Hellburner (3 page)

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.