Devil to the Belt (v1.1) (33 page)

So knowing he was already nervous they hadn’t told him they were close by, hadn’t come down with him—just called and asked a Certification office secretary how long a D3 permit exam might take, and they’d come down from the 3-deck shop to be here—in case.

“Doesn’t look good,” Sal said; and Meg had a moment of misgivings, whether they shouldn’t just duck back and try to blend with the Transstop traffic—not easy in her case and not easy in Sal’s. So there was no chance for cowardice. She waved.

Or maybe on second thought they might make it away unseen. Dekker was walking along looking at his feet, off in some different universe.

She said, as he came close, “Dek? How’d it go?”

He looked up, looked dazed, as if he couldn’t figure them being there, or he hadn’t really heard the question.

“How’d it go?” Sal asked.

“All right,” he said.

“So did you get the permit?”

“Yeah.”

“So, bravo, jeune rab!” Sal clapped an arm around him and gave him a squeeze. “We said, didn’t we?”

He was dead white. He looked scared—and a little zee-d. “I said I’d call up to the ship—tell Bird how it came out. I need a phone.”

Deep-spaced, Meg thought uneasily. Got himself through the test in one piece and just gone out. God hope they hadn’t spotted it in the office. She linked her arm through his, protective custody. “Come on. Phone and lunch. In that order.”

He went with them. They found a public phone near the Transstation, and she punched through to Bird. Bird said, “Good,” when he heard, and Ben said, in the background, “So what’s the fuss?”

Break that man’s neck someday, Meg thought. With my own bare hands.

Another damned breakdown in D-28, and a pump-connection had blown out in the mast at dockside—spraying 800 liters of hydraulic fluid into free-fall toward the rotating core surface. The super swore it was worker sabotage and Salvatore, with three more cases on his desk, had a headache.

He put a tech specialist on the investigation, poured himself a cup of coffee and told himself he had to clear his desk: the stacks of datacards in the bin had reached critical mass, Admin was having a fit over the quarterly reports being a week late, it had a Fleet Lieutenant on its lap bitching about a schedule shortfall, and he couldn’t find the cards the current flags referenced.

Flag on Walker. The guy had card use near an office break-in, had no business there—no apparent relation to the crime, merely a presence that didn’t make sense. Flag on Kermidge: every sign of resuming bad associations. Flags on Dekker: blew hell out of the sims.

He keyed up the subfile.

Wills’ voice said, out of the comp, “
Dekker passed his D3 ops. Score shot straight to the Chief Examiner. Word is the sims jumped out of D class and ran clear up in C before the examiner terminated the test
—
standard if there’s an overrun: the Certifications office suspects a suspension at a higher grade
—
started searching court records, potential inquiries to Sol
—”

Oh, shit!

“
I intercepted it, told them let the license stand at a D3, pending inquiry with this office: I hope that was all right
.”

Thank God.

“I did check the examiner’s record in the files: retired pilot, ECI training,, Sol based, good record, three years in his present position, et cetera. He’s clean
.

“But here’s another interesting development: Bird and Pollard, the ones who brought him in, that got his ship on salvage, that’re staying in the same sleepery? They’ve filed to run pairs, refit shakedown run with Dekker’s former ship leased to one Kady and Aboujib. Dekker’s on that application as a D3 wanting board time.

“
Here’s the catch. Aboujib and Kady have records
—
Kady’s, as long as your arm. Smuggling, rab agitator
—
SolCorp background, opted here on an EC transfer. Aboujib’s an AIP dishonorable discharge, reckless endangerment with a spacecraft, Shepherd background, small-time morals charges, one assault, bashed some guy with a bottle. Allocations hasn’t ruled yet. Deny or let-pass
?”

Salvatore hit Pause, sat there with his elbows on the desk, reached for his inhaler, thinking: Son of a bitch…

Not about Wills. Wills had done a good job—so far as it went. The business with the examiner jangled little alarms, no less than the immaculate Bird’s shadowy associations.

Report that finding to Payne’s office? Payne had said: We don’t need to drag this out. The report to the ECSAA said mechanical failure, no fault of the pilot…

Payne wanted the case closed; but, dammit, it kept resurfacing in the flags, and now with Wills’ information came the niggling worry that where there were anomalies in official records there might also be management secrets. Salazar’s threatened lawsuit, contractor disputes, the rash of incidents on the dock and in the plants—the military making demands to install Security personnel on R2—some kind of “readiness survey” involving their contracts, which was, one could suspect, strongly tied to schedule slowdowns, and, dammit, an implication of blame for
his
department—it was the whisper in the company washrooms that the Fleet was putting heavy pressure on ASTEX management, the Earth Company was worried about sabotage and slowdowns, possibly sympathizer activity—the labor agitators were looking for the right moment to embarrass the company; and damned right the radical fringes of all sorts were looking for a way to get control of the labor movement—radical fringe elements ASTEX had more than its share of, thanks to the EC’s policy of letting malcontents and malefactors transfer out here—sans trial, sans publicity that might catch media attention in the motherwell, where strikes and welfare riots and lunatic religions fed on the airwaves. This Kady was probably a prime example, but monetary rather than political.
That
was no problem. Shepherd connections? Shepherds had more kids than they could find slots for. Reckless endangerment? An ECSAA violation. Not this office’s province and any shift on helldeck could provide three and four assaults and a few cases for the medics.

ASTEX Security had a damn sight more on its mind than a couple of small-time malcontents and a disputed miner craft. Dekker was a watch-it, but Dekker had so far done nothing worse than show up an anomaly on a simulation—better than average. Meanwhile management had a ship over at that classified facility way behind schedule and sabotage in a plastics plant that had no damned reason except a fool of a manager.

Hell, no, it wasn’t the ASTEX board that was going to take the damage: boards were never to blame—ASTEX management wasn’t to blame: dump it on Security, dump it on Salvatore’s desk—

So what had he got, but a missing kid with a mother on MarsCorp board, whose lawyers were threatening a negligence suit against the mechanic at Rl and trying to get those records opened. Dekker had had one incident, making wild charges against the company—but he had been quiet since then, had spent money on clothes, on food—his only current sin was applying for a re-cert in D class when he might—he read through Wills’ report—have rated higher.

You did have to wonder about some ringer thrown in at higher levels, somebody working for some investigatory office, even—in these nervous days—something that should come to the attention of MI.

Blow the Dekker case wide and he could kiss his career goodbye; but if he failed to report a problem, and let something slip, his competence was at issue. Hell of a crack to be in. In his most paranoid moments he was moved to ask had there ever been a Cory Salazar—

But there was no doubt about Dekker on any level he could assess; the various departments over at Rl had his background from two years back; and no clandestine operator would be so stupid as to ring bells on a test: it didn’t in any wise smell like an EC probe
or
a security problem.

Hell, Dekker had had his Dl from back in ‘20, he’d had working experience since, and very possibly he’d been dogging it back in ‘20, lying low from the military recruiters: that behavior was an epidemic among draft-age males. With that medical against him, he’d put out everything he had—and very nearly brought himself back to Ms. Salazar’s attention: thank God Wills had put the stop on that.

So Dekker wanted to go back to space. It didn’t seem a bad place to have him right now. You couldn’t be quieter than out in the deep Belt, with no communication with anybody but BM. Alyce Salazar’s lawyers couldn’t serve him a summons there without a damned long arm.

Memo the doctor on Dekker’s case to sign the medical release and satisfy the meddling clerk with the ECSAA rule book, get Dekker out and off the daily flags, and if Dekker went psycho out there and slash-murdered Bird and Pollard, they should have known what they were getting into. Only hope he got Kady and Aboujib with them. They didn’t need the tag end of the rab acting up.

So with the push of a few keys, that was
one
problem off his desk for three months—a fix good the minute that ship cleared dock. Flag its return, flag—God!—Bird and Pollard, Aboujib and Kady, have Wills’ office run down all the datatrails they might have left, at leisure. In a situation that could blow up again, on any whim of Salazar’s lawyers, upper echelons could come down demanding complete files.

Pity, Salvatore thought, he couldn’t sign up a few other problems for a three-month cruise in the belt…

Like the manager of D-28, with his dress codes and his inspections and his damned constant memos about sexual conduct off the job and his rules about mustaches, God, he’d
like
to memo Payne that Department Manager Collin R. Sabich had a private problem with kink vids, but owning the vids wasn’t illegal and the fact wasn’t relevant to anything but the fact Sabich was a slime. Admin knew that. Admin had already promoted him sideways three times and evidently couldn’t find anywhere less critical to put him. What else could you do with a sonuvabitch with a kink and an Institute degree in Plant Management?

God knew, maybe they’d give him an administrative office to run.

ONE thing had started going right, Dekker thought, God, and another thing followed: a message turned up in the bar’s mail-file at breakfast, addressed to Mr. M. Bird, from Belt Management: special permit granted for 2 ship operations in the same sector—launch permit and all, usual permits for loading and charging, et cetera, et cetera. They had a sector assignment, they’d get that and the charts when they boarded, they had a launch date, September 18th, four days from now—Bird had shaken his head over that, one of those damned do-it-now decisions from BM, no different at R2 than at Rl. You expected a delay, you applied early, and you got a go-yesterday.

First the offer from Bird, then a piece of his license back, and Ben turning downright civil: now BM approved a joint run—and still nothing fell apart: Dekker sat holding his coffee cup, listening to the regulars in the bar congratulate Bird on BM’s good behavior with the recollection that the last time in his life things were going this right—

But he didn’t let himself think about that. He just stared at where he was and told himself that the letter had to be a sign his luck had turned, or maybe a signal from BM that management had decided to dog somebody else for a while. Who knew? Maybe somebody had slipped up and nobody had noticed he was on the crew. Maybe BM was signaling it would drop its feud with him and let him pick up his life if he just kept his mouth shut.

Don’t worry about might-be’s, was the way Meg put it. Just keep your head, don’t make noise. MamBitch has a real shortterm crisis sense. There’ll be some new sod on her grief list next week, and she’ll forget all about you.

He truly wanted to believe the wreck might be a closed case, but experience told him no desk-sitter ever bothered to track and erase what some other desk-sitter had sent into files: that medical report and everything else in the files was going to surface time after time for the rest of his life, he was sure of it, a file uncatchable in its course through the company computers… probably every time he applied for a sector assignment. Damned sure if he tried to certify into C3.

And BM was putting him back to work, officially—still with no real resolution of what had happened, no answer, no justice. It was a cover-up Cory’s mother evidently couldn’t breach. He was sure she had to know by now—at least the official version. So what was
he
supposed to do that a mother on the MarsCorp board couldn’t?

He thought about writing Alyce Salazar directly, send her his own account of what had happened, never mind Ms. Salazar hated him with a passion. But mail went through a lot of hands before it went out of R2. If anyone’s mail found its way to special attention—his was a hundred percent certainty: he’d gotten that canny by now.

So it looked as if they were really going, and all he had to do was hold on to his nerves and stay out of trouble til launch, hope if the permit was a mistake nobody caught it in time—and try, meanwhile, to believe that Ben had really meant it just now when Ben had slapped him on the shoulder and said, in his subtle way, that in spite of him being an ass, he might actually work out.

Bird pocketed his datacard and remarked that since BM had a hurry-up on, they had a last few things to do in the shop, and they’d better get at it…

Sal said, “All right, all right, Bird. God, we put in fifty hours this week!” and Bird said: “Yeah, plenty all right if the shower doesn’t work. Won’t get any sympathy from me.”

So it was a last-minute rush of things that had waited—no really vital jobs: they hadn’t applied for their run without the big items latched down and
Way Out
past the mandatory ECSAA inspection: but Bird wanted some cleanup and the shop offered a refuge where a body could sit, put screws in holes and test circuits without a thought in his head except the job he was on, and he personally had no objections—anything that kept his hands busy.

Ben came and went, handling the legwork. Meg and Sal worked in the shop, raked over old lovers, the quality of hair dye, a vid they couldn’t agree on—chatter, just chatter… human noise. They looked strained. Tired, yes. But he kept having the feeling it was more than that.