he want—look, can / talk to him online? Two minutes.”

“He’s in a meeting, sir. Just a moment.”

He was late by now, by two minutes. You weren’t late in Evaluations. You didn’t antagonize the examiners. Who were UDC to begin with.

“The lieutenant says he needs to talk to you. He says at 2200.”

“2200.” Graff didn’t plan to sleep, maybe. “Right. Thanks. Yeah. I’ll be there.”

“My partners aren’t out of Test yet,” Dekker said. “They went in at 0600. It’s 2202 and Testing doesn’t answer questions....”

“They’re all right,” Graff said, quietly, from the other side of the desk. “I can tell you that much.”

“So what do you know?”

“That they’re being very thorough.”

“They’re not reacting to the drug or anything—”

“No. They’re all right. I did check.”

It wasn’t regulation. He wasn’t convinced. He wasn’t at all convinced.

GrafT said: “On the other matter—”

“I just want to call my mother. Make sure she’s all right.” He kept his frustration to himself. He didn’t want to push Graff. He was running short of friendlies in Admin.

Graff said, “I got your message. I understand. There’s a good possibility her phone calls are being monitored by the police. Possibly by someone less official.”

“Who?”

“All we know,” Graff said, “is the same thing you saw in the news. We’re investigating. I could wish this lawyer weren’t involved—personally. Is your mother a member, a contributor—of that organization?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. —Arc you asking me her politics?”

“You don’t have to answer that.”

“She hasn’t got any politics that I know of. She didn’t when I lived there. I don’t think she would change.”

“She was never politically active. Never expressed any opinions, for or against the government, or the Earth Company?”

Bit by bit the line of questioning made him uneasy. It wasn’t like Graff—at least as he knew Graff—to probe after private information. He didn’t think it was necessarily Graff’s idea—and that meant whoever was investigating. So he offered a bit of his own reasons: “I was rab when I was a kid, the clothes, the haircut—Kady says I was a stupid plastic, and I guess I was; but I thought I was real. I used the words. My mother—got hot about it, said politics was all the same, didn’t matter what party, all crooked, she didn’t want any part of it—told me I was a fool for getting involved. They’d shot these people down on Earth. I think—”

Meg was there, he almost said. But that was more than Graff needed to hear—if a deep spacer cared about the Company, the Earthers trying to emigrate...

“Think what?” Graff asked.

He couldn’t remember his thread for a moment. He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. She’s just not the kind. Works a full shift, mostly over, if you want extras you have to do that—and that was all she wanted. A nice place. Maybe a station share. Security. That kind of thing. You wouldn’t get her involved in anything.”

“You know the Civil Liberty Association?”

“No, sir. I never heard of them.”

“They’re the ones funding your mother’s lawyer. They’re headquartered in Munich. They support lawsuits in certain causes, that’s mostly what they do. Their board of advisers has some of the same associations as the Sun Party, the Peace Front, the Karl Leiden Foundation—the Party of Man—”

He shook his head. “I don’t know anything about them. I doubt she does.”

“They’re Earth-based Internationals: of several related groups, only the Civil Liberty Association and the Human Research Foundation maintain offices off Earth. They apparently do each other’s business. So I understand. I’m no expert in terrestrial affairs. But I thought you should know, this organization does have political overtones that aren’t friendly to the program or to the Fleet.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“I only thought you should be aware of the situation.”

Deeper and deeper. He thought of saying, I’m in no position to restrain her from anything. I can’t do your politics for you. But it was all on their side and nothing on hers. And probably the lieutenant didn’t want a blunt question, but it wouldn’t be his first offense this week. “So hasn’t the Fleet got strings it might pull?”

“Possibly.”

“So what do you want me to say to her?”

“Nothing. Nothing on that score. I just want you to be aware of these things.”

Why? In case of what, for God’s sake?

“Do you still want to call her?” Graff shifted a glance toward the phone on his desk.

He had never believed of himself that he was smart, no matter what Evaluations told him—if he was smart, he wouldn’t be here now, put on the spot to make an excruciatingly personal phone call in front of a man he’d thought he trusted, whose motives he didn’t now entirely understand.

And, God, he didn’t want to talk to her... he was fast losing his nerve.

“Do you want to do that?”

“Yes, sir,” he said, before all of it evaporated. “If you can get me through.”

Graff took up the handset and punched in. “FleetCom. Route this through our system, FSO, Sol One. —Number there?”

“97...2849. Dekker, Ingrid. Routing can find her.” 2210 mainday and she ought to be home. She didn’t have a nightlife—at least she hadn’t had, when he’d been living at home.

“Takes a bit,” Graff said, and gave him the handset. “It’s going through, now.”

He held it to his ear. Listened to the clicks and the tones. His heart was beating fast. What in hell was he going to say? Hello, mother?

Click. Click-click. Beep.

“There’s a noise on the line.”

“A beep?”

He nodded.

“Somebody’s got it monitored. FleetCom’s picking that up.”

Hell. It was going through. He listened for the pick-up. But the answering service came on instead. Ms. Dekker is out at the moment. Kindly leave your name and number....

You’d know. “Mother. Mother, this is Paul. I’m sorry to hear about the trouble you’re having....” It was hard to talk coherently to a machine, hard to think with that steady beep that meant the police or somebody else was listening. “I don’t know if I can help, but if you just want to talk, I’m here. I’d like to talk to you. I’d like to help—” He wondered if he should mention money. But while he was thinking, it clicked off and connections broke, all the way back along the route, leaving him the sound of static.

“She wasn’t home,” he said, and gave the handset back. “I left a message on the machine.”

“Anything that comes through—you will get. I promise you.”

“Thank you.” They’d taught him to say thank you. Please. Yes, sir. No, sir. Stand straight. Answer what you’re asked. They’d told him he wouldn’t fly if he didn’t. His mother hadn’t had that advantage in dealing with him. He didn’t remember he’d ever said Yes, ma’am or Please or whatever boys were supposed to answer to their mothers. Fuck you, he’d said once, in a fit of temper, the week she’d bailed him out of juvenile court, and she’d slapped his face.

He’d not hit her. Thank God, he’d held it back, he hadn’t hit her. Only respect he’d ever shown her, that last year... and if they shipped him out from here—the only respect he might ever have a chance to show, except that phone call.

“Forgive me,” the lieutenant said. “I have to ask this—in your judgment, is it possible—is it remotely possible she did make threats against MarsCorp?”

Ingrid Dekker wasn’t a walkover. She wasn’t going to stand and take it—not without handing it back. “If they threatened her. But she wouldn’t—wouldn’t just take it into her head to do that, no, I don’t believe that.” I have to ask this...

At whose orders... sir....

“Are you close to your mother—still?”

God. He didn’t want to discuss it. But the lieutenant had been on his side, Graff if anybody was still his lifeline. He didn’t want to put his mother in a bad light. She was the one in trouble and she needed all the credit she could get. He said, looking at a spot on the front of Graff’s desk: “I was a pain in the ass, sir. She said if I went to the Belt I didn’t need to come back. I—was sincerely a pain in the ass, sir. I was eighteen. I was in with a rough crowd. —I was stupid.”

Graff didn’t say anything to that, except: “Have you corresponded with her?”

“No, sir.” He stared fixedly at that spot on the desk, wondering if they might search his room and bleed his datacard for it, next use he made. Maybe they already had. “Not recently. —I’ve got about four, five k I’d like to send over to her account. If I could do that. She’s not working, she’s going to need the money.”

“I’ll talk to Legal. See what the procedures are. —As I said, we’re going to be looking into the case. If mere are strings to be pulled, maybe we can pull them.”

“I appreciate that, sir.”

“Are you ready to get back to work?”

“Yes, sir.”

Graff keyed something on the deskcomp. Glanced at it. “I don’t know if they can get your friends back to quarters this watch. But you’re their unit commander, you have access there on any shift, if you want to check up on them.”

Not back to quarters? Not in this watch? His heart did a tic and a speed-up. He looked at Graff, met a level, I-can’t-tell-you kind of stare.

“What are they doing?” he asked Graff. “They’re hi there for Aptitudes—it’s a four-hour test, for God’s sake...”

“You have access there.”

“I’ve been over there. They wouldn’t tell me a damn thing!”

Graff had never been one to hold back information, not under Keu, and not under his own administration. Now...

“I suggest you go over there,” Graff said. “That’s all I can say.”

Didn’t like the damned drugs. Didn’t effin’ like the floating feeling. Told you stuff you didn’t want to hear. Told you you’d effin the if you screwed it... and Ben didn’t want to the, he sincerely didn’t want to the...

“Fire!”

His heart took a jump, he felt neg g, he went spinning away—you should feel blood pooling in your head and your feet and he didn’t, didn’t feel anything right except cold breeze on his face and his lungs getting air again—

He could see light. Felt somebody holding his sleeve. He was fiat on his back in g and Dekker was holding on to him, saying, “It’s all right, it’s all right, Ben—”

Wasn’t who he wanted to wake up in the arms of. He stared at Dekker, with his heartbeat still thumping away like explosions, and recalled they were surrounded by dots all but six of which were trying to kill him— except he was in bed and Dekker wasn’t flying the ship.

He took slow assessment of this fact. He took a look around the ceiling of a disgustingly barren room, recalled signing his name, and them telling him Sal was in, and him talking to the tech and screwing with the sim, because he’d been mad as hell and wanting to get court-martialed and wanting to go to bed with Sal Aboujib if he had to get shot at to do it—only viewed backwards, as he had to see it now, that sequence didn’t highly make sense.

Neither did Dekker sitting on his bedside. He’d come here to sit with Dekker. He wasn’t in the hospital. He was in the sims lab and Dekker, with this scared look on his face, was holding him by the wrist.

“Ben.”

“Yeah?” He began to think he’d better wake up.

“Ben. You all right?”

Dekker asking really worried him.

“Don’t agitate him,” somebody else said. “You know the rules.”

“Trying to give him a heart attack, what’s the damn hurry?”

There wasn’t any answer. Dekker took hold of his hand. Said, “Shit...”

Dekker holding his hand? He’d really rather not. Unless he was dying. He didn’t feel like he was dying. He stared at Dekker, made his fingers bend and his hand draw back and decided in this moment of clarity that he wanted his foot on the floor.

“Ben. Ben, —don’t do that.”

Froze right there. Face down in the bend of Dekker’s arm. And couldn’t think how to get out of that situation.

“Skuzzed,” Dekker said. Light came back. Dekker swore at nothing in particular. That was all right. Saved him the bother.

“Aboujib did pass,” he wanted to know.

“Yeah.”

“Meg?”

“Yeah. I got three of you. Same condition.” With which Dekker got up and stalked out.

That was Dekker, all right. Boy had a lousy temper.

“Shit!” he heard from the hall.