Devil to the Belt (v1.1) (71 page)

“Is he asleep?” Ben asked quietly—made a trip to the bathroom while Sal was drowsing and stopped for a look-see. Dekker looked skuzzed, thoroughly, face down in the pillows. Meg was using his reader, scanning through Dekker’s manuals—there was a lot of study going on in the barracks, over cold dead hamburgers and breaded fish. The smell out there could gag you. And the atmosphere was crazed. Guys glad they were going to fly this thing—the pilots and the lunatic lead techs who made up the core crew.

He should have counted, he told himself. He’d been a numbers man. He should have added it—and panicked when the number of him and Dekker and Meg and Sal tallied four, same as the other core crew units out there.

“He’s out,” Meg said. “Cold. Thank God. Man’s seriously needing his sleep.”

He came and sank down on the edge of the other bunk, said, ever so quietly, “You like this guy?”

Meg shrugged. You never got unequivocal out of her or Sal. But she was here. She’d risked her neck and her license for him. Partner, yeah. But Meg didn’t do things for one reason, or even two. A solid part of it was in that datacard, was in the way Meg looked right now, sharp and serious and On as he’d ever seen her.

He didn’t say what he’d sat down to say: Flunk that damn test. He slid a glance at Dekker and back and said, “You know, you better carry a pocket wrench.”

Any Belter knew what a wrench was for, on helldeck. Meg’s mouth quirked.

“The CO’s crazy,” he said very quietly. “I flew out here with that guy.”

“So did we.”

“That where they got him? Belt garrison?”

She shook her head. Whispered, “That carrier came in from deep. We dunno where. All the time we were on there, we saw crew, never but once saw him.”

“What’d you think?”

Meg frowned. “Didn’t like the signals.”

He said, under his breath, “We got a serious warning. Don’t know what that guy’s problem is, but it is. We saw him far more than once. Just watching us. The body language. He wants his space, he wants yours. Smiles and laughs but he doesn’t smile, you know what I mean? He watched Dek real close. Dek didn’t like him.”

“Grounds?”

“Just that.” He didn’t think the place was bugged. Events hadn’t proven it and it was too egocentric to mink Polrey’s security had made a straight line to their quarters. But he got uneasy with the topic. He said, “Helldeck radar, maybe. Guys you’d insist do the EVA, if it was the two of you in a miner can, you know what I mean?”

Meg got real dead grim. “Ask Sal about that kind.” And then bit her lip like she’d said too much of Sal’s business. “Yeah. Same signals. You ever ship with Sammy Wynn?”

Awful thought. Guy with some serious personality faults, that wouldn’t get better on a long, lonely haul. “I wouldn’t share a bar table with Sammy Wynn. Whatever happened to him?”

“Spaced by now, I hope.” She stopped and looked aside as Dekker turned over and buried his head in a pillow. Time to go, Ben decided, before they woke Ens. Moonbeam. He stood up, stood still til he knew Dekker wasn’t going to wake up.

“You going to take the Aptitudes?” Meg asked him.

Sore spot, that. “Yeah,” he admitted. And went back into the room with Sal. He had signed the assignment roster out there. He hadn’t intended to tell them. But what had happened here, with the UDC CO busted out of command, himself being caught behind a Fleet Security wall... he didn’t give a real thought to a transfer right now. He could test into something administrative. Damned sure the Fleet wouldn’t want him going back under the UDC curtain with what he’d witnessed here, if by any means they could finagle hanging on to him—and it certainly looked as if they had the clout. He didn’t have the instincts or the nerves for combat, he’d proved that before, and that was bound to show. Drugged you down, they did, even for the basic test. Hooked you up to a machine and read your responses and your answers. You couldn’t fake this one. They said.

He passed the door back into his room, sat down on the bed carefully, so as not to wake Sal. Low light, scatter of braids on the pillows, innocent-as-a-babe profile with parted lips, slight snub nose—dammit, the conniving kid was his partner, he liked being with her, he’d found a piece of himself clicked back into place when she’d come walking into the barracks—and being without her again was a dreary thought. He earnestly, honestly liked Sal; and Meg; which he’d never said about anybody but Morrie Bird; and God help him, he could even get acclimated to Dekker, or just plain nerve-dead.

Fact was, skuz as this whole place was, somehow the echo and the racket and the coming and going in the barracks fit him like an old sock—fact was, he liked the racket and the activity and the accent he’d grown up with echoing off the bulkheads. Pressure here was from fools higher-up, different than TVs carpeted, high-voltage corridors, where competition was cutthroat and constant.

But this wasn’t any damn mining run this group was prepping for. At TI your highest chance of fatal injury was sticking your finger in a power socket or ODing on caffeine. Here—

God, they weren’t even sure the damn ship would work. Rumor out in the hall was that they were going max v with the program and they still hadn’t proved any crew could run it once—let alone fly it in combat.

That was crazy. And he wasn’t—even if insanity got the rest of them.

Sal—go out there and turn herself into a missile? Sal and Meg end up in a fireball? Hell if, if he could stop it. But he didn’t know how to; couldn’t stop Meg, damn the woman, if Dekker couldn’t. And if Meg went, Sal went, and if Sal went—

Oh, hell, he was not a fool. There were women in Stockholm. There’d be a way to get down there, even through Fleet Command—if he just got Aptituded into strategic technical.

Stockholm women wouldn’t ask stupid questions like What’s the Belt? They’d have university degrees and stand and watch the tide come in and the snow fall and... think it was all damned ordinary.

Hell. Bloody hell with women. Dekker was saner. At least Dekker knew what he wanted.

INSERT card please,” the neutral voice said. The phone clicked. Dekker held the receiver and waited. And waited. Meg and Ben and Sal were in Testing. His day didn’t start until 1015, when he had an appointment with Evaluations. Which meant he could go to the gym to try to settle his breakfast and his nerves; or try a phone call, see if he could get a personal call through to Sol One, on FleetCom, in spite of the security crackdown.

“Ens. Dekker.” Human voice this time. “Is this an official call?”

“I’m trying to call my mother.” He hated to sound like a strayed six-year-old. Mother always felt strange to him. Mama he’d long outgrown, though it came naturally to Belter ears. “It’s a next-of. There was something on the news. —Look, can you put me through to Lt. Graff? He knows the situation.”

“—I’m not being obstructionist, Ens. Dekker. I’m aware of your situation, but I am required to get an authorization for personal calls.”

God, everyone in the solar system knew his business. “Yeah, well, can you do anything, FleetCom? The lieutenant’s not outstanding easy to find this morning.”

“I’ll page him.”

“Everybody’s paged him,” Dekker muttered. “I’ll card in every little bit, I’m going down to gym 3A.”

“I’m sorry. The gym is now off limits to Fleet personnel. Use the one on 3-deck, section 2.”

“How do I get my clothes out of the locker in 1A?”

“Check with the office on 3-deck.”

Everything was on its ear. “Thanks,” he said glumly, and went four sections and took a lift in—it was about as much exercise as he wanted, just walking it. But one thing he’d learned in his tour in the Belt, if you could crawl to the gym, you crawled there and worked out; and if you got the spooks or the nerves—you went there and burned the chill off, you didn’t let your mind go in loops—never let that start, not when you worked in cold, dark places, with things that went bang all too commonly.

The office there had his gym clothes, everything in sacks with old locker numbers. They had his name on the gym records. They had lockers already assigned to him and his crew....

He hadn’t had a run of things that worked in weeks. It gave him a moment of ridiculous cheerfulness. He had the whole gym to himself for the hour, everybody else being in sims or in special briefings—he wasn’t fondly looking forward to his own session with the meds upcoming. Warm up the sore spots and go in there with the adrenaline burned out of him, was the plan—lunch on carbohydrates and go into Evaluation at 1300 warmed-up and hyped, and blow hell out of their damn tests... he could do it. The doctors had kept him flat on his back too long, he’d dropped five kilos on the hospital food, and Custard Charlie Tyson had gotten a couple of good hits in, but he could do it if he could get the chill out of his bones.

Light workout with the hand weights raised a sweat.

Coordination was shot. That wasn’t good. He leaned on his knees a moment, trying to get his wind back and the rubbery feeling out of his arms, getting madder and madder at the meds, at the UDC, at the Fleet that had busted Graff over to a desk job and put in a bastard with an Attitude—

Temper wasn’t helpful. Demas would say that. Calm down, Dekker. Use your head. Adrenaline’s for speed, not stomach acid.

Yeah. But it didn’t help when the knees wanted to cave in, when you had serious worries about three fools who’d gotten themselves into a Situation for his sake, and had a CO who’d flat warned him he didn’t give a damn for their survival—

Stomach acid, hell, he wanted to beat the shit out of Porey, that was why he was shivering. And if he did that, with all the esoteric consequences of people he knew and didn’t know, it wouldn’t stop bastards from being bastards, and wouldn’t get Porey out of here, he’d only make it worse.

He didn’t want to be in this situation. He didn’t want to be anybody anyone else relied on for anything: he was schitz as hell. He was crazy. Ben knew it. He didn’t see why Beet Command couldn’t see it. He didn’t know why he’d ever been made an issue, or put where they’d put him, except the Shepherds had needed somebody crazier than they were to press their differences with the insystemers— and people who wouldn’t have given a damn about him back in the Belt, found a use for him here. He wasn’t Paul Dekker to them: he was this to one group and that to another and nobody really knew shit about him....

Hi, Dek, good to see you, Dek, how you doing? He couldn’t stand it any more—because Ben was right, they didn’t know him, didn’t know he was a screw-up, a damn dumb pusher-jock who didn’t think before he opened his mouth. Only value he had to anyone, the fact that his nerves jumped faster than average. Only thing he was good at, that ship—that was all that had mattered to him; Pete and Elly and Falcone had had themselves, and they’d gone together— the Fleet had thrown them together, they’d tested high, that was all. And they were good and they’d worked together, but he was burned out this morning, he didn’t even know whether he’d ever felt anything with them but comfort, and that was cheap—

He didn’t know why Ben had decided to take the damn test this morning. Ben had skuzzed out on him. If Ben had held out, Ben might have persuaded Sal and Sal might have reasoned with Meg—

Like hell. He hadn’t seduced Meg out here. At least Meg and Sal weren’t his fault. The ship had done that. Some lying bastard in the Fleet had done that, who’d told Meg they’d give her a chance—

Yeah. A chance. Thanks.

Drug made you seriously spaced. You had sensor spots patched all over you, in places that made a body most emphatically wonder if it was procedure or the femme tech having a few loose circuits of her own—

“Do it where?” she remembered asking. But the examiner, that was a guy, nice-looking greyheaded man, asked her to match up all these shapes and holes—God, she hadn’t done this one in years. “I’m not good at this,” she said. “I don’t fly little cubes.”

Neither did he, he said. At least he had a sense of humor. So she ran the test and she tracked on discrimination stuff that flashed on screens, they moved her to another station and belted her in and the computer spun her around and around—easy piece, nothing hard at all. Til the floor dropped out from under her and then the thing went through its paces.

Wanted you to draw a straight line? Right.

Wanted you to get up and walk one?

Yeah. Maybe.

Sit in the spin chair again. Wait for the light and press the button while the chair spins?

Siren blast. Right before the light flash.

Dirty trick, sumbitch. Dirty trick. Flash again. Flash, flash. Pause. Flash.

Hold the yoke and the toggles, make the VR lines meet? This was a good one. Hadn’t done this one before....

Weight escaped his balance and bounced. Dekker ended up on one knee, caught a breath and waited for the room to stop spinning before he went to pick it up and rack it and lock it in. Good show he was going to make for the meds in an hour. He drew long breaths, sat down and felt after the towel to mop his face.

Stars came out of a vast dark. Lights on the panel glowed with information....

It was in his head, the same as, in the Belt, you got to seeing rocks in your sleep, not rocks as they existed in the deep dark, but the way they were in the charts, the courses they ran, falling sunward, faster and faster, and then more and more slowly outward—

He wiped the sweat that stung his eyes. He heard somebody come in, challenged at the office for numbers and names. “Yeah,” he heard someone say, far away and a door shut...

Echo. Door opening and closing. He’d seen a shape. He’d talked to someone. But he couldn’t remember to whom. He chased the memory. But the voice that came back lacked all tone:

Just checking. Do what you were doing....

Who in hell would he take that answer from?

Piece of nonsense. He could screw this test. They wanted him to discriminate a damn lot of advancing lines and dots? Easier if the sensors didn’t itch.

He muttered, “Quick way to solve this. Who programmed this?”

Examiner said, “Don’t talk.”

“This is a piece of shit, major. Begging pardon.” Zap. “Damn arcade game.”