Hellburner (25 page)

Because damned right there was a connection between his mother and MarsCorp, it was Aim, it was Cory Salazar’s mother, who’d wanted to have a daughter, had one solo and tried to run that daughter’s life and now her afterlife as a personal vendetta against the pusher-jock who’d romanced her collegiate offspring out of her hands.

Hell if that was the way it had been. Cory had dreamed of starships, Cory’d hated her mother’s laid-out course—college to a MarsCorp guaranteed success track—so much that Cory Wouldn’t run fast enough or far enough to escape it. Maybe starships had only been a kid’s romantic answer—but Cory had come to the Belt because she’d thought she could double and triple her money free mining—she’d lured him along for a pilot, and they’d nearly done it, until Cory ran head-on into the corrupt System her mama had wanted her to sit at the top of—and it killed her.

That was the bloody truth. That was the thing Alyce Salazar wouldn’t see. He’d wanted to tell her so: he’d imagined how he’d say it if he got the chance, maybe talk to her sanely, maybe just grab her and shake some sense into mama, so she’d do something about the system that had killed Cory.

But Legal Affairs had nixed any such move, said plainly, Don’t communicate with her. Don’t attempt to communicate with her. And made it an order.

So now Alyce Salazar had communicated with his mother he knew that was the case, because his mother wasn’t dedicated to finding trouble, his mother was the absolute champion of Never get involved...

The side door opened. A team of medics came in, with: “Let’s have a look at you,” so he sat where they wanted and let them look at his eyes with lights, and into his ears, and his mouth. They got the nosebleed stopped, at least, then said they’d better have him down in the clinic for a thorough go-over.

“No,” he objected, suddenly panicked. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”

But they took him anyway.

Aboujib, assault with a weapon, incitement

Basrami, assault

Bissell, assault

Blumgarten, assault, assault on an officer

Brown, assault with a weapon

Cannon, assault, incitement

Dekker, instigation of riot, assault

Franklin, assault with a weapon

Hardesty, assault

Hasseini, assault, verbal abuse of an officer

Jacoby, assault with a weapon

Kady, assault, assault on an officer

Keever, assault, destruction of government property

Mason, assault

Mitchell, assault, assault on an officer

Pauli, assault, incitement

Pollard, assault with a weapon

Rasmussen, verbal abuse; (hospital)

Schwartz, assault

Simmons, assault

Vasquez, assault; (hospital)

Zeeman, aggravated assault

Graff read the list, handed it to Petrie, the junior out of Legal Affairs. “I want interviews, any way you can get them. Record everything. I want them now, I want any releases you can get, I want them an hour ago. And I want condition, instigator and perpetrator on our hospital cases.”

“Yessir.” Petrie put the list in his case. The temper must be showing. Petrie didn’t stop for questions of his own. The door shut.

Demas, resting against the counter, said, “Doesn’t seem there was anything premeditated: the channel 3 news boss recognized a correspondence of names on the Sol One news feed, suddenly realized it was sensitive, and jerked the report off the air—bad decision. Dekker happened to be in the messhall, the vid happened to be channel 3. Charlie Tyson happened to be behind him with a tray; Dekker jumped up—bang into the tray. Tyson blew up, Dekker blew, the whole messhall blew.”

“I want a tape of that news broadcast, I want to know what’s going on with Dekker’s mother, I want to know what she’s involved in.”

“You want it in capsule now?” Demas asked. “I’ve got the essentials.”

“Go.”

“Dekker’s mother got fired two days ago. She was a maintenance worker—electrician—for SolCorp. The maintenance office claimed incompetence—the record is apparently inaccessible—she claimed she was a victim of MarsCorp pressure inside the EC, claimed Salazar’s agents had been harassing her on the phone. She showed up in front of the MarsCorp office with lawyers and reporters, MarsCorp called Security, and a MarsCorp spokesman went on camera to charge Ms. Dekker with sabotage and threatening phone calls—apparently Ms. Dekker had been doing some work inside the MarsCorp sector and got some phone numbers, by what Ms. Salazar charges. Ms. Dekker claims they’ve been harassing her—calls on her off watch, that kind of thing. Ms. Dekker’s got some civil rights organization on her side, they’re charging Ms. Salazar used pressure to get Ms. Dekker’s job on personal grounds. End report.” “Harassing phone calls. Is Ms. Salazar on One?” “She was eight days ago, at the time Ms. Dekker claims she got two of the calls. She’s in London at the moment. Ms. Dekker claims she asked for a trace on the calls. The station office claims there was no such request and says their records show no calls to Ms. Dekker’s residence.” Demas folded his arms. “Ask how sophisticated Ms. Salazar’s employees might be.”

“I take it there are ways to evade those records.” “Abundant methods—limited only by the sophistication of the operator and the equipment. This is a woman who maintains apartments in two space stations and a couple of world capitals, on two separate planets. I would not match a station electrician against her technical resources.”

“We’ve been sleeping through this one. I need a structural chart of MarsCorp and the EC, With names and kinships.” Damn, the Security chief was—where else?—with the captain. “Can we get that through our own channels?” “We can try. It’s going to be a maze. Kinships, I’m not sure are going to be systematized anywhere. They’re illegal, remember—where it regards government contracts. Personal friendships are illegal.”

“Are animosities?”

A humorless laugh. “Unfortunately there’s no such rule. Among those cards on your desk is the Alyce Salazar file such as we have it—with Saito’s compliments. Some of the information may be in there. It’s going to take Legal Affairs to—“

“—unravel the MarsCorp connections?”

Demas nodded. “If they can.”

“Meanwhile there’s the next shuttle to One. I want somebody on it. I want somebody to go personally to the captain’s office—if there still is an office—and get a report to him we’re sure isn’t intercepted. And I want some message back here that isn’t wearing a UDC uniform or Belter chain and claiming they don’t know a thing. I should have done it when Pollard came in here.”

Demas looked thoughtful. “I’ll look up the schedule.”

“Due in at 0900h on the 27
^th
, out at 2030h the 29
^th
, we’ve got a service hold for scheduled maintenance. They’re claiming it’s booked full outbound. There’s always some contractor holding seats. If we’ve got any pull—get one.”

He’d gotten used to being handled like a piece of meat. He’d gotten used to cameras and doctors and cops. They made a vid record of the new skin on his shoulder and the finger-marks on his arm. They asked him who’d hit him, he just shook his head, didn’t even have to come out of his haze to talk to them. They took samples of his hair, his skin, his blood, and whatever fluid they could wring out of his body; “Pulse rate just won’t go down,” one of them said. “That’s on his hospital records.”

“What do you expect!” he asked, only time he’d opened his mouth except for a tongue depressor, and one of them said he should calm down.

“Yeah,” he said. His stomach was upset from the poking around they were doing. He tried to go on timing out, just go away and blind himself with the lights and not to let his heart flutter, the way it felt it was doing. Couldn’t think about anything if you wanted to fake out the meds. Think of—

Sol One. His mother’s apartment. But that was no good. His mother was in trouble, thanks to him...

Way Out. But that ship was dead. Like Cory.

Think of stupid stuff. Name the moons of Saturn. Jupiter had used to work, but he’d learned that real estate too intimately.

Docking fire sequence for a miner ship. Range and rate of closing.

Finally one said, “Name’s Parton. Fleet Medical. How are you doing, Lt. Dekker?”

Fleet. He said, “The lieutenant agree with this?”

“The lieutenant doesn’t agree with fighting.”

So he was in trouble. With everybody. He slid a glance over to the wall, where he didn’t have to look at Parton or get in an argument, and wondered distractedly if he could get a word out of the news channel if he could just get permission to make a phone call. ...

But the medic, Parton, was talking with the other medics— said, of the blood pressure, “Yeah, he does that. Doesn’t like hospitals. Doesn’t like UDC medics, if you want the plain truth....”

Not real fond of any meds right now, —sir. Can I get up?

But he didn’t ask that, he didn’t think it was smart to ask, at this point. He got an elbow under him—they had him lying on a table freezing his ass off, and he only wanted to relieve the ache in his back. But a hand landed on his shoulder: it had a UDC uniform cuff. MP. He lay back and stared at the lights and froze in silence until the Fleet medic came back and stood over him.

“Lieutenant’s orders: you go where you’re told to go, you don’t argue, you don’t say anything about the incident to anybody but our legal staff, you understand?”

He said, burning with embarrassment, “Something about my mother on the news, can anybody for God’s sake find out what happened to my mother?”

“Lieutenant’s aware of that. He’s making inquiries.”

“What about the other guys? Pollard and Kady and Aboujib—“

“They’re fine.”

“They arrest them too?”

“Riot and assault.” Parton looked across him, over his head. “Lieutenant wants him with his unit. The three he named.”

“Kady and Aboujib are women.”

“They’re his unit, sergeant.”

Long silence. Then: ‘I’ll have to ask the major.”

Age-old answer. Dekker shut his eyes. Figured they’d be a while asking and getting no. “It’s protecting me from Kady you better worry about,” he told them. Bad joke. Nobody was laughing. He wasn’t amused either. Meg had a record of some kind. Meg had just gotten it cleared, got a chance to fly again. Ben had his assignment in Stockholm....

His mother used to say, You damned kid, everything you touch you break—

You messed up my whole life, you self-centered little brat—why can’t you do right, why can’t you once in your life do something right, you damned screw-up?

Long time he lay there freezing, with a knot in his gut, replaying that newscast for the information he could get out of it, telling himself they couldn’t prove anything on his mother, she’d at least got some kind of lawyer, so she wasn’t without help—

He’d got a little money ahead, he’d saved it out of his pay, he wasn’t spending anything. He’d tried to give it to her before, for what he’d cost her, but she hadn’t wanted it. Maybe he could get Ben to send it to her. Maybe she’d take it from Ben—she was going to need funds fast, if she wasn’t drawing pay, she never got that far ahead of the bills, and even if she had free legal help, it wouldn’t pay for food...

“Word is, he can’t go in a cell with the women,” the MP said. “Regulations. We can put him with Pollard....”

He didn’t argue. Parton only said he’d report that refusal to the lieutenant.

Parton left. The UDC medics got him up. The MPs locked a bracelet on his wrist that they said he wasn’t to mess with, and took him out and down the hall to the cells.

Guys from his barracks yelled out, along the way, “Hey, Dek!” and he looked numbly to the side. Mason and Chiv were mere. Pauli. Hardesty. And across the aisle—a guy he didn’t know, familiar face, who looked murder at him. So he didn’t look. He walked where they wanted him, they took the cuffs off when he’d gotten to Ben’s cell and they opened the door and put him in.

Ben gave him a sullen look. He didn’t figure Ben wanted to start a fight in front of the MPs. So he got over in the corner, mere being just a double bunk and a toilet, and Ben sitting on the bunk: he sank down on the floor with his back to the corner, feeling the bruises and feeling the silence from the bunk.

MPs stood there a moment more looking at him. He had the fanciful notion that after they left Ben was going to get up and come over and kill him. But he didn’t truly think so. Hit him—yeah. He expected that. He even wanted it. Anything to stop him thinking about the mess he’d made.

The MPs went away.

Ben said, “The place is probably bugged.”

Which meant Ben wouldn’t kill him—not in front of any cameras. He sat mere with his knees drawn up to his chest so tight he couldn’t move and felt numb.

“You going to sit there?”

He didn’t know what else to do. Didn’t care about climbing up to the top bunk. He was comfortable enough where he was—comfortable as he was going to get.

“You sure got a way of finding it, you know that?”

“Yeah,” he said. It cost to say, “Sorry, Ben,” but he did it, past the knot in his throat. He hadn’t said it often enough, maybe, over the years, and a lot of the people he should have said it to—it was too late to tell.