Hellburner

Chapter 2

DEN hated institutions, hated hospital smells and institution colors and most of all he didn’t look forward to this, in his first hour on B dock. He felt like hell, he’d slept in a damn cubbyhole of a berth hardly larger than a miner-ship spinner, his feet had swelled, he’d had sinus all the way: he’d spent too long in the null-g hi his life and his body had a spiteful overreaction to the condition. They didn’t issue pills and stimsuits for a three-day shuttle trip, no, that prescription’s not on your records, lieutenant, sorry... If you’d just checked with medical—

It was damned well going to be on the record when he left Sol Two. Talk to the doctors in this hospital, get some damn good out of this end of the trip... because he meant to be on that shuttle on its turnaround tonight. Six hours was plenty of time to see Dekker, and get out of here.

after three days of floating in a three-berth passenger module on a cargo shuttle, ahead of a load of sanitation chemicals and spare parts. He’d had no one to talk to but a couple of machinists who were into some vegetarian religion and hooked on some damn VR game they wanted to explain to him; and he had had ample time to drift weightless in the dark and think—too much time to imagine this meeting, and what kind of damage a pilot could take in an accident. Missing limbs. Blood. He hated blood. He really got sick at his stomach if there was blood...

They’d had some sort of missile test that had gone bad out here. Nobody said what. There’d been a lot of long faces in Technical. A lot of emergency meetings last week. Dekker couldn’t have been involved in any missile test. A pilot trainee didn’t have anything to do with missile tests. Did he?

Jackson had done the talking. But why in hell did a Fleet captain sign the order and bust him out here? What was Dekker that the Fleet cared? The Fleet was fighting for its life in the Appropriations Committee. Dumbass pilot cracked up and UDC Priorities got overridden—for humanitarian reasons?

Not in the military he knew. That was the tag end that had disturbed his sleep and his thinking moments all the way out here. Their high-level interest in this affair was what had his stomach upset, as much as the stink of disinfectant and pain and helplessness in this place. He didn’t like this. God, he didn’t like this, and if Dekker wasn’t dead he was going to strangle him bare-handed for writing him into that damned blank.

God, he was.

Reception desk. He presented his orders to the clerk and got a: “Lt. Pollard. Yes, sir,” that did nothing for his stomach or his pulse rate. The receptionist got him a nurse, a doctor, and Dekker’s attending physician, all in increasingly short succession. “How is he?” Ben asked the last, bypassing long introductions. “What happened to him?” and the doctor said, starting off down the hall:

“No change.”

“So when did this happen?”

“That’s classified.”

More white coats. More people leaning into his face. They wanted him to open his eyes, but Dekker knew the game. They wanted answers to fill the blanks they had on their slates, but they wanted their own answers, the way they wanted the case to be.

Company doctors. He’d been here before. And they wouldn’t listen. He asked, “Where’s Cory?” because sometimes he couldn’t remember what had happened, or he did, but it was all a dizzy blur of black and tights. The ship was spinning. He fought to get to the controls, because he had to stop that spin, with the blood filling his nose and choking his breath, and his hand dragging away with the spin, his grip going—

“Cory? You damned bastard, stop!”

But sometimes he came loose from that time and he was in hospital, or he was going to be, scon as Ben and Bird got him there, and they would lie to him and tell him there never had been a ‘driver ship and he never had had a partner named Cory.

The Company had lied to him. They said he was hallucinating, but it was all lies. And sometimes he thought the hospital was the hallucination, that it was all something his conscience had conjured to punish him for losing his grip on the counter and for losing the ship.

For losing Cory.

And Bird.

Sometimes he was back in the shower, and sometimes tied to the pipes, because he was crazy, and he couldn’t figure out how the ship had come to the hospital.

Thirty days hath September, March eleventh, and November. ...

There were green coats now. Interns. He hoped for Tommy. But Tommy wasn’t with them. “Where’s Tommy?” he asked. “Why isn’t Tommy on duty? —God, it’s afire, isn’t it? Meg? Meg, wake up, God, don’t the on me—“

“Ens. Dekker, you have a visitor.”

“I don’t want any fuckin’ visitor. Get away from me. Get out of here.”

“Ens. Dekker, —“

“Tell him to go to hell! I don’t want any damn Company lawyer! —Put Tommy back on duty, hear me? I want Tommy back.” They grabbed hold of his arms, they were going to put the restraints on. Tommy wouldn’t do that. Tommy would ask, Are you going to be quiet, Mr. Dekker? and he would say, Yes, yes, I’ll be quiet, and Tommy wouldn’t use them.

Wouldn’t. But Tommy wasn’t with them. And they did. They told him then if he wasn’t quiet they’d have to sedate him. So he said, “I’ll be quiet,” and shut his eyes.

“Dekker,” Ben said. And he opened his eyes. Ben was leaning over his bed. Ben was in uniform. UDC. That was different. But odder things happened in this place. He didn’t blink. Things changed if you did. Finally he said, “Ben?”

“Yeah.”

There was a ship out there. He remembered that. “Ben, we’ve got to go back. Please, we’ve got to go back, Cory’s still out there—“

Ben grabbed a fistful of his collar, leaned close and said, in a low voice, “Dekker, shut it down right now or I’m going to kill you. You hear me?”

He said, “That’s all right.” He felt Ben’s hand on him. He saw Ben’s face. He knew where he was men, Bird was asleep and Ben was about to beat hell out of him. But that was all right. He really liked Ben, most of the time. And there hadn’t been much to like where he’d been.

What could a guy do? Ben disengaged himself, and Dekker caught his hand. He pulled free and got out of the door to get his bream.

The doctor was out there, several doctors this time. “He knows you,” Dekker’s surgeon said. Higgins was his name. “You’re the first person he has recognized.”

“Fuckin’ hell! Then he’s cured. I’m out of here.”

“Lt. Pollard,” another doctor said, and offered his hand. “Lt. Pollard, Fm Dr. Evans, chief of psychiatry.”

“Fine. Good. He needs a psych. That’s all that’s going to help him!”

“Lt. Pollard, —“

“Look, what do you want from him? The guy’s schitz, completely off the scope. He doesn’t know where he is, he doesn’t know what happened—“

“Lt. Pollard.” The psych motioned off down the farther hallway. “There’s coffee in the lounge. You’ve had a long flight.”

The psych wanted him to sit down and be reasonable, which he was in no mood to be. But coffee appealed to his upset stomach and his sleep-deprived nerves. And it was not at all a good idea to have a psych telling the local CO you’d been hysterical. You didn’t need that on a record behind another service’s security screen. So he went with the psych, he went through the dance—“White or black, sugar?” “That’s enough, thanks,”—until he could get the weight off his feet, sink into a chair and try not to let Evans see his hands shake while he was drinking.

“So what happened to him?” he asked, before Evans could fire off his own questions.

“That’s what we want to know.”

“So how’d he get like this?”

“That’s another question.”

Deeper and deeper. Ben stared at the doctor and scowled. “So a door got him. Is that it?”

“A simulator did.”

Flight simulator? Dekker? “Hell of a simulation, doctor.”

“Didn’t lock the belts, strong dose of sedative in his bloodstream.”

Shit. Pills again.

Evans said: “We’d like to know how he got there.”

Or maybe not. “You mean somebody put him there?”

“It’s one possibility.”

“Guy has a talent for making friends. Yeah. There’s probably a dozen candidates.”

“Why do you say that?”

Psych question. He thought, Because he’s a fuck-up. Because he has this way of getting himself in trouble and slapping the hand that helps him. But that led to more questions; and screwed Dekker worse than he was with this guy, to whom he owed nothing yet. He said, finally, “Say I didn’t really know him that well.”

“He listed you as next-of-kin.”

“It was a joke. The guy’s foil of them, tot of laughs.”

“We don’t rule out suicide.”

Dekker? he thought. Dekker? Suicide? The idea was more than unlikely. It upset him. And he didn’t figure that, either why they could think mat—if they knew Dekker, which they might not; or how Dekker could come to that—here, in this place that swallowed people down without a word.

“You don’t agree?”

He shrugged. “It’s not him. It’s just not him.”

You didn’t come from where Dekker came from—didn’t survive what he’d survived—and check out like that—in a damn sim. Something wasn’t right, not with the questions, not with Dekker lying in there thinking he was back in the Belt, not with this whole max-classified operation that took a will to live like Dekker’s and put him in that bed, in that condition.

Dekker had looked at him like he was what he’d been waiting for, and said, to his threat of killing him barehanded, That’s all right...

Every time you got near the guy mere was a disaster, Dekker attracted disasters, you could feel it, and, God of all the helldeck preachers, he wanted on that shuttle tonight. Do this effin’ job, get Dekker to figure out where he was, and when he was, make him talk to the psychs, and get out of here while there was still a chance of making that interview—and getting out of this mess.

“I’ll talk to him,” he said.

“You’re sure you’re all right about that?”

Another psych quiz. Correct answer: “A long trip with no information, run in here straight from the mast, I was a little shaken up myself.” He tossed off the rest of the coffee, got up and pitched the cup into the bin. “I’m fine to talk to him. What do you want out of him?”

“His health,”

“Yeah, well, he’ll pull it out. Knock him down and he bounces.”

“Don’t stress him, lieutenant. 1 really don’t advise another confrontation. He’s been concussed. We want to keep mat blood pressure under control.”

That was about worth a laugh. Dek was already stressed. Dek was in an out-of-control ship in a ‘driver zone with his partner lost. He said soberly, “I’ve no intention of upsetting him.”

The doctor opened the door, the doctor walked him back to Dekker’s room and signaled an orderly for a word aside in the hallway.

Ben walked on in, pulled a chair over and sat down by Dekker’s bed. Dekker’s eyes tracked his entry, stayed tracked as he sat down, he wasn’t sure how focused. Dekker had been a real pretty-boy, a year ago, fancy dresser, rab hair, shaved up the sides. Still looked to be a rab job, give or take the bandage around the head; but the eyes were shadowed, one was bruised, the chin had a cut, lip was cut—not so long back. The hollow-cheeked, waxen look—did you get that from a bashing-about in a simulator a few days ago?

“You look like hell, Dekker-me-lad.”

“Yeah,” Dekker said. “You’re looking all right.”

“So what happened?”

Dekker didn’t answer right off. He looked to be thinking about it. Then his chin began to tremble and Ben felt a second’s disgusted panic: dammit, he didn’t want to deal with a guy on a crying jag—but Dekker said faintly, shakily, “Ben, you’ll want to hit me, but I really need to know—I really seriously need to know what time it is.”

“What time it is?” God. “So what’ll you give me for it?”

“Ben, —“

“No, hell, I want you to give me something for it. I want you to tell me what the hell you’re doing in here. I want to know what happened to you.”

Dekker gave a shake of his head and looked upset. “Tell me the time.”

Ben looked at his watch. “All right, it’s 1545, June 19^th—“

“What year?”

“2324. That satisfy you?”

Dekker just stared at him, finally blinked once.

“Look, Dekker, nice to see you, but you really screwed everything up. I got orders waiting for me back at the base, I got a transfer that, excuse me, means my whole career, and if you’ll just fuckin’ cooperate with them I can still catch a shuttle in a few hours and get my transfer back to Sol where I can stay with my program. —Dek, come on, d’ you sincerely understand you’re screwing up my life? Do me a favor.”

“What?”

“Tell the doctors what happened to you. Hear me? I want you to answer their questions and tell them what they want to hear and I don’t, dammit, 1 want to be on that shuttle. You want me to call them in here so they can listen to you explain and I can get out of here?”

Dekker shook his head.

“Dekker, dammit, don’t be like that. You’re a pain in the ass, you know that? I got to get back!”

“Then go. Go on. It’s all right.”

“It’s not the hell all right. I can’t get out of here until you tell them what they want to know! Come on. It’s June 19^th. 2324. Argentina’s won the World Cup. Bird’s dead. Cory’s dead. We came out here on a friggin’ big ship neither of us is supposed to talk about and Gennie Vanderbill is top of the series. Do you remember what put you here?”

“I can’t remember. I don’t remember—“

“Because you climbed into a friggin’ flight simulator tranked to the eyeballs—does that jar anything loose?”

A blank stare, a shake of the head.

Ben ran a hand over his head. “God.”

“It’s just gone, Ben. Sometimes I think it’s the ship again. Sometimes it’s not. You’re here. But I thought you were before. What are they saying about the sim?”

“Dekker, —“ He gave a glance to the door, but the doctor-types were conferring outside. He said, in a low voice: “You’re not hooked on those damn pills again, are you?”

Dekker shook his head. Scared. Lost. Eyes shifted about. Came back to him.

“Ben, —I’m sorry. Please tell me the time again.”

He didn’t hit Dekker. He leaned forward and took Dekker’s hand hard in his despite the restraints and said, very quietly, “It’s June 19^th. Now you tell me the year, Dek. I want the year. Right now. And you better not be wrong.”

Dekker looked seriously worried. A hesitation. A tremor of the lips. “2324.”

“Good. You got it memorized. Now there’s going to be a test every few minutes, hear me? I want you to remember that number. This is Sol Two. You had a little accident a few days back. The doctors want to know, mat’s not so hard to hold on to, is it?”

“I can’t remember. I can’t remember, Ben, it’s just gone...”

“Shit.” He had a headache. He looked at Dekker’s pale, bruised, trusting face and wanted ever so much to beat him senseless. Instead he squeezed Dekker’s hand. “Dek, boy, listen. I got a serious chance at Stockholm, you understand me? Nice lab job. I’m going to lose it if you don’t come through. I really need you to think about that simulator.”

Dekker looked upset. “I’m trying. I’m trying, Ben. I really am—“

Something was beeping. Machine up there on the shelf. Doctors were in the door. Higgins said, “Lt. Pollard. He’s getting tired. Better leave it. —Ens. Dekker, I’m Dr. Higgins, do you remember me?”

Dekker looked at him, and said faintly, “Ben?”

“You do remember him,” Ben said. “Hear me? Or I’ll break your neck!”

“Don’t go.”

“He’ll be back tomorrow.”

“The hell,” Ben said. “Dekker, goodbye. Good luck. I got to catch a shuttle. Stay the hell out of my life.”

“Lieutenant.” That was Evans. “In the hall.”

He went. He got his voice down and his breathing even. “Look, I’ve done my job. I’m no doctor, you’re the psych, what am I supposed to do?”

“You’re doing fine. This is the first time he’s been mat sure where he is.”

“Fine. I’ve got orders waiting for me on Sol One. I haven’t got time for this!”

“That’s not the way I understand your orders. You have a room assignment—“

“I haven’t got any room assignment.”

“—in the hospice a level up. It’s a small facility. Very comfortable. We’d prefer you be available for him 24 hours. His sleeping’s not on any regular pattern.”

“No way. I’ve got a return order in my pocket, my baggage is still right back there in customs. Nobody said anything about this going into another shift. That wasn’t the deal.”

“Nobody said anything about your leaving. You’d better check those orders with the issuing officer.”

“I’ll check it at the dock. I’ll get this cleared up. Just give him my goodbyes. Tell him good luck, I hope he comes out all right. I won’t be here in the morning.”

“Hospice desk is on level 2, lieutenant. You’ll find the lift right down the corridor.”

Ben had been there a while. Ben had told him—

But he couldn’t depend on that. Ben came and Ben went and sometimes Ben talked to him and told him—

Told him about an accident in the sims. But if it was a sim then maybe people he thought were dead, weren’t, even if they told him so. The doctors lied to him. They regularly lied, and Tommy didn’t come back. They kept changing doctors, changing interns, every time he got close to remembering....

Only Ben. Ben came and he started to hope and he knew that hope was dangerous. You didn’t hope. You just lived.

Ben asked him was he on drugs. He had been once. He had been crazy once, now and again, but Ben and Bird had pulled him out. The ship was spinning. Cory was out there alone, and somebody had to pull him out—

Ship was spinning. Pete was yelling. And Cory—

Ben said he would kill him if he was crazy and he hoped Ben would do that, if he truly was, because he didn’t want to live like that.

Ben said remember. But he couldn’t remember any specific time in the sims. He could remember an examiner giving him his C-3. He could remember the first time he’d Men me boards. Remembered pushing beams at Sol. Supervisor had said all right, he could do that: he was under age, but they needed somebody who wouldn’t ram a mass into the station hull. His head was bandaged, his ribs were. His knees ached like hell, he thought because he had hit the counter, trying to hit the button, but he wasn’t sure of anything. You blinked and you got green numbers and lines, and if you followed them too far you never came back. Midrange focus. Back it up, all the way inside.

There’d been an accident and the ship had blown up. And his partners were dead. Or maybe never existed. It was a sim. Bright ball of nuclear fire. And he was here and they were in it, and it was all green glowing lines out there, whipping and snaking to infinity.

He remembered faces now. People he thought he liked— Bird. Meg and Sal. Cory, and Graff. Pete and Elly and Falcone. Faces. Voices. Falcone yelling, Hey, Dek, see you tomorrow.

But Falcone wouldn’t. Elly wouldn’t. They never would.

“You damn bastards!” he yelled. “Bastards!”

Interns came running, grabbed hold of him. “No,” he said, reminded what happened when he yelled. “No. Tommy!”

“Get the hypo,” one said, and he got a breath, he got a little sanity, said, “I’m not violent. I don’t need it. It’s all right. Let go, dammit! Get the doctor!”

They eased up. They stopped bruising his arms and just held him still.

“Just be quiet, sir. Just be quiet.”

“No shots. No damn shots.”

“Doctor’s orders, sir.”

“I don’t need one. I swear to you, I don’t need one.”

“Doctor says you’re not getting any rest, sir. You better have it. Just to be sure.”

He looked the intern in the face. Big guy, red face and freckles, lying across him. Out of breath. So was he. And two other large guys who were leaning on him and holding his legs.

“Sorry,” he said, between breaths. “Don’t want to give you guys trouble. I really don’t want to. I just don’t want any shot right now.”

“Sorry, too, sir. Doctor left orders. You don’t want to be any trouble. Right?”

“No,” he said. He shook his head. He made up his mind he had better change tactics. Agreeing with them got him out of this place. It would. It had. He couldn’t remember. It was only the drugs he had to worry about.

“Just hold still, sir. All right?”

“Yeah,” he said, and the hypo kicked against his arm. Stung like hell. His eyes watered.

He said, “You fuckin’ get off me. I can’t breathe. Let me up, dammit.”

“Soon’s you shut your eyes, sir. Just be quiet. You loosened a couple of John’s teeth yesterday. You remember?”

He didn’t remember. But he said, out of breath, “I’m sorry. Sorry about that. I’m better. A lot better.”

“That’s good, sir.”

“Friend of mine was here,” he said. But the drug was gathering thick about his brain. He said it again, afraid he might not remember when he waked. Or that it hadn’t happened at all.

He went to sleep when they drugged him and he waked up and he never knew where or when. He was going out now. He felt it happening. And he was scared as hell where he would wake up or what would be true or where the lines would lead him.

“Ben,” he cried, “Bird. Ben, come back— Ben, don’t go— they killed my partners, Ben, they fuckin’ killed us—“

“This isn’t validated,” the check-in clerk said, and slid the travel voucher across the desk in the .6 g of 8-deck. “You need an exit stamp.”

Ben took the voucher with a sinking heart. “What exit stamp? Nobody said anything about an exit stamp. There’s no exit stamp in the customs information.”

“It’s administrative, sir. Regulation. I have to have a stamp/’

“God. Look, call Sol One.”

“You do that from BaseCom,” the clerk said. And added without expression: “But you need an authorization from your CO to do that, sir.”

“And where do I get that?” You didn’t yell at clerks. It didn’t get you anything to yell at clerks. Ben said quietly, restrainedly: “My CO’s on Sol One—I need the UDC officer in charge.”

“This is a Fleet transport voucher.”

“I know it is,” Ben said. “But this uniform is UDC. Is it at all familiar to you? Where’s the UDC officer in charge?”

The clerk got a confused look, and focused behind him, where someone had come into the office, to stand in line was Ben’s initial reckoning; but whoever it was said, then, “Lt. Pollard?”

Voice he’d heard before. A long time ago. He turned around, a little careful in the .6g, saw a blue uniform and a black pullover, a thin, angular face and nondescript pale hair. Brass on the collar.

The trip out from the Belt. The Hamilton. And Jupiter’s well.

Graff. Fleet Lt. Jurgen Graff. Carrier pilot, junior grade.

“There’s an office free,” Graff said, meaning very evidently they should go there. Now. Urgently. A Fleet lieutenant wanted to talk to him, and he was stuck on Fleet orders in something that increasingly felt like a deliberate black hole?

“I’ve got a flight out of here at 1800. They’re talking about an exit stamp. I need some kind of clearance.”

“You don’t have a flight out of here. Not this one.”

He slowed down, so that Graff had to pull a stop and look at him. “Sir. I need this straightened out, with apologies, sir, but I’ve got a transfer order waiting for me back on Sol One, I was told not to communicate with my CO, I’m not Fleet personnel. I understand the interservice agreements, but—“

“Five minutes.”

“I’m UDC personnel. I want to see a UDC ranking officer. Sir. Now.”

“Five minutes,” Graff repeated. “You don’t want your friend screwed. Do you?”

“My friend— Sir, I don’t care what happens to my friend. I’ve got an appointment waiting for me back on Sol One, and if I lose it, I’m screwed. I’m just a little uneasy about this whole damn arrangement, —sir. This isn’t what I was told.”

“There’s another shuttle out the 22^nd. 2100 hours.”

Ben caught a breath. Three days. But Graff’s moves meant business and you didn’t argue a security matter on the open dock—no. Even if it was blackmail. Extortion. Kidnapping.

Graff waited. He came ahead. He went with Graff into a freight office and Graff waved the lights on.

“Yes, sir?” he said.

“We need him,” Graff said. “We need him to remember.”

“Sir, I just graduated from TI. If I’m not back there for the interviews they’re going away. They’re going to assign those slots and I’m stuck teaching j-1 programming to a class full of wide-eyed button-pushers, —sir. Excuse me, but I’ve not been in contact with any officer in my chain of command, I’ve gone along with this on the FSO’s word it had notified my CO. I’m not sure at this point I’m not AWOL.”

“You’re not. You’re cleared.”

“I’ve got your word on that. I haven’t seen any order but the one that had me report to the FSO on One. What have you done to me?”

“You have my word. I’ll get a message to your CO.”

“You mean they haven’t?”

“I’ll double check. We’ve played poker, haven’t we, Mr. Pollard?”

“Yes, sir.” Days of poker. Him. Dekker. Graff. No damn thing else to do on a half-built carrier.

“This is poker,” Graff said. “For the major stakes. How is he?”

“What does it matter? What’s he into?”

“Say I need him sane.”

“He’s never been sane.”

“Don’t joke like that. In some quarters they might take you seriously.”

“I am serious. The guy’s good, but his tether on reality’s just a little frayed.”

“Maybe that’s what it takes to do what he does.”

He stood there close to Graff, looking into Graff’s sober face in this very unofficial office and suddenly wondering who and what Graff was talking about and what Dekker did regularly do that had put him where he was. He said, carefully, “Dekker got lost out in the Belt. Banged around a lot. Real disoriented.”

“We know that.”

And how much else? Ben wondered. God, how much else? News didn’t escape the Belt. Security didn’t let anything get out. Even yet. Everything about the mining operation out there was under wrap. You didn’t know how much the Fleet might know. Or what tiny, inadvertent slip would let them guess what they’d done track there and what they might have been involved in that might screw his security clearance for good.

“I knew this man a handful of months. I’ve seen him like this before—when he Fust got out of hospital on R2. I can’t make him make sense til he wants to make sense. I couldn’t then. Nobody can.”

“You made a good advance on it. Three days, lieutenant. I want him to talk.”

Bream came short. “Do I get to beat it out of him?”

“Let’s be serious, lieutenant.”

“What am I supposed to be asking? Have I got a clearance to hear it? Or what happens when he does talk? What am I looking for?”

“As much as you can know—and it’s not been released yet—there was an accident. Dekker wasn’t in it. Friends of his were. Dekker’s crew was lost.”

“Oh shit.”

“Top command subbed in another pilot with Dekker’s crew on a test run. The test didn’t go right. Total loss. Dekker was hospitalized, treated for shock. The day he got out—he either climbed into a simulator under the influence of drugs or something else happened. It’s a matter of some interest—which.1’

Ben chewed his Up. Missile test, they’d said on Sol One.

Tech committee meetings. Place crawling with brass and VIPs. Hell. “So isn’t there an access record?”

“Computers can be wrong. Can’t they?”

Ben’s heart rate picked up: he hoped to hell there wasn’t a monitor hearing it. He tried to think of some scrap to hand Graff, for good will’s sake. He finally said, “Yes. They can be.”

“I want him functioning,” Graff said. “Say you’re on jnterservice loan—at high levels. It could be good. It could be bad. To take maximum advantage of that... you need to deliver.” Graff pulled a thick envelope from his jacket and held it out to him. “He listed you next-of-kin. So you have a right to see this.”

“I’m not his next-of-kin. He’s got a mother—“

“She’s specifically excluded. Don’t worry. There’s nothing in this packet outside your security clearance.”

He took it. He didn’t want to.

“I wouldn’t leave that material lying about unattended,” Graff said, “all the same. —You’ve got your quarters in hospital. I can’t order you not to use the phone. But if you do, if you contact anyone else, do you understand me, you’re not behind our screen any longer. Take my personal advice: get back to the hospital and stay there—and don’t use that phone.”

He looked at Graff a long, long moment. Lieutenant j-g. Carrier command officer. A tech/1 to a tech/2’s rank. But he had the impression Graff was leaning on some executive and clandestine authority to do what he was doing. It was in Graff’s tone, in the clear implication he should avoid his own chain of command.

“Whose office does this originate in, sir? You mind to tell me how official this is? Who’s in charge?”

“Ultimately, the captain.”

Two and two suddenly made four. Keu. Sol FSO. He looked Graff in the eyes and thought—I don’t like this. Damn, I don’t. He said,

“Is your captain the only authority that’s covering me?”

Graff said, “No.”

Conrad Mazian? The EC militia commander who was romancing his way through the UN hearings? “In which service, sir? I want to know. I need to know that. I want orders in writing,”

“Ben. Take my word. I’d go back to quarters, immediately, if I were you. I’d stay quiet. I’d do everything I could to finish my job. If I were in your place.” Graff opened the door, and shut off the lights. “If you need me, for any reason—tell Dr. Evans.”

The keycard worked, at least. The room in the hospice was an institutional cubbyhole with a bunk, a phone, an ordinary flat-vid.

And no baggage.

Delivered, customs had said. Customs had showed him the slip. Delivered at 1500h. God only where.

He set down the soft drink he had carried up from level 1. He looked at his watch. 1845h.

He picked up the phone and went through hospital downside to call customs.

“This is Lt. Benjamin Pollard. I was just there. My baggage isn’t here. Is it still being delivered?”

“Who did you talk to?”

He sat down on the bed. He pulled a vending machine sandwich from his pocket, laid it on the table by the soft drink, and pulled out the customs claim ticket. “The claim number is 9798.”

A pause. “It’s been delivered, sir.”

“You didn’t deliver it to HOS-28.”

“That’s what’s on the ticket, sir.”

“That’s not what’s in HOS-28, soldier. I want to know where my baggage is right now.”

‘ ‘That’s alt the record I have, sir. You could check with Lost Baggage at 0700.”

“This shift doesn’t find baggage, is that it? It just loses it?”

A moment of silence. “I’ll make a note of it, sir.”

“Thank you.”

He punched out. He did not break the phone. He took a sip of his soft drink and unwrapped the sandwich.

No official assignment, no cafeteria open at this hour, no card with food privileges. He had fifty on him. Period. And Mr. Lieutenant j-g Jurgen Graff and his unnamed captain hadn’t seen to that detail.

God, he didn’t like the feeling he had. Bet that Graff had contacted Maj. Weiter? Hell if. Bet that the UDC knew where he was right now?

He looked at the phone and thought how he could call the UDC CO here. He could do that. He could break this wide open and maybe be a hero to the UDC—or get caught in the middle of something, behind a security screen that didn’t have Stockholm anywhere inside it. A screen confined to this place. Right now he could plead total ignorance. Right now he had a transfer order signed by Keu and a Security stamp on it and he could plead he had regarded the order exactly the way it said in the Interservice Protocols. And he could do what they wanted and get out of here.

Dammit, he didn’t know why Dekker was crazy. Anybody who wanted to fly little ships and get shot at was crazy. If even the simulator could half kill a guy—

He could have said get Dekker off the drugs. He could have said don’t sedate him—but Dekker knew too much about him, damn him, Dekker knew enough to babble things that could end up on his record, if Dekker got to talking to the psych; and if Dekker had told certain things to Graff, God—Graff could have been sifting everything he had said against information he had no idea Graff had, and weighing it for truth. Graff could have had technical backup doing it, big-time, interactive logic stuff you had no good chance to evade without a clearer head and a calmer pulse rate than he had had in that interview—

God only, what Dekker had involved himself in. Or why someone might have wanted Dekker dead.

Or what might happen if he picked up that phone right now and tried to get through to the UDC office—via hospital communications.

He didn’t know enough about how the lines were drawn here. He didn’t want to know enough. Do what Graff wanted and be on that shuttle on the 22^nd, that was all. Any way he could. And if the UDC did land on him—spill everything immediately. Total innocence. No, sir, they showed me orders, they said it was cleared—

Somebody subbed a pilot on a test run? And somebody put Dekker into a simulator drugged out of his mind?

Bloody hell.

He pulled out the envelope, from inside his jacket. Opened it and pulled out cards and pictures, a couple of licenses and old IDs.

Flight certification. Picture of Dekker and three other people. Group shot. All in Fleet uniform. Woman and two guys besides Dekker. All smiling. Arms over each other’s shoulders.

Old vid advert for a truly skuz sex item. God. We all have our secrets, Dek-lad,...

Picture of Sol Station. Picture of a couple of people outside a trans station. Picture of Mars Base from orbit. If there’d been any of Cory Salazar, Dekker had lost those, a long time ago.

Datacard. The phone had a reader, but he shoved the card into his own. Personal card showed vid rentals. Commissary charges. Postage charges. Bank records. Bits and pieces of Dekker’s life since they’d parted company. Lad had 5300.87cc to his account and no debts. Not bad. Not rich either.

The other datacard was old notes and mail. Not much of it. Notes from various people. One letter months ago from Ingrid Dekker. Four, this last year from Meg Kady.

So Meg did write him. He would never have figured Meg for the letter-writing kind.

Would never have figured Meg for a lot else, either.

He keyed up Meg’s last letter, scanned at random through what must have cost a Shepherd spacer a mint to send:

.. . can’t complain. Doing fine. I’m working into the crew, got myself onto the pilot list. ..

Sal and 1 dropped into The Hole, just on a look-see. Maybe it’s what we are now. Maybe it’s just the place is duller. It doesn’t feel the same—

So what does? he thought, and thought about Sal, and good times in the Hole’s back rooms. But Sal Aboujib probably had herself a dozen guys on a string by now, swaggering about in rab cut and Shepherd flash, visiting pricey places like Scorpio’s—if Scorpio’s still existed. Sal had her a berth, had her a whole new class of guys to pick from. And Ben Pollard never had gotten a letter from Sal Aboujib. A hello from Dekker once, months ago. He’d said hello back. Only communication they’d had. And it was on here. Hope you’re doing all right. Everything fine. Only long-distance letter he’d ever gotten, tell the truth. And what did you answer, to people you didn’t want to be tied to? Good luck, goodbye, Dekker?

Bills. Note from one Falcone—Dek, we don’t like it either. But nothing we can do right now. They want a show. We’ll sure as hell give them one.

He skimmed back to the letter from Ingrid Dekker. A short one. Don’t come here. I don’t want to see you. You went out there by your own choice and maybe it wasn’t any of it your fault what happened, but things are hard enough. Paul, and I don’t need any more trouble. Stop sending me money. I don’t want any more ties to you. I don’t want any more letters. Leave me alone.

Shit.

He set the reader on his knee, gave a deep breath, thinking— Shit, Dek —He’d grown up on his parents’ insurance himself, both of them having been so careless as to take the deep dive with their whole crew. At first he’d really resented them doing that, thought if they’d given a damn about their kid they wouldn’t have been that careless, but he’d stared into Jupiter’s well himself once—and he knew how subtle and sudden that slope was, in the pit of his stomach he knew it, now, and dreamed about it, on bad nights.

But his mama had never written him a letter like this one, and in that cold little spot marked Who’s left to care, he guessed why Dekker might have written him as next-of-kin: Meg with her letters about how she was working into the crew and everything was going fine for her-Dekker wouldn’t risk having another woman writing him, saying, Get out of my life, you skuz. Dekker already knew what Ben Pollard thought. And if Dekker was in trouble that needed a next-of-kin—whose life was he going to interrupt, who might remotely even know him?

He cut the reader off. He sat there in a cardboard cubby of a room with no damn baggage and for a moment or two had remorseful thoughts about Paul Dekker. Wished maybe he’d written a line or two more, back then, like—hell, he didn’t know. Something polite.

What friggin’ time is it?

Two months in a miner-ship with Dekker off his head asking him the time every few minutes. So here he was back there again—locked into a hospital with Dekker. One part of him felt sorry for Dekker and the other panicked part of him still wanted to beat hell out of the fool and get out of here....

Dammit, what am I supposed to do with this damn card? Why didn’t Graff give this stuff to the psych?

Sub in another pilot, did they? Why, if not Dekker’s attitude? And who did it,” if not the CO who’s supposed to want this stuff from Dekker? Real brand-new ship, Dekker said once. That’s why the Fleet had wanted him. He’d been real excited about it—wanted it more than anything in his life—

And a crew’s dead and Dekker’s screwed like that?

He sat there on the side of the bed desperately, urgently, wanting off Sol Two, he didn’t at the moment care where. This whole deal had the stink of death about it

Serious death, Sal would say.

No shit. Sal. What do I do with the guy?