Hellburner (46 page)

Disaster. Utter political disaster.

“The tape is the damning thing. Someone’s given out details. Someone in a position to know what we’re doing—“

Saito said, “Don’t discount Tanzer. The UDC has those records at their disposal, a lot of damaging data. We had to accept the UDC structure in place, and after the takeover, we knew it was a bomb waiting to go off.”

“What side are they on, Com, for God’s sake? Do they think it’s a bloody game we’re playing?”

“Their power is in question. Their sight has unquestionably shortened. The question whether or not they’re in control of the EC or whether the EC is in control of Earth’s policy—it’s a very large, a very sensitive, issue in this system. The EC has enormous power, a constituency spread over the stations and the refineries and worlds outside this system. And we outsiders only know the EC. But there are governments, many governments on Earth, that consider the situation out there solely the EC’s war.”

“But it is the EC’s war. Do any of us doubt it’s the EC’s war? The EC’s cursed emigration restrictions created the mess, they motivated the dissidents to move out, they insisted on micromanaging at lights distance. Every stupid decision they ever compromised their way into created this war, but the fact is something very foreign is coming here, that’s the point. They’re worried about tape-training off a rab model because the rab movement is foreign? The rab isn’t azi. The rab isn’t designed personalities. The rab isn’t an expansion into space so remote we don’t know what may come out of it or what in hell they’re going to provoke... Belters are foreign? They should worry about me, Com. I’m foreign. I’m more alien than anything they’ve ever met!”

“Maybe they do worry. Maybe that’s what that mob in Geneva is really saying. Give us back our control over things. Make it stop. Make it the way we always thought it was.”

“It never was. Not for one moment was the universe the way they imagined.”

“Of course it wasn’t. But they thought they knew. They thought they controlled it all. Now they know they don’t. And that poor woman—is the symbol of their outrage.”

“Alyce Salazar has to be the EC’s greatest internal liability. Why in hell do they go on letting her take the offensive?”

“Principally because Mars wants its independence. Because Mars has gotten quite different, quite alien from Earth. That’s what I’ve turned up on the Salazars.”

“Cyteenization?”

“Something like. Something like the Belt—with nostalgic conservatism as the engine, instead of the radical reform that drove the rab to the Belt. They cling to an Earth that never existed. They’re the pure article, more Earther than Earth is—maintaining the true opinion, the true Earthly tradition. Never mind the outbackers are eccentric as they come. The corporate management runs the government, quite conservative, quite protective of their personal interests and their family influence.”

“I thought that was illegal.”

“It is. But it’s the driving force in Martian society— who’s in whose camp. Understanding what the daughter’s desertion meant to Alyce Salazar—simplistically, face-saving has to be a large part of her motive, by what we’ve turned up. The girl escaped her mother’s authority by literally slipping through customs and eluding her mother’s personal security: that was one blow to the Salazar corporate image; more extravagantly, she embarrassed her mother by dying, quite publicly, quite firmly associated with Belter rab in a fullscale Company disaster. The daughter was clearly a dynastic hope on her part—a bid to extend Salazar’s influence into another generation. A lot of Salazar alliances were built on that assumption.”

“Which had to be revised at the daughter’s death.”

“Which to a Martian corporate, was a major disaster. A threat to her immediate control. It’s radicalized the Salazar influence: she’s—certain people think, calculatedly—offended certain elements that oppose the Company. The consensus I’m getting from intelligence is she’s not mad, she calculatedly created a cause and an opposition to force the EC itself down her path in a move to come out of this more powerful man she was. That’s what we’re dealing with. She’s maneuvering for power equal to the EC president—and the EC so far is paralyzed, because of who’s backing her. They can’t betray the conservatives in Bonn, or it erodes a structure they’ve built up over decades. The conservatives mere are in fear for their lives over the radical resurgence. And that promotes Company hardliners, like Bertrand Muller. Muller is for the war, incidentally. He wants us to ‘recover Cyteen.’”

“My God.”

“He calls it a colony. What do you want? He’s ninety years old, he formed his current opinion on his fortieth birthday, and he says the Company police who fired on the rab were defending civilized values.”

“We’re in the hands of lunatics.”

“Of financiers. Far worse.”

HIT it, hit it, hit it—“ Breathless dive down the handlines for the seats, one, two, three, four... in place, switches up... Launch. Surreal burst of static while the screens and the V-HUD spieled numbers and lines...

“Shit!” from Ben. You couldn’t cure him—or Sal; and there wasn’t a miracle, they’d screwed the first run, the second and the third, but damn, Meg thought with half a neuron to spare, it felt better of a sudden... wasn’t garbage she was screening, it was starting to shape itself— Objective wasn’t there, God, intelligence gaffe— Time to sweat. Ben was on it, logicking his way for the current location.
 
Dek said, “What the hell?” and Ben confirmed a fire-zone. Virtual ordnance blasted out into virtual reality and she figured—yes! “Got it, got it, got it—“ “Watch that mother!”

Fan of junk in the carrier path. Dek repositioned and gave Sal the window on a roll to the main objective, and Meg input him the latest calc in long vision, new definition to the hostile fire-paths he was ready to see, more precise positions she was inputting to Sal and to him.

Feeling too good, too damn good, you didn’t cut a rip like that, couldn’t sustain it...

Couldn’t get overconfident, the damn sim kept throwing them targets and you couldn’t believe you were getting them, effin’ sim had to be playing with them...

Couldn’t go on this way—she was the only one in the crew who had time to worry, worry was the job description, taking the long view, mission objective, degree of criticality, sight and target, sight and target, priority was seen to, ride home couldn’t be this—

“Shit!”

Whole list of hits. It had felt too good all the way through, and Dekker shook his head, looking at the outcome, all of them gathered around the table, getting the same news. Objective achieved, path cleared, flock of surprises locked and taken out...

“Too soft,” Ben muttered. “Too soft, this thing. I don’t like it. It’s not supposed to fall down like this...”

Dekker rocked his chair on its hinge, propped a knee against the table and surveyed his crew, the chart-table with its windowed displays—not the stuff they’d worked with in the station, not the hard plastic chairs and the scrub-boards and the antique display system: anything they wanted, Porey said, and for himself he still had crises of disbelief.

And moments of slipping reality—like this one, that showed him faces he knew with reactions that just weren’t wrong... Pete and Elly and Falcone riding in the cockpit with them an hour ago, if he wanted to be spooked about it; but that wasn’t really what had happened: the carrier had that tape lab down the corridor, the way the carrier had a lot else it hadn’t let out, and his crew spent hours there, but they didn’t drug deep anymore, they didn’t need to, that was the story from the tape-techs. Done was done and their sessions were simply reaffirming the synched reactions, making sure—Meg said—they didn’t pick up any bad habits in live practice....

Live practice. Hell of a way to word it, considering.

They ran the sims in the prototype itself up to four hours a day, its V-HUD and instruments linked realtime to the carrier boards and the sims library, thanks to what Ben called the effin’ difference between the UDC’s EIDAT and the Fleet Staatentek. Ben seemed personally vindicated in mat—what it all meant, he wasn’t sure, but it ran.

And they did, not the first time, damned sure, the screw-up had been what Meg called egregious and Sal called words he’d never heard. Until, this sim-run ...

This run, he looked at the result and the fact Ben had psyched that relocated target right and laid the probability fan right over the son of a bitch, dead center—that was a fluke, but Ben swore he’d had a good hunch—which was what Elly had used to say. Same words. That was a spook-out, too; but it was another fluke. The cockpit wasn’t haunted and his crew didn’t see spooks in the mirror. He slept with Meg with no illusions it was Pete Fowler, hell if, Meg would say. You didn’t confuse one with the other...

And that still wasn’t what worried him. It was what Ben said, it wasn’t supposed to fall down this easy. They were out here on no other reason than keeping him away from the media, he told himself that once a day and he managed to relax and worry about Mitch and Almarshad, who were the ones in jeopardy—stilt catching glitches; and the crew who was dogging it and trying to come up from scratch and a couple of total disasters pulled a hundred percenter?

He’d thought he knew the answers, he’d eased off, kicked back, taken it for granted he was just going to steer while everything was going to go to hell and they started handing him stuff that fit together.

Adrenaline had come up, hold-it-steady had become tracking-on, this last run; he was still hyped and on his edge and he hadn’t been this alive down to the nerve-ends since—

Since he’d screwed the sim. You knew all along something was wrong with our set-up, Ben kept insisting. And by comparison, now it wasn’t wrong, and he couldn’t sit still and couldn’t help remembering how it felt to be a hundred percent On, and right...

With a crew he cared about, dammit, more than he’d ever cared about human beings in his life, and too damn many deaths and too many lost partners, with a chance to make runs they’d plotted, the way the UDC hadn’t let them do it, and that perfect run lying on the table saying... Can’t do it twice. Complete fluke. Can’t pull it off again... System can’t be that perfect. Something’s wrong.

His gut was in knots and his suspicion began to be, in two blinks of an eye and the work of an overhyped brain, that it could be working because his team had come in with miner-experience, something the lofty Shepherd types with their fancy tech hadn’t had, or—

Or the tape off his dead partners worked, and Porey hadn’t given up when they’d had to downgrade the crew to basics—it wasn’t basics anymore. They’d either pushed the sim to the limit—or it had lied to them. And he didn’t put that past Porey, he didn’t put anything political past Porey, if he wanted to prove something to some committee in charge of finance ...

They were on the damned list, that was what, they always had been, that son of a bitch had jerked him sideways and just kept going with his crew. What was it, a confidence-building exercise? Another damned psych-out for more damn political reasons? He felt sick at his stomach.

“You all right, Dek?”

He looked at Meg, realized everybody was looking at him.

“Dek,” Ben said, “you aren’t spooking on us, are you?”

He shook his head solemnly. “It’s August eighth, Ben.”

“Huh?” Sal said. Meg frowned. But Ben said;

“It better be, Moonbeam. It had effin1 better be.”

“Yes, sir,” Graff said, at the table, hands folded, looking straight at two very anxious senators and a busy background of senatorial aides. There was a committee, inevitably if there was a glitch, there was a committee, thank God currently meeting at Sol One, in the comfort of class 1 accommodations: it wanted answers and this was the forerunner, the shockwave.

“Why is a junior lieutenant left in command of this base? What in hell does your base commander think he’s doing taking that carrier out? We give you the authority you ask for, and immediately the program goes to hell in a handbasket, while the officer in charge removes a carrier and declares he’s going to test, without notifying the UDC or the Joint Committee, with a highly controversial figure aboard, conveniently unavailable to an ongoing investigation, while a distorted version of the whole damned training program leaks to the media? What kind of circus are you running here?”

His stomach was in knots. He missed certain of the references. Demas and Saito had advised him certain things to say, certain points to make, the direction he should go with these men. But Demas and Saito didn’t know one truth he knew. Neither did Porey and neither did the captain.

“Sir,” he began on that track, “with all respect, I deny that the breach was in our Security.”

“Are you suggesting the UDC leaked it? What about Dekker’s phone call to Sol One? What about other phone calls from other Fleet personnel?”

He hoped to hell there wasn’t a recorder going. “Let me explain, sir. Fleet personnel are contained in a security cocoon within the former administrative apparatus. Our personnel are issued cards which do not work with civilian accesses, which can’t access BaseCom or the internal phone system without going through FleetCom, which is physically aboard the carriers, if there were anyone outside this facility for them to call, nearer the Belt. The one exception was Dekker, who—“ They began to interrupt and he kept going. “—who made his only call to his mother in my office, on my authorization, and I recorded the call in its entirety in case any question arose about that contact. The UDC system is run through BaseCom, which is linked by other means to station central. Those are the principal routes information can take. There is the shuttle, and there is contact between human beings who can walk from one place to another If information flowed from this facility, it took one of those routes.”