Devil to the Belt

CHAPTER 11

2345H and all Dekker wanted was his own bed, didn’t want to talk to anybody, just skuzzed through the door into a darkened barracks, went straight to his quarters around the corner and down the corridor, and got undressed on autopilot—wasn’t even thinking clearly when he heard the stir outside. A knock came at his door and he stared at it and blinked.

Second knock. He thought, What in hell? and opened it, on Mitch and Pauli and Trace and God-only who else the shadows behind them were.

“Want to talk to you,” Mitch said, and Dekker leaned his forearm on the doorframe and reasoned that even if he could talk them into leaving him alone now, it was too late, the adrenaline he thought he’d run out of was up again, sleep was gone, leaving just caffeine-ragged nerves and a body shaking with chill and exhaustion. Didn’t have a shred of embarrassment left, Trace there and all—he just said hoarsely, “What?”

“The rest of your guys didn’t come in?”

“No.”

“Dek. What’s going on?”

“I don’t know what’s going on, I don’t know any more than the rest of you guys.” Struck him then, though, that a lot of the aforesaid guys had risen to his defense in the messhalI, a couple of them had gone to hospital and a lot of them had suffered serious inconvenience on his account—so they had some right to knock on his door in the middle of his sleep and want a piece of his hide.

Mitch asked: “Is it true they’re going to bust your guys right into active? They’re going to put Pollard and Kady and Aboujib straight in?”

Wasn’t hiding any damn thing around here. He’d been trying to get the same admission out of Testing and he couldn’t do it, or find out who the order came from that had shoved his crew straight out of Aptitudes into the board-sims—he stared at Mitch a beat or two, muttered, “Something like.”

“ ‘Something like.’ They’re going to take Kady’s hours for legit?”

“Mitch, I don’t know what they’re taking for anything, nobody’s told me a damn thing, I don’t know what your source is, but it’s more than I know...”

“So where are they right now?”

“In the labs sleeping it off. They started in at 0600 and they got through somewhere around 2200, that’s all I know, except they’re Aptituded in, that’s the only official word I have on anything.” He got short. His temper was on the edge. But he hadn’t reassured anybody. And maybe they’d heard something: he hadn’t been in the rumor mill all day, he’d been chasing around in places rumors didn’t get to— back and forth between offices and Evaluations. And rumor was evidently saying for fact what he suspected and couldn’t get the labs or the techs to admit to....

Shove them up into Mission Ready, with him?

God, Porey wouldn’t do that. Porey’d said himself that he wouldn’t lose another ship: the Fleet couldn’t afford it. They weren’t going to do that.... They couldn’t do that....

“Rumor is,” Jamil said, “the Fleet thinks your guys have the stuff, so they’re just going to go with them, put them right in on the pods—”

“They can’t do that,” Dekker said. It came out a thin, helpless kind of voice. “No way. They haven’t got ships to throw away on a notion like that—”

“Rumor is,” Mitch said, “they were running some kind of new tape off Pete and the guys during the mission, rumor is the Fleet thinks they can take that tape and sub it for the whole damn training sequence—”

Legs nearly went out from under him.

“Seems,” Jamil said, “they wanted crew that hadn’t been biased by all this prior training—”

“Shit, no....” He couldn’t feel anything below the gut. He got a couple of breaths and managed to stay on his feet. “This is shit, guys, I don’t know where you got this, but this is shit. No way are they going to do that...”

Trace said, “First we got Tanzer, now we got a guy thinks he can program us like computers?”

“Where’d you hear this stuff?”

“In the slightly off chance,” Mitch said, “that we’re dealing with bugs, we decline to answer that in specific. But we thought you’d like to know.”

“Shit—” He wasn’t doing too well with words. His teeth started chattering. “I got to talk to the lieutenant....”

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

“Good luck with that,” Trace said.

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

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

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

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

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

“They aren’t damn b-bad...”

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

“They survived.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Go on,” he said, “out.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Like hell. Like hell, lieutenant, sir.

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

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

“Did you know? What do you know?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Possibility she didn’t know?”

“Possibility she didn’t know or didn’t want to say. It would extend legal rights to the child. She took full financial responsibility. She had the child—again, her choice.”

Graff frowned, revising attitudes. He had no idea who his own father was, but his mother had had a cheerful account of possibilities, all from one ship—who had not the least liability in the matter: not for him and not for his cousins of the same stopover. Who might even be half-sibs, but who cared?

Earth certainly did.

“Mother,” said Saito, “has nothing to do with ship-loyalty. Not in the least. Unitary family. He grew up in a two- or three-room apartment alone with one woman. No sibs, no cousins, no other kin—not an abnormal situation. Not the local ideal either.”

Claustrophobic, what he could feel about it. He watched Saito take a drink and sail the bottle back to him.

“Dekker did not get on well in school,” Saito said. “Fell in with a group of young anti-socials—read, quasi-rab—and got caught vandalizing station life-support—a series of smokebomb incidents, as happened. One might assume it was their idea of political statement.”

“A very stupid one.” He had read the file, though not with Saito’s interpretation. Sabotaging one’s own life-support hardly qualified as intelligence—and Dekker was far brighter than that. Or should have been.

“He got very little education. It’s all classroom theory, mere. Very little hands-on. Dekker doesn’t learn by lecture. His episode with the court nearly had his mother fired and deported, for a minor out of control—”

On a merchanter ship, it would have had the youngster scheduled for a station-drop and a go-over by psychs. Possibly with mother or cousin in tow, but not absolutely. There was no use for such a case aboard—

But Dekker was not insane. Quite remarkably sane, considering his upbringing. Graff took a sip and frowned, passing it on to Demas.

“She spent her personal bank account on lawyers and bond for the boy’s behavior,” Saito said. “She enrolled him in vocational training. Electronics, her own profession. He ducked out of that and got a position pushing freight. Lied about his age. Made very little money, but he was out of trouble. He went back to school—probably found out he needed the math for a license—and apparently became an upstanding citizen, though by this time he was in remedial in all his subjects....”

“One brush with the rab. And no other troubles,” he said, “until the Belt.”

“Until he absconded with Alyce Salazar’s daughter—with whom he’d been a correspondent since his return to school.”

“Mmmn,” said Demas, “the miraculous reform.”

“And no record there,” Saito said, “until Cory’s death. A model citizen. Solvent—”

“On Ms. Salazar’s money.”

“But solvent. A hard worker. He had been on Sol before he left. Had, one suspects, a habit of pushing himself beyond the legal limits on his license....”

“Certainly a talent,” Graff murmured, thinking. .. “Why did no one at Sol ever Aptitude him?”

“With that score in social responsibility, I don’t think anyone ever thought of tracking him for ops.”

“A mortal waste.”

“Earth has a million more who want the slot. They can afford human waste.”

“Dekker’s a statistical anomaly.”

“Especially in that population. But they didn’t recognize the profile. Sports or trouble, that was their analysis. And he was off the team very quickly. He wasn’t physically adept, of course. And temper didn’t serve him well. You do not frustrate that lad. But you know that.”

Morbidly interesting, Graff thought, to know what a profile like his own might have meant—in the motherwell. “Pressure on the genome.”

Demas muttered: “Emory? Or Wallingsford?”

And Saito: “Don’t we fight this war for that distinction?”

“Who knows why we fight? Because we stayed by the Company? But what’s the Company? Not wise, nor representative of the motherwell. Nothing I’ve met tells me that answer.” Demas passed the bottle again, to Saito.

Graff asked, “Can we help his mother? We’ve civilians working in FSO. Maybe she could be employed there.”

“There’s that peacer contact. She certainly won’t pass our security clearance with that attachment.”

The bottle came back to him.

“Because she’s naive and desperate, she’s a security risk? She wouldn’t have access to the FSO lunch schedule.”

Saito said: “Being Dekker’s kin and outside our wall is a security risk. And there’s the vid. The Dekker affair may have died out of the media—but watch them remember it now. Command will be extremely reluctant to solidify that association. The peacer connection—”

“Our employing her could be an interesting embarrassment to their side.”

“And there’s the claim of harassing Salazar.”

A most uncomfortable thought occurred to him. “You don’t think Salazar could have hired Ms. Dekker’s lawyer, to control both sides of the lawsuit?”

“Not legal, of course—to pay both sides’ legal help. That much is true even in Sol System.”

“Possible, though. Isn’t it? Their system of exchange makes a private transaction hard to trace.”

“Oh, it’s even possible the peacer groups see Salazar as a way to their objectives; possible that the money is flowing to this conflict from the peace and the defense committees. Mars is relatively leftist, relatively isolationist. They see their interests remote from the EC as a whole. Pursue some of these groups deeply enough and you come out the door of their opposition.”

“Moebius finance,” Demas said. “These groups survive on fund-raising. Particularly their executives and staff. How could these people survive without each other?”

Completely paranoid.

“The enemy of my enemy,” Demas said, and took the bottle up, “threatens both our livelihoods. And of course the Fleet is innocent in this game. Earth’s parliaments and congresses understand Mazian. Mazian gains command of R&D. Of Sol Two. God, one wonders what traded hands.”

Graff thought privately, and dared not say, even to them: Our integrity. Our command. Mazian was going to fill the captaincies with his choices—

Porey among the first.

Fingers felt all right. Wasn’t sure about the ownership of the hand, though. Schitzy experience, that was. Meg held her eye from blinking with one set of fingers and tried to apply the pencil without blinding herself—Dek had been kind enough to make a supplies run from the quarters to the lab-dorm, only thing she’d asked of him last night: Get our makeup, God, we got to look like hell—

“Dek was a skosh bizzed last night,” she said to Sal, who was putting earrings in, stealing a bit of mirror past her shoulder. “Don’t you think?”

“Man’s doing all right.”

“You?”

You had to catch Sal like that, blindside. Sal met her eyes in the mirror, wide-open.

“So, Aboujib?”

Sal said, scowling, “Scared as I hoped to be, give me a damn field of Where-is-its? and a: Some of these things are rocks, Aboujib, and some of these things are missiles? I never memmed a field faster in my damned life—”

“Pass?”

“Hey. I didn’t have a heart attack. —Kady, I got seriously to talk to you about your sojer lessons. They’re severely real, these sumbitches.”

She would have turned around. But mirrors was the best place to catch Sal. “Truth, Aboujib. You want to go back to tile Hamilton?”

She saw the hesitation. The little nip of a lower Up. “Without?”

And had this moment with her heart up in her throat. She’d passed, dammit, they’d told her. Finally got a chance at a ship and a guy she got on with, and, dammitall, here was Sal pulling in the other direction, she saw it plain.

And it was a lot of hours with Sal, a lot of bad times and a lot of good, but on the other hand there was Dek—there was Dek, who—God....

Sal’s frown had gone. The lower lip rolled out in a rueful sulk. “I dunno, Kady, I dunno how you talk me into these things.”

“Aboujib, come serious. You want to be back there.”

“I tell you what. I want, I seriously want, a little damn couple finesses on that simulation. They got no them-check, there’s not a damn interset macro in there—maybe they been getting this thing from Shepherd types. Ought to ask a freerunner about rocks, Kady, ought to ask us how not to go boom in a fire-track—”

“I’m not asking that.”

“Well, I’m not the hell going back to the Hamilton. Leave you here with the guys?” Frivolous. Deliberate. The mask was back and Aboujib’s long eyes were half-lidded. “I lay you bets, Kady.” Flick of a nail against a large earring. “Ben didn’t flunk that mama. Not our Ben. Scare hell out of him the way they did me—and they get a class A per-for-mance. So with this child. Miner nerves, here. Don’t tell me fire-track. They’re saying I got to set up the positional? Somebody else is going to have his finger on the fire-button? Shit-all. I want the guns, Kady.”

“Effin’ right I passed, Dek-boy. No question I’d pass if I wanted to. Ap-ti-tuded, hell, they put me in armscomp, are you satisfied?”

Dekker wasn’t. He sincerely didn’t want that. He watched Ben shaving in this dormitory the labs afforded their test subjects and kept his chilled hands in his pockets.

“Sorry doesn’t cover it. I know. But—”

Ben looked around at him. “You’re worried, Dek-boy. Tell me why you’re worried.”

He wasn’t sure he ought to say that either—since Ben didn’t know; since self-doubt was the deadliest creature you could take into the program. The program was full of egos. Ben’s was fairly healthy.

“So what’s the matter?” Ben prodded him.

He had to say something—because somebody would, back in barracks. “Say the Fleet has that new program—say they came up with this tape stuff...”

“You mean what they gave us wasn’t reg?”

He was supposed to be a fast thinker. He wasn’t doing well this morning. Mute as a rock, he was.

“Look, Moonbeam, what in hell are they up to? Gives a guy a real uneasy feeling, that look of yours, and you’re the lousiest Har I know of.”

“It’s supposed to work, that’s all I know.”

Ben gave him a long, suspicious stare.

“All I know,” Dekker said; and Ben said, “Hell if. What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing but they want results. Fast. And the heat’s on my tail. But it doesn’t get to you guys. It doesn’t.”

“Yeah? They put you in command, did they, of the whole friggin’ Fleet?”

“No. Porey said it. They don’t want to lose another ship. And I swear to you, —I won’t lose another crew.”