CHAPTER 18
HIS mother had said often enough, You don’t care, Paul, you just don’t care about people, there’s got to be something basic missing in you— Maybe there was. Maybe he didn’t feel things other people did. Maybe machines were all he came equipped to understand, all that was ever going to make sense to him, because he couldn’t stay away from them... he honestly couldn’t live without doing this...
He couldn’t turn it loose. When he was away from the ship, he could think reasonably about it, and know that it was a cold way to be, and that if he could be something different and he could be back in the Belt with people he cared about, doing nothing but mining, he could be happy— he’d been happy there; he could have been again, in the right company...
But when he got up here in nuIl-#, in the rider loft, with the four Hellburner locks staring him in the face, and the ship out there, behind number1, then everything was different, every value and priority was revised. The ship was different, every value and priority was revised. The ship was a presence here. Was waiting to be alive; and he was, in a way he wasn’t in the whole rest of his life. He was scared down in the gravitied quarters, scared out of his reason, and be realized he’d gotten everyone who cared about him in one hell of a mess; but up here—
Up here he knew at least why he’d made the choices he bad, right or wrong, he knew why he’d kept going, and why the pods made him afraid—just that nowhere else was this. Nowhere else had the feel this did. It didn’t altogether cure being scared, but it put the fear behind him.
This was where he would have been on that day, dammit, except for Tanzer, except for Wilhelmsen being put in the wrong place, at the wrong time... it felt as if his whole life had gone off-line since then, and he was just now picking up again where it should have been, with the people he should have had: time that had frozen on him, was running again, the mission was in his pocket, and right now the only thing he was honestly afraid of up here was being pulled from the mission again—
But nobody in command would mess with him—not now. It wasn’t Tanzer in command. He was too valuable. He was somebody, finally, that people couldn’t shove aside, when all through his life people had been trying, and they couldn’t do that again. If he did this—if he lived through it—
If he made good on everything he’d promised.
“Dekker.”
Percy’s voice, echoing over the speaker, making his heart jump.
“Sir?”
“Mission dump has gone to your files. We have incoming.”
Cold hit his gut, raw panic negated every reasoning. It couldn’t happen. It wouldn’t happen, it wasn’t true...
“I said incoming, Dekker. Get your ass into library! Fast!”
He grabbed a new grip on the zipline for the lift and hit the inner lift wall, damn the drilled reaction, he didn’t believe it, damn, he didn’t believe it. “We’re not betraying position,” the voice from the speakers said. “We’re allowing forty minutes, that’s all we can allow, for library access, plot, and confirm. Get with it.”
“You’re lying! Sir! This is a test run, this is the damn test, you don’t have to pull this on us!”
Silence from the lift speaker. Lift crashed into the frame, jolted him and the whole compartment around to plus 1 g, and he caught a grip on the rail.
“Damn you!” he yelled at the incommunicative com. “Damn you to hell, commander, —sir! Where’s this incoming?”
But nothing answered him.
“I swear to you it wasn’t our guys,” Villy said on the way to the officers’ conference room, to a meeting Graff would as soon have skipped. “That’s official from the colonel. He didn’t leak it, nobody on staff did that he can trace. That’s what he wants me to say.”
“What do you say?” Graff asked.
“He’s not lying.” Villy didn’t sound offended by the question. Villy’s eyes, crinkled around the edges with a lot of realtime years, were honest and clear as they always had been. You wanted to believe in Alexandra Villanueva the way you wanted to believe in sanity and reason in the universe. But Villy quoted Tanzer at him and it was suddenly Villanueva’s own self Graff began to worry about, now, about the man who, over recent weeks, he’d worked with as closely and as cooperatively as he worked with his own staff—sorting out the tempers, the egos, the simple differences in protocols: they’d mixed the staff and crews in briefings and in analysis sessions, they’d given alcohol permissions in rec on one occasion, holding the marine guards in reserve—and nobody’d been shot, nobody’d been taken to the brig, and no chairs had left the floor. More than that, they had a remarkable sight ahead of them in the hall, that was Rios and Wojcak in UDC fatigues and Pauli in Fleet casuals and station-boots, engaged in conversation that involved a clipboard waved violently about.
No combat. Sanity. Cooperation, if a thin one. There was a secret, highly illegal betting pool going among the crews, odds on which crew was going to draw the test run, and a sizable pot, from what Fleet Police said, the UDC crews leaning heavily toward solid, by-the-book Almarshad and the Fleet tending to split between Mitchell and Almarshad and no few still betting on Dekker as the long shot. He hadn’t taken the action on that pool that regulations demanded; Villy hadn’t; more remarkable, Tanzer hadn’t, if Tanzer knew, which he personally doubted—Tanzer didn’t know everything that was going on these days, Villy directly admitted there were topics he didn’t bring up with Tanzer, and it was too much to hope that Tanzer had learned anything about dealing with the Shepherds or changed his style of command. It was Villy’s discretion he leaned to—had been leaning to it maybe more than he should have. Maybe he’d only been naive, looking too much for what he hoped and too little for the long years Tanzer had built up a network: in this place.
Fact was, same as he’d told the committee, there were too many chances for leaks, too many contractors, too many technicians, too many station maintenance personnel with relatives in Sol One or, God knew, in Buenos Aires or Paris. It was worth their jobs to talk, the workers knew that, they’d signed the employment agreements, but they were human beings and they had personal opinions, not always discreetly.
Shuttle was coming in—approaching dock. They might be rid of the senators, but they had reporters incoming, FleetCom had broken the news of the impending test. The senators had no wish to get caught here, they were packing to leave, had their last interviews with the Lendler personnel today (God hope they didn’t give anything away) and the shuttle would be at least six hours in maintenance and loading, latest report.
None too soon to be rid of the lot, in his book.
“We have any new data on the hearings at One?” Villanueva asked him. “Anything from the JLC or the technical wing?”
“Nothing. Not a thing yet.”
Steps behind them in the hall, rapid, as they reached the briefing room. Late arrival, Graff interpreted it, turned to glance and met an out-of-breath Trev, out of FleetCom. Evans handed him a printed note.
It said: Reporters are on the shuttle. All outbound system traffic on hold. Test is imminent.
Hell, he thought. And: Why didn’t the captain warn us? FSO has to have known, FSO has to have signed the press passes...
“Reply, sir?”
“None I want in writing. Tell Com One I said so and what in hell. Those words. Stat.”
“Yessir,” Trev said, and cleared the area at max speed.
Which left Villy’s frown and lifted eyebrow.
“Reporters, on the inbound shuttle,” he told Villy. “The test’s been announced, I don’t know by whom... System traffic is stopped. We’re stuck with the shuttle, the senators, and the reporters.”
Villy’s look couldn’t be a lie. “They’ve been inbound for three damned days! This isn’t a leak, this is a damned publicity set-up! What kind of game are you guys running over at FSO?”
“That’s what I’m asking FleetCom. Bloody hell, what are they doing to us?”
“Damn mess,” Meg muttered, in the ready room, looking at the lighted plot-screen—Dek was a bundle of nerves, holding to the hand-grip beside her and memorizing that chart with the only drug-training he’d ever had, the bit that helped you focus down and retain like crazy. Ben was swearing because he hadn’t got his specific numbers out of carrier Nav yet, Sal was talking to the ordnance clerk; and Meg muttered her own numbers to voice-comp, while suit-up techs tugged and pulled at her in intimate places. You didn’t even do that basic thing for yourself, you just memmed charts fast as you could and talked to the systems chiefs and techs who you hoped to God had done their job.
The helmet came down over her head, and other hands twisted the seal. 360° real-HUD came active, voice-link did. She evoked her entry macro, that prepped her boards long-distance, dumped her touch, her patterns, her them-marks on the plot-screen fire-path to the Hellburner systems.
Mitch’s crew and Almarshad’s were in flight control, two beats of argument between them whether it could possibly be real, whether they might actually have a realspace system entry launched at high v from far out; or whether intelligence reports foretold something about the drop in—the consensus was test, set-up, but they couldn’t take it as a test run, didn’t dare believe the ordnance that would come at them was anything but real. The sketchy fire-track was running right past Earth’s moon, not the kind of thing Sol System traffic control was going to like, and that meant a wide-open track with a shot at Earth that if they didn’t get a fast intercept on that incoming ship—the doomsday scenario: they could lose the whole motherwell in less than ten minutes, that was what shaped up on their data. Billions of people. All life on earth. The enemy wouldn’t do that. They were human beings. ..
But life in the Belt and the gossip from Fleet instructors argued there were minds out there more different than you ever wanted to meet. And you could never, ever bet on them doing the logical—
Siren went off, the board and take-hold. “Hell!” Ben cried, because they were going, there was no more time, the carrier was going to hit the mains and the next input they got was going to be off carrier ops, the carrier’s longscan / com team that was their data-supply and their situation monitor, them and the back-up teams doing her job for the sixty-minus seconds it was going to take them to board and belt.
She grabbed the dismount line behind Dek, in crew-entry order, hindmost, and hung on as the door slammed wide and the line meshed with the gears, hell of a jerk on the arm. You held on, was all, as the singing line aimed you for the mounting bars at the hatch, one, two, three, four, tech lines ringing empty, the Hellburner’s tech hatch open, but receiving no one. Carrier technical crew shouted good wishes at them as they shot past and one after the other hit the stop, pile-up of hand-grips—inertia carried them in—she hit the cushions last, heard the hatches shut when she flipped the toggle, both ports, confirm on the seal by on-panel telltales as she was snapping the only manual belt; second toggle and they went ops-com, linked with the carrier, sending and receiving a blitz of electronic information. “We’re go,” Dek said, and instantaneously the carrier mains cut in with a solidity that shoved them harder than the pods ever had, 10+ in a brutal, backs-downward acceleration.
Carrier was outputting now, making EM noise in a wavefront an enemy would eventually intercept in increasing Doppler effect, and to confuse their longscan they were going to pull a pulse, half-up to FTL and abort the bubble, on a heading for the intercept zone—that was the scary part. That was the time, all sims aside, that the theoretical high became real, light, true hellride, with herself for the com-node that integrated the whole picture.
They tranked you down for jump. They didn’t for this move. They told you what it was going to be, they pulled disorientations and sensory assaults, and learned the them-techniques from the starship crew, and hoped you could get the threads back when you came out—but meanwhile you just kept talking to the computer and the carrier and moving your markers with the joystick, laying the strike and the strategy as if you were seeing it tamely on the light-table instead of on monitors, with numbers and grids floating in glowing colors. Reality became hyper-extended vision, into mathematical futures, chaos of nature, two intersecting presence-cones of human action that had to narrow at a proximity to Luna that was truly harrowing.
Hard to breathe. The flight-suit squeezed the ribs in efficient pulses, oxygen flowed—damned sure not the pod this time. This was real—this was—
Moment that the brain skipped. . . moment that they weren’t—anywhere, and all the data left the brain void. A voice said, like God, Stand by sep, Hellburner; she recalled that procedure, scanned her crew’s LS, TAG and STAT data glowing gold at the upper periphery of her midrange vision and said, mechanically as any machine, “Sep go, that’s go, go...”
Bang!
“We have absolutely identical interests,” Villy said to the gathered reporters, while Graff folded his arms and leaned against the wall by the door. Captain Villy rested elbows against the podium and said in that voice that had to be believed: “Let me explain where the UDC stands. Yes, there’ve been problems in the past. As a test crew, in this facility, we’ve seen ideas that worked and we’ve seen ideas that didn’t—we’ve worked with a lot of bright-eyed young pilots and techs that came in here all impatient to be trained in equipment we ran when it didn’t have all the buttons they put on it—who never gave a damn about what we knew so long as the buttons worked. That’s the truth. And I’ll tell you, having the future operational crews shoved in here to be part of the testing procedures—that’s been a hell of an adjustment for us—but the Fleet did call this one right. The physiological demands of this equipment are hell; and the crews that can fly this baby are going to be so scarce in the general population they’re probably going to give some of us a chance to be honest working crew.”
Tidbit of real News. Graff pricked up his ears, saw Optex record lights like so many blinking eyes among the reporters.
“They say the other guys have to grow ‘em in vats, and eighteen years from now we’re going to see their hand-raised clone pilots in the cockpit. That eighteen years is the lead we have, because they tell us the merchanters that won’t take our side, won’t take the Union side either. Union doesn’t have the insystem crews we do—they’re a lot more mechanized, their mining equipment’s state of the art, a lot of robots. Their miners sit on big ore-collectors, they don’t have our antique equipment and consequently they never developed the pool of experienced insystem crews like we drew in from our asteroid belt—”
“What about this tape?” a reporter asked, out of turn. “What about this Union mind-tape?”
“It’s not Union,” Graff said from near the door, and drew an immediate concentration of steady red lights. “It’s ours, and it works only on the reflexes, a glance left or right at the panels, mathematical formulae and routines, nothing as organized thought or attitudes... It covers the same kind of memorizations you do in school—” He trusted they did such things in schools. These reporters were Earth’s equivalent of com and he doubted they had any experience in common. He wanted Saito down here, but Saito was on the carrier, where FleetCom with a test proceeding mandated she be; Demas was God knew where—Demas had taken refuge in Ops, he was willing to lay bets...
Com said in his ear: “Mission is go-for with Dekker. Rider is sepped. We’re coming up in station systems.”
“I copy,” he told the bone-mike. “I’m on my way to mission control.”
Reporters were still looking at him. Optex lenses were all turned his way, and Villy was watching him from the podium.
“Mission’s away,” he said, removed the uncomfortable security com from his ear, and added, with a certain suicidal satisfaction, “Team leader is Dekker,” and watched all chaos erupt.
“All right?” Ben sounded finally satisfied with the numbers and Dekker gave a little breath of relief—a relief that Ben probably wouldn’t understand. Smug, that was Ben when he relaxed; but Ben wasn’t smug now, he was On and anxious, all the way.
“We just keep running quiet a while, Dek-boy. A real hold-steady here, minimum profile, just keep us out of their acquisition long as we can—carrier’s gone up ahead, going to fire a decoy and brake hard.”
The carrier’s vane-config showed clear, that was the immediate worry on this maneuver—the carrier was going to pull an axis roll: a thing the size of some space stations was going to do a total reverse, pass them again at close range, rotate a second time and tail them at a distance ...
“This is a set-up,” Meg complained, “we got too many numbers on this, Ben. It’s got to be a set-up...”
“Dekker a murderer?” Graff said, tracking past the spex windows of mission control to the profile screens and the working teams and his own trainees at the boards. They’d established the reporters in the viewing area, gotten the senators a secure spot in a VIP observation point, and on the displays in mission control a situation was unfolding neither party yet comprehended. “No. He happens to be the survivor of three documented attempts on his life, two of which put him in hospital, one of which killed Cory Salazar.”
Not the loudest voice, but the one he chose to hear: “That contradicts what Councillor Salazar charges—”
Probability fans were changing color on the screens, rapidly narrowing. “It is, nevertheless, the truth. The evidence against Paul Dekker was fabricated by the identical agencies responsible for covering up a strike-breaking police action that took seventeen other lives documented in 2304 sworn affidavits and complaints.”
“From Belters?” Bias dripped from the question, and sharpened focus and temper for a split-second.
“From civilian and military eyewitnesses and victims living and dead in Earth Company records. There are no grounds for the charges against Paul Dekker—they’re old history, investigated and officially dismissed when the agencies that made the charges were dissolved by legal action for corruption, wrongful death, and labor abuses. As for the culpable parties, they were relieved of command and stripped of their licenses, but unfortunately that was the only action taken. I suggest you ask Ms. Salazar why she’s never named them in her pending suit.”
“Why didn’t she?”
“I couldn’t speculate on her motives.”
Ten and twenty questions at once. Riot, as reporters a moment ago drifting along the spex wall suddenly elbowed each other to get Optex pickups to the fore. Let the Company raise hell, let the Reel ship him to the battle zone— please God, ship him to the zone, away from reporters, cameras, Edmund Porey, and self-serving senators demanding dinner in the VIP observation area.
Then someone shouted, from the hall, “They’re releasing the separation footage!” and bedlam surged in the other direction, reporters trying to get into mission control, jamming in the doorway. Two stayed to ask:
“Who authorized this test, lieutenant?”
“Not in my need-to-know, I’m afraid. Insystem traffic near Luna shows lift delayed for thirty minutes on the monitor up there. That has to come from very high levels.”
“Who can authorize it?”
“Sol One Stationmaster, for the lowest level.”
“If—”
The barrage of questions and dicing of information kept up. He stood there with his gut in knots. It was go now, no likely recall of the rider. Mission parameters were ‘showing on the screens, dopplered transmission from the carrier, and from the rider, via the carrier. Course was laid for intercept from the ecliptic, of a zenith system entry shielded from the carrier by Earth’s own security zone...
Worst-case scenario in system defense—an attack coming into Earth’s vicinity, and not a damned thing on the trans-missions to say the case wasn’t real... worse, there was an incoming showing on the one screen his eye knew for real-case. Something was inbound or they’d gotten insystem traffic management to lie, and it didn’t. Ever.
Ship felt good, felt good all the way, zero no-calls and zero glitches on the boards. Clean, wide sep from the carrier and for a while they would keep the carrier’s rate inside its shields, pretending to the enemy that separation was still to come. Attitude assemblies were all answering test-calls. Dekker lost himself in the internal config-confirms, in the numbers that were the immediate future—Meg was there to tell him where he was, Ben was shaping further future, and Sal was working up the fire-path, armaments taking program, talking to Meg’s boards which would talk to his V-HUD when the time came. Right now body-sense was expanded into the ship, time was cut loose and independent of circumstance—the track and the fire-points were shaping up further and further into the diagrams spread in his far vision—but he was only generally aware of that; he was seeing that interval as leisurely information-building minutes diving toward a split-second hype-point, where he had to be ready to execute a sequence of immaculately timed moves to confuse the enemy, position the fire platform, and get their asses safely past a line of answering fire scarily close to Luna, with a v that overrode both Luna’s pull— and the available energy of their own missiles.
Which was all Sal’s problem.
They aren’t doing anything, the reporters objected with increasing frustration, even anger, and Graff said, finally, with a heart going faster and faster, eyes fixed on the monitors beyond the spex panes: “Oh, yes, they are. They’re maintaining output silence. The carrier’s doing all the transmission, noisy as it wants to be. They launched something on either side before they braked, one’s a decoy, one’s the rider, and the rider doesn’t want to be seen yet, that’s the name of the game—even we don’t know which it is, because they haven’t told us and motion hasn’t started.”
Questions broke out, a shouted confusion.
“Yes, we have no doubt they’re still conscious. See the four dots on the screen, all doing fine...” Trajectories were widening their perspective on the screens and one reporter noticed the obvious. “That’s going straight through Luna space—is that Luna space?”
“All system traffic’s suspended. The firepaths will have been cleared and safed.”
“What if—”
Chatter kept up. Media seemed to abhor a dunking silence.
He watched the situation on the screens, thinking, Damn, who’s feeding them their orders? But he heard no calculations emanating from FleetCom. He suspected the carrier armscomper had primed them for this—set up the incoming and the response: he personally suspected that anything and everything Porey did was with mirrors; but he kept his mouth shut and hoped to God no reporter got onto that question.
And the firepaths were damned close to Luna... me reporter was right, they were terrifyingly close, from the viewpoint of civilians not used to starships at entry and exit v—close, and with a maneuver that, if they did it—damn, it was Russell’s Star, replayed—
Long, long time on a hold-steady. Easy to become hypnotized, if not for the nuisance chatter on internal com. Dekker did the small breathing exercises that kept him aware of time—nothing but freefall at fractional light, minimal signature, nothing noisy, no output at all, no input but the passive receipt of the carrier and its boards that advised them things they couldn’t output to see.
Couldn’t prove it wasn’t real, what they were receiving. You couldn’t assume: it, daren’t assume it.
“What we’re going to do imminently, Dek-boy, we’re about to do a little round the corner shot at this sumbitch. Luna’s shadow’s your boost point, God, I hope you get it right...”
“Copy that,” he muttered. “Do your own job, Ben.”
“Ordnance up,” Sal said. “Meg. Dek, that’s your plot-points, you copy?”
Dots and lines were multiplying in his midvision now, floating in space, designating essential fire-points, orientation, mass decrease. Considerable decrease: Hellburner was 90% fuel, engines, ablation surface, and ordnance.
“He’s got it,” Meg said. “Here we go, guys. —Initiate.”
Pulse of the main engines. Missiles launched with a shock through the frame, one and two away.. .straight .toward the moon. Adrenaline stretched time arid distances.
“T-l,” Ben was saying, calling out the major coordination points.
Second pulse, high-g RO, intermittent accel and launches directly down their backpath toward their carrier, staccato hammer of missiles away, Hellburner’s mass diminishing fast.
Second RO, braces engaged. Had to hold the track with immaculate numbers—crossing the carrier firepath now, edge on, minimum profile.
“Son of a bitch,” Ben yelled, as the emissions receipt picked up launch, but their four missiles had kicked off the frame on the mark and Dekker swung into his scheduled Profile RePosition with an instant eighth less mass and a violence that blurred vision. “Track!” Ben yelled at Sal. “Track!”
“Got it, got it, got it,” Sal cried, onto a steady stream of profanity, as their chaff gun opened up down the hostile firetrack straight for the incoming. “Burn it!” Ben yelled, and Dekker shoved it to 4-10.5 instant gs ahead, on the instant, rotated sideways as they were.
Countered. Graff watched the fire bursts, listened to the dispassionate voice of FleetCom confirm the intercept.
It looked so slow on this scale—so incredibly slow. But his heart knew the speed at which things were moving, his gut was in knots, he wanted his own hands on controls, he wanted that with every breath he took—
They were on. God, God, they were making it. So had Wilhelmsen—this early on. Another Reorient and they were still throwing fire...
But, damn! the lines intersected, and of a sudden—missiles near Luna were off the scope of a sudden—
Range safety? or hostile action?
“Test stop,” came over the speakers. “The test has been terminated.. . this is FleetCom mission control...”
Disaster? Graff felt cold all over. Couldn’t have. The plot was still tracking.
“The incoming is confirmed as EC militia merchanter Eagle, proceeding at V to maintain effect shields against inert chaff which will not, repeat not, intersect civilian traffic. Luna-vectored ordnance was destroyed by the range safety officer. At no time was this ordnance capable of reaching the lunar surface: technical explanation will follow. The remaining ordnance is being cleared from the area by destruct commands issued by range safety. Rider ordnance trajectories have been computed as intersecting Eagle presence and moment with three major strikes, sufficient to have eliminated the incoming threat. This concludes a successful test of the Hellburner prototype. In-progress System traffic will resume ordinary operations in fifteen minutes ...”
Impossible to hear in the spectator gallery, after that. Crews and techs inside mission control were out of their seats, pounding each other on the backs with complete disregard of uniform or gender. “Damn on!” Villy roared from the other side of the spectators, Optexes were going, reporters were shouting questions—a few of them loudly incensed about the apparent proximity to the moon.
God, he just let it go. Gave fragments of answers, how he felt—damned happy; had he been nervous—wanted to be out there, he said, all the while tracking on the screens, the celebrations, the communications from FleetCom telling Hellburner 1 there was no need to brake, the carrier was on direct intercept, and from UDC System Defense saying that lift traffic would resume in areas declared cleared, starting with alpha zone, near Earth’s atmosphere.
Was it an unwarrantable risk to Luna? a reporter wanted to know. He said, tracking on the politics as well as the damned brilliant straight-line shot, “In the first place, it was never going to hit the moon. It was moving past the moon faster than it was moving toward it. By the laws of physics it absolutely couldn’t hit the surface.”
“If something had gone wrong with the missiles—”
“They didn’t have enough fuel to reach the moon soon enough to hit it. It’s absolutely impossible.”
“But they could reach the carrier.”
“The carrier could run into them. The range officer got it well within the safe zone. If it had failed to detonate, there were two back-up systems; and, I reemphasize, the ordnance was not infalling Luna, no more than the ship itself was. The armscomper knew exactly what she was doing.”
“She,” a reporter pounced on the question, but another shouted:
“Was it a successful test, when the duration was half an hour less than the Wilhelmsen run, at a slower speed?”
“The rider eliminated the threat. It had nothing left to shoot at. There’s no point in continuing beyond mission accomplished.”
“But could they have kept going?”
“No doubt whatsoever. And let me point out, they were slower, but their target was moving at system entry speeds. Wilhelmsen’s targets were only randoms, from known fire points, nothing this real-time. But he gave us data that helped us. It wasn’t a pointless sacrifice—never a pointless sacrifice.” Tanzer had just shown up in mission control, Tanzer accepting handshakes of his staff, beyond the sound-damping spex, and the whole press corps was suddenly trying to figure out how to get where they weren’t going to be admitted. Villy clapped him on the shoulder in passing and escaped the intercepts, while another Optex pickup arrived in his face with, “Ms. Salazar has denounced the choice of Paul Dekker as the source of tape for the program and called for the disfranchisement of the Beet. How do you feel about that?”
“My answer? If that incoming had been Union, that ship and that young pilot and crew would have prevented global catastrophe. A single barrage of inert matter falling on Earth at half light would create ecological disaster.” Stock answer, stock material, the science people had calc’ed it years ago: he knew not a damned thing about climates, truth be told.
A reporter followed up: “Earth was not in actual danger.”
“Earth was in deadly danger if that had been a Union ship. But Hellburner demonstrated its ability to deflect any such attack. Their course was right on intercept with that incoming militia ship, you can see it on the display up there. This was a live ordnance test, but nothing at any time was aimed at Earth or Luna.”
“What if it went off-track?”
“That’s why there are range safety officers.” He didn’t want to say what he suspected, that if the destruct sequences for the rider’s missiles hadn’t been dumped to Eagle’s computers by the Sol system buoy on entry, the range safety officer on the ECS4 had to have had a few extremely anxious moments once the shots went around the limb of the moon. That volley had come very close to sending the missiles out of communication with the carrier. But the crew hadn’t pulled any punches. No crew could afford to think in those terms. Ever. “Lieutenant, lieutenant, do you think—” “Excuse me....” He was getting a burst of new information off FleetCom on the screens and over the PA, and another line of comflow in his ear from Saito, saying ...
Panic over much of Europe, assumption the test was real, public reactions yet uncertain... But Mazian was in front of the cameras in Bonn, with pronouncements of what a Union strike would have meant for Earth,... calling Paul Dekker and his crew phenomenally skilled, heroes of Earth’s own defense forces, a combined FIeet-and-crew...
“Good run. Still room for improvement.”
Porey’s voice; and Dekker wanted to tell him go to hell for the trick they’d pulled. Destruct the ordnance, damned right they’d had to, he’d been scared as hell they might hit a friendly ship; but a Belter didn’t have ordinary nerves, and he’d not been a hundred percent convinced until they’d gotten the congratulatory communication from FleetCom that it had been the scheduled test.
Didn’t know what to do with the nerves now, things were still dragging along, interminable time stretch: not so hard a job, this run, but that was the problem, wasn’t it? You didn’t get the hellish repositions and redirects when you were working with Ben and Sal, when your co-pilot was thinking ahead of the pilot’s problems so he didn’t get called on for those moves—only one of those shifts he’d had to rip, they’d hyped the v sideways hard after Sal’s best shot and Ben was still muttering about realspace feeling real, and soreness setting in.
Meg said, “We’re in the pocket, right in the pocket, now, Dek, you don’t have to do a thing til the bow-shock. —Incidentally, compliments from Capt. Kreshov, on Eagle, he says it was a damn pretty job, his words. —Thank you, sir. The team appreciates the compliment. —We got a drink offer from his armscomper.”
“Sounds good,” Ben said. “Yeah!” from Sal.
Himself, he wasn’t highly verbal, just tracking on the approaching carrier—Ben decided it was a frigging party, all of a sudden, Sal and Meg evidently had; and he could strangle Ben. They weren’t through until they’d been through the realtime shields, nothing virtual about it this time: carrier coming up like a bat behind them, Baudree’s showing out, no different than the rider jocks, except Baudree was carrying multiples of their mass, and when he contemplated dock after what he’d been through he felt sweat running on his forehead and a tension cramp knotting his leg.
Meg switched him out of the FleetCom loop to carrier-com, then, the range blip and the docking schematic a total preoccupation in his 360° V-HUD compression, carrier Helm talking to him now, wanting his attention, while he left Meg and Ben to watch elsewhere.
“Just hold steady and we’ve got you.”
Moment of panic. Hard to shift time-perception. It wasn’t going fast now. Everything took forever and a tiny bobble was disaster. You didn’t screw it at this stage. Didn’t, please God, didn’t.
“Bow shock in 43 seconds.”
“Copy that. Go.” He couldn’t afford to think they’d done it...
Not yet.
“That’s capture and dock,” FleetCom’s dispassionate voice said. “Thank you, Mr. Dekker. Excellent job.”
Graff found himself breathing again.
“We’re going into our checklist.” Dekker’s voice. The reporters had gotten to recognize it. Had picked up on the tension in mission control and Villy had finally gotten it through, the shift the pilot had to make between nanosecond events and docking at relatively slow docking approach. “We had two funerals getting this down pat,” Villy muttered. “It’s no piece of easy the kid’s working—hell of a buffet when you cross the shields.”
Another flurry of technical questions. Graff looked for an escape, saw the door to the VIP area open and the two senators walk out—instant recognition from the press, instant convergence in that direction. Shouts and questions.
“We were invited to observe this test.” The senior senator, Caldwell. “To see how the taxpayers’ appropriations have been spent. I must say we’ve had a compelling demonstration of the effectiveness of the technology, outstanding performance...”
“J-G,” Demas said, in his ear. “Bonn. Our suspect did work for MarsCorp.”
He ducked for the corridor, deserted Villy and the senators for a small nook near a couple of marine security guards. “Say,” he asked the security unit. “Have we got a case?”
“I don’t know if we have a case, but he has former close associates in the Federation of Man, and the UDC background check didn’t go that deep, he was passed in under Lendler security, and hear this, J-G, the VDC ‘took Lendler’s word for it,’ unquote. ‘Ail their personnel have to have a clearance.’ Unquote. MarsCorp is 45% of Lendler’s business: the atmospherics softwares, for a start.”
Bloody hell, he thought. The information had hit his brain. The implications were still finding sensitive spots in his nervous system. Took Lendler’s word for it. ‘All their personnel have to have a clearance.’ Political implications, far beyond the Dekker affair.
“You’re serious.”
“Mars is threaded all through this. But so is the Federation of Man. Eldon Kent has two cousins in that association. Lendler’s records on him are so-named classified—which we can’t penetrate without filing charges.”
“Not yet. Not yet. God.”
Saito cut in on the channel. “J-G. The carrier is returning to dock.”
“We’re deep in reporters. Tell the commander that.”
“I’m sure he knows,” Saito said.
Damn! he thought, but he kept it off his face, he hoped, at least. He stood very still for a moment, heard Caldwell saying, inside, “... a tribute to the skill and dedication of Earth’s industry and innovation—”