Devil to the Belt (v1.1) (56 page)

“Yeah,” he said. He didn’t want his lips to tremble, but they did, and tears stung his eyes. A long, long time he’d been alone. There’d been others, but they’d died, and Ben hadn’t, Ben wouldn’t, Ben was too hard to catch and Ben wouldn’t get himself killed for anybody. He trusted Ben that way. Ben was too slippery for the sons of bitches.

Someone shadowed the doorway.

“Need to check his blood pressure, sir.”

Somebody had said something about Have a nice trip. Someone who’d told him go to hell....

He caught at the bed. Caught at Ben’s arm as Ben started to get up and turn him over to the nurse. “No.”

“Your blood pressure’s getting up, Mr. Dekker.”

“Screw it. —Ben, —”

“Lieutenant.”

He swung his legs off the bed, made a try at getting up and the room went upside down. The nurse made a grab after him, he saw the blue uniform, and he elbowed it aside. He caught himself with a grip on the edge of the bed.

But Ben was gone. Ben had left him, and the nurse got a hand on his shoulder and his arm. “Just lie down, Mr. Dekker. Lie down. How’d he get in here, anyway? Visitors aren’t supposed to be in here.”

He didn’t know either. But a lot of things happened here that shouldn’t. And he hadn’t been dreaming. Ben had been there. He had a cut inside his lip and a coppery taste in his mouth that proved it, no matter what the nurse said about visitors. He lay down and ran his tongue over that sore spot, thinking, through the shot and everything, Ben’s here, Ben’s here... and knowing it was Sol Two where Ben had found him: Ben hated him; but Ben had got here, Ben talked sense to him and didn’t confuse him. Even if Ben wanted to beat bell out of him. He liked that about Ben—that for all ; Ben wanted to go on beating hell out of him, Ben hadn’t. Ben had held on to him. Ben had shaken him and told him where right side up was and told him to get there. Only advice he’d trusted in days. Only voice he’d wanted to come back to, since— since his crew died. Died in a fireball he wasn’t in. Couldn’t have been in, since he wasn’t vapor.

Somebody’d said, later, Enjoy the ride, Dekker.

He couldn’t remember who. Someone he’d known. But the voice had no color in his mind. No sound. And he couldn’t recover it.

They said, shadows leaning over him, “Need to keep that blood pressure down, Mr. Dekker,” and he said: “Screw all of you, I don’t need your help,” and kept his eyes shut.

Whine of mag-Ievs. You got that through the walls. There was light out there, but it didn’t diffuse, despite the distances across the huge sim chamber, where a solitary pod was working. There was a safety stand-down in effect. Lendler Corp techs were doing an inspection on this shift, remoting the pod from the number two access. You could see the light on, far across the chamber.

Easy ways to get hurt out there. Pods pulled a lot of g’s,positive and negative. Graff touched the cold plastics of the dead panel, drifting in the zero g, antagonizing an already upset stomach, and watched the pod, figuring how hard a body could hit, repeatedly, doing that gyrating course. Dekker was strong for his slight frame. Only thing that had saved him. God only knew how conscious he’d been, but enough he’d protected his head somehow. And his neck and his back and the rest of his bones. The meds who hadn’t seen the inside of the pod had said the belts must have come loose. But the belts had been locked together under Dekker, deliberately to fool the safety interlocks, by somebody who hadn’t left prints—unless it was the last man to use the pod, and that was Jamil, who hadn’t a motive that he knew. Belts locked underneath Dekker—otherwise the pod wouldn’t have moved. The MP’s report had said, Suicide is not ruled out.

Suicide, to have a MarsCorp councilor on your case?

Suicide, to call Tanzer a bastard?

Don’t let it get to you, Saito had said, when he’d called the carrier to tell them the hearing was over. Midge had hand-carried his report to the ship and a long transmission had gone out to the captain by now. Tanzer was going to rebound off the walls tomorrow.

But the report was at Sol One by now. So far as what he dared send the captain, the most urgent matter was one name, of everything related to the accident: Salazar. The rest was in Dekker’s file. Beyond that, Keu needed to know how Bonner and Tanzer had run the hearing; needed to know how his Helm Two had answered the questions, right or wrong.

Helm Two had underestimated Tanzer, that was the fact, Tanzer had thrown him a last-minute set of choices in which his refusal to go against Keu’s orders, and a lone lieutenant’s blind run through a mine-field, Tanzer had said it, might just have lost the program tonight, lost the war for the whole human race, literally, right in that hearing room this evening—if somebody wiser and better at politics couldn’t somehow take the pieces and put them together with more skill than he had mustered in front of that committee.

He was tired, God, he was tired, and he had had no business coming here. He wasn’t doing entirely rational things now, he’d sent word with Midge where he was going and put com on alert, but he hadn’t come to the Number Ones for aid and comfort and he was refusing to, knowing nothing they could tell him was of any use, since they didn’t know any more than he did what was going on. He’d made some critical judgments left and right of the course he’d hoped to hold in the hearing and in his dealings with Tanzer, and he was avoiding their input til he’d mapped out the sequence and sense of those judgment calls, that was what he suddenly realized was pushing his buttons right now—he wanted to know the answers; and if he could shove Bonner and Tanzer into a move of some kind, even an assassination attempt, he’d know, all right; he’d have proof: more than that, the senators might have it, before they left here at maindawn: Explain that one, cover another attempted murder, Bonner, while the committee’s still on station...

Otherwise, if Tanzer was only tracking him and more innocent than he judged, let Tanzer sweat what he was up to—looking for clues, maybe, trying to find something to prove Dekker’s case, something politically explosive. Legal troubles in Dekker’s past—it was all backgrounded, solved, just one of the connections Dekker had had and left when he left the Belt. He didn’t go off Sol Two, he took no leaves, but there had been no particular reason for Dekker’s name to rouse any anxieties in Defense—certainly no reason to fear him getting to the media. Dekker was allergic to cameras and microphones, Dekker certainly didn’t want publicity bringing his name up again, any more than Defense did; and evidently there’d been a decision to take Hellburner public if the test succeeded. So someone high in the Defense Department had said pull him.

That being the case—the line certainly led to Salazar; and Salazar lived behind the EC security wall, the same EC that they were fighting for. That was a worry, and a real one, if the woman had penetrated security channels and found out what Dekker was working on, and where he was.

There was—top of the list regarding Dekker’s injuries— Wilhelmsen’s crew. Dekker hadn’t been tactful. Dekker was, Pollard had said it, volatile. There was a lot of that in the crews they’d recruited—including the UDC test pilots. You could begin to wonder was it a pathology or a necessary qualification for this ship—or was it the result of ramming crews together in a handful of years, the few with the reflexes, the mental quickness—the top of the above-average in reaction time, who didn’t, even on a family ship, necessarily understand slower processers, or understand that such slower minds vastly outnumbered them in the population? He’d told Tanzer, You can’t train what we need ... he hoped he’d gotten that across at least to one of the committee, but there was no knowing—he’d never excelled, himself, at figuring people: he’d certainly failed to realize how very savvy Tanzer could be in an argument.

He had his pocket com. The captain might send him word at any hour, please God, and give him specific instructions, either for a bare-ass space walk or a steady-on as he was bearing and he’d rather either right now than chasing might-have-beens in circles. After a jump you got a solid Yes, you’d survived it. But right now he could wonder whether the FSO was still operating on Sol One, or whether something might have gone wrong at levels so high the shockwave had yet to hit Sol Two. For all he knew the committee had been the shockwave of a UDC power grab and he’d just self-destructed in it.

Or why else hadn’t they heard anything? Or why, according to the news that he had heard before he’d left the office, was Mazian still smiling his way from council to council in the European Union, and making no comment about the accident, except that a ‘routine missile test’ had had a problem.

The pod flashed by, unexpectedly, filling the view port.

His heart jumped. He watched the pod whip across the far side and felt queasy after the visual shock. Dekker’s pod had been running on the mission tape. Dekker had seen the accident. They’d treated him for shock, he’d gotten out of hospital and turned up here, at shift-change, in a pod repeating the exact accident set-up. On loop. Was there anything in that, but vindictiveness?

Higgins said only that Dekker had lucid moments. No recollection, most times no awareness even where he was. Cory Salazar had died out in the Belt. Dekker was back in that crack-up. Over and over and over.

Check-in records had listed no UDC personnel as in the area. The mission sims tape was checked out to Dekker—as mission commander, he’d had one in his possession. Dekker had been in hospital. One would have expected that that tape had been with his effects. Security should have collected it, with the tapes in all crews’ possession, living and dead. But Library hadn’t checked Dekker’s in: Dekker was alive, and unable to respond to requests for the tape, Security said, they’d decided not to seek an order to get it from his effects—which would have had the Provost Marshal’s staff going into Dekker’s locker while Dekker was alive, a violation of policy in the absence of charges.

A hatch door crashed and echoed at the distant end of the access tube. The lift had just let someone in. The Lendler Corp techs, maybe, moving up to this bay. But the light was still on over there. And the pod was still running, the mag-levs whiting out anything but the loudest sounds.

Damn, he thought, Tanzer might be a fool after all. He might have his answer, all right: and if he and his didn’t make the right moves now, he might become the answer. He’d gotten colder, standing here, and he had a sudden weak-kneed wish to be wrong about Tanzer—he hadn’t thought through what he’d done in the hearing yet, he wasn’t ready or willing to make gut-level choices in a physical confrontation. He closed his fist around the bolt in his pocket—he’d collected that from the desk; he drifted free and took out the pocket com he’d collected too. “D-g, this is 7-A11, sim bay 2. QE, C-2-6, copy?”

“7-All, this is Snowball, C-2-6, on it, that’s 03 to you, dammit, seat that door!”

Saito was on com. Saito must be lurking over Dan Washington’s shoulder and the pocket com was wide open now and logging to files on the carrier. Saito wasn’t as accepting of harebrained excursions as Dan was, Saito must have gotten uneasy, and, onto Helm Two’s side excursion, was probably calling Demas in, besides having Security closer than he’d set them. But they would or wouldn’t come in, depending on what Saito heard. Meanwhile he watched the hand-line quiver along the side of the lighted tube. Someone was on it, now, below the curve of the tube. Several someones, by the feel as he touched it.

First figure showed in the serpentine of lights, monkeying along the line. Not UDC. Their own. Flash of jewelry, light behind blond hair.

Friendly fire incoming, then. Not UDC: Mitch. He drew a breath, focused down off the adrenaline rush toward a different kind of self-protection, said to the com, “Snowball, easy on,” before Security came in hard. More of them behind Mitch: Jamil, Almarshad.. .Pauli. A delegation. The Shepherds didn’t have access to query over com. Saito was sure to give him hell; the Shepherds had tracked him, never mind Tanzer’s ‘boys’ might have—it wasn’t a good time he was having right now; and he hoped it wasn’t a breaking problem that had brought them here. He couldn’t take another.

He held his position as the Shepherds gathered in front of the open door, drifting hands-off on the short tether of their safety-clips, in the frosty-breathed chill and the low rhythmic hum of the mags. “Hear it was bloody,” Mitch said.

“How did you hear? What’s security worth in this place?”

Jamil shrugged, tugged at the line to maintain his orientation. “2-level bar. Aerospattale guys with a few under their belts. Saying Bonner’s pissed. Tanzer’s pissed. Bonner told some female committee member it wasn’t really important she understand the technicals of the accident, or the tetralogic, she should just recommend the system go AI.”

“Damn,” he said, but Jamil was grinning.

“Happens Bonner mixed up his women and his Asians. Turned out she’s Aerospatiale’s number two engineer.”

He had to be amused. He grinned. And he knew that via his open com, Bonner’s little faux pas was flying through the carrier out there, for all it was worth. So the J-G wasn’t the only one who could talk his way into trouble.

But that was one engineer and one company, with no part of its contract at issue: Aerospatiale was the engines, and they weren’t in question.

The Belter trash, as they called themselves, wanted to know how it had gone. Correction, they knew how it had gone. He didn’t know how they’d found him, didn’t know what they expected him to say. He hadn’t delivered. Not really. They couldn’t think he had.

“What are you guys doing here?”

They didn’t know how to answer, evidently: they didn’t quite look him in the eye. But maybe he halfway understood what was in their minds—a feeling they’d been collectively screwed, the way the Belters would say. And that together was better than separate right now.

“How did you find me?”

Mitch said, “Phoned Fleet Security. They knew.”

2-DECK 229 was a tacky little hallway in a tacky little facility that met you with a security-locked, plastic-protected bulletin board that said things like NO ALCOHOL IN QUARTERS and REMEMBER THE 24-HR RESTRICTIONS, along with SIM SCHEDUUE and LOST CARD, DESPERATE, BILL H. SMITH.