Hellburner (20 page)

Severely big joke. The idea of infalling a gravity well made him nervous as hell. Going down to Stockholm, if he got mere, as happened, he intended to drink a lot of cocktails before the dive—because he was Shepherd—a Shepherd orphan, as happened, thank God he’d been on R2 when the ship went. But sometimes, on his worst nights, he dreamed of metal groaning, bolts fracturing, the sounds a ship would make when compression began— pop, and bang and metal shrieking—

Yeah, Shepherds made jokes. Shepherds defended the perks and prerogatives they got from the Company for flying where others couldn’t. And Meg was insystemer, inner systemer, even blue-sky; and there on Sal’s ticket....

So Dekker got the credit with the Shepherds, for one hell of a flight; and Meg, who’d nearly got her arm blown off for the cause—got the shit: Dekker hadn’t asked for a post with the Shepherds, that was the Attitudinal difference....

“She wanted to come,” Sal said. And gave a long breath. “Couldn’t let her go alone.”

“To find Dekker? She didn’t effin’ know him. She didn’t—“

Pilot, he thought then. Meg was a pilot same as Dekker, didn’t care about anything but to fly. And the Shepherds didn’t want her at controls?

Double shit. But things the other side of the wall still didn’t make sense in that light.

“So she’s in bed with the guy?”

A movement of sheet, shrug of Sal’s shoulders. Silence a moment. Then: “Hormones.”

“What kind? That’s the question.”

“Like he’s the best, you know what I mean? Beating him’d—I dunno, it’d prove a lot of things.”

“God.” He fell onto his back to think about that a tick.

“I mean/’ Sal said, “if even the Fleet had offered her back then what they’d offered Dekker—if they’d just offered, she’d have been gone. But she was lying in pieces and patches, as was—couldn’t blame them, really, but it severely did hurt....”

Up on his elbow again. He was hearing craziness he might have to fly with. “She’s not any damn twenty-year-old, Sal, if you want to talk hormones, here, you got to have a whole different wiring. Reactions aren’t there. They’re not going to be there for any sane human, Sal, the guy’s flat crazy, it seems to be a pre-rec on this ship—“

Silence a moment. Sal was all shadow and maybe anger, you couldn’t know when you were talking to a cutout in the dark. Finally Sal said, with a definite edge to her voice, “She’s not any twenty-year-old, but she was damned good, Ben, you weren’t out there with us, you didn’t see how she’d finesse a rock—and we got shit, Ben, the Company gave us shit assignments, because we were worse than freerunners, we were freerunner lease crew, and they were trying to run us broke, to crack the ship-owners, that was what they were up to. We never got one good draw from that ‘random assignment procedure’—Meg had a record on Sol, Meg was on the Company’s hit list because Meg was rab, Meg didn’t dress by the codes, Meg didn’t think by the codes, Meg wouldn’t kiss ass and they screwed her, Ben, same as B.M. screwed her, same as the Hamilton screwed her— So here the damn Fleet comes in and says, By the way, will you come in and haul Dek out of his mess? —Didn’t even say, You want to fly for us? Said, You want to come haul this chelovek out of his funk and we’ll cover your record? That’s all, that’s all they promised, Ben. And she got this look—shit, what was I going to do? She’d stuck by me. Maybe it’s time somebody went with her.”

He’d never heard Sal talk that way—Sal with an attack of Obligations. But, shit-all, —

That thought led down a track he didn’t want to take, something about old times, about what they’d had on helldeck, confidence that came of knowing the guy you were sharing a ship with wasn’t out to screw you—whole damn universe might be out to do that, but your partner wouldn’t, your partner had to have the same interests you did, and you just didn’t cheat on him.

You just didn’t cheat on him....

He rolled out of bed, buck naked and cold in the draft from the vents, he walked over to tile other bunk and leaned his arm against it, because if he stayed in that bed he was going to start thinking about Morrie, and he didn’t like to do that, not in the middle of the dark.

So Sal was being a fool. So Meg thought she could get the years she’d lost back again and the system wouldn’t screw them all.

Rustle from behind him. Movement. Arms came around him, and the chill myriad clips of Sal’s braids rattled against his back.

“Cold out here, Ben.”

‘’I want out of here, dammit, I’m not aptituded for combat. I got a place in Stockholm...”

Sal said, holding him tight, “What’s Stockholm?”

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

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

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

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

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

But come into their territory—

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

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

“Lt. Graff?” Young male voice. Familiar male voice. “Col. Tanzer on the line’1

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

Pop. “Lt. Graff?”

“Colonel?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The sojers had this perverse habit called reveille, which meant after the com scared hell out of you and you hauled yourself bleary-eyed awake, you ran for the breakfast line

before the eggs disappeared—Meg had gotten into that routine on the ship coming here, got a few days spoiled on the shuttle, and here she and Sal were again—standing in line, the only females in sight, with two guys who drew their own kind of attention.

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

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

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

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

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

She listened. She tried to imagine it.

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

“Grits,” Dek said.

“Was it alive?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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