“Ms. Kady.” New voice. “That was a system abort. Don’t worry about it. You can stand down.”
“Thank you.” Cold and calm. Same as you did when something went seriously wrong. She flipped the board-standby switch. Habit. Fool, she thought. It was a toy-board anyway.
“Thank you.” Another delay. “You can get up. Go to the room with the red light showing. You are in .9 gravity.”
“I think I can remember that,” she muttered.
“Some don’t.”
“Thanks.” Anger was the immediate reaction. She was embarrassed to beg; but, putting her foot off the platform: “Do I get another try on that abort?”
A hesitation. Somebody had blanked a mike. Then: “How are you feeling?”
“Good enough for another try.” Self-disgust. “If I can get one.”
“Get back in the chair, then.”
Thank God. She was all but shaking. And damped that down. Fast.
“Pulse is up, Ms. Kady.”
“Yeah. Re-start.”
“Hyped as hell,” came a mutter from the earplug. Faint. Then at normal volume: “The yoke is an automated assist. It is changing its responses. Do you perceive that?”
“Yeah.” Absolute relief. They hadn’t told her the sim could do that. “But I got my own numbers. Let’s shorten this. What are you, IMAT?”
“IMAT or CSET. A or B, select your format, input your actual license level.”
“No problem.” She took B, ran her numbers in, hoping she remembered them, hoping she was still that sharp, and watched the readout for response profiles. “Shit! Excuse.” 12.489 sudden g’s on a tenth of the yoke range. She cut it back, re-calced in her head, thinking she could have a seriously pissed examiner if she dithered too long, but dammit, she needed the fine control on that hairline correction in the sims and you had to have it wide enough if they threw you an emergency. Hell of a thrust this sim was set for—different than shuttle controls by a long way...
Forgot to ask if time counted. Too late to spare a neuron. You did it right, that was all, you did it real, hell with them... set the controls to your own touch and take the time it took, they should have effin’ said if there were criticalities not on the instruments—it was a new kind of adaptive assist, piece of nice, this was.... All kinds of interlocks and analyses it could give you. Mining in the Belt, you adapted your jerry-built and most egregiously not AI ship by whittling a new part out of plastic, and what you saw on your boards was a whole lot of hard-to-read instruments, not an integrated 360° V-HUD with the course plot and attitudes marked in glowing lines. This thing was trying to find out your preferences, arguing with you when its preconceptions thought it knew you. But it would listen. —Damn it, machine, soyez douce, don’t get cheek with me ... used one of these things ten plus years ago, she had, but, God, that had been an antique, against this piece...
“All right.” She calmed her breathing rate. Panel lights lit. Scopes lit. “Go!”
Numbers hemorrhaged.
“God!”
“Nothing yet?” Dekker asked the desk on his mid-test break; and the secretary in Testing said, “No, sir. No result yet.”
“Are they out yet? Have they left?”
“I don’t think so, sir.”
He tried FleetCom. He had a new comtech and had to explain everything again. “I just want to know if the lieutenant’s ever checked in.”
“He’s in a meeting,” FleetCom said.
“Has he gotten his messages?”
“I think He has. Excuse me....”
On hold again, when all he wanted to do was hang up; and he didn’t want to offend FleetCom by doing that before the tech got back to him. He wished he hadn’t called. Five-minute break from his own Evaluations, it was 1456 by the clock, the granola bar and soft drink were wearing extremely thin, and he was regretting it. //he could get off the phone, he could get down the hall to the vending machines.
No word on his partners. Aptitudes was a four-hour session. You could take a little longer coming out from under the trank if you reacted....
God, he didn’t know what to—
“Ens. Dekker? Sorry to keep you waiting. I did get hold of the lieutenant. He says see him in his office at 1400. That’s 21a, Admin.”
“I’m in Evaluations til 1700. I’m in the middle of tests—”
“Excuse me....”
Hell!
He put a hand over his eyes, he leaned against the counter and waited. Looked pleadingly at the secretary across the desk, then. “Do they ever take this long on Aptitudes?”
“I don’t know, sir. I’ve only worked here for four...”
“Ens. Dekker? I’m sorry.... the lieutenant says he can’t talk at 1700, he’s got another meeting.”
“Will he clear a phone call for me to One? That’s all I want.”
“I think he wants to talk to you about that.”
Shit. “Look—” He shut out the light and the secretary’s presence with the palm of his hand. Tried to think. But he kept seeing fireballs. Hearing that door clank. “Is that all he wants? The phone call? Or does he want—look, can / talk to him online? Two minutes.”
“He’s in a meeting, sir. Just a moment.”
He was late by now, by two minutes. You weren’t late in Evaluations. You didn’t antagonize the examiners. Who were UDC to begin with.
“The lieutenant says he needs to talk to you. He says at 2200.”
“2200.” Graff didn’t plan to sleep, maybe. “Right. Thanks. Yeah. I’ll be there.”
“My partners aren’t out of Test yet,” Dekker said. “They went in at 0600. It’s 2202 and Testing doesn’t answer questions....”
“They’re all right,” Graff said, quietly, from the other side of the desk. “I can tell you that much.”
“So what do you know?”
“That they’re being very thorough.”
“They’re not reacting to the drug or anything—”
“No. They’re all right. I did check.”
It wasn’t regulation. He wasn’t convinced. He wasn’t at all convinced.
GrafT said: “On the other matter—”
“I just want to call my mother. Make sure she’s all right.” He kept his frustration to himself. He didn’t want to push Graff. He was running short of friendlies in Admin.
Graff said, “I got your message. I understand. There’s a good possibility her phone calls are being monitored by the police. Possibly by someone less official.”
“Who?”
“All we know,” Graff said, “is the same thing you saw in the news. We’re investigating. I could wish this lawyer weren’t involved—personally. Is your mother a member, a contributor—of that organization?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. —Arc you asking me her politics?”
“You don’t have to answer that.”
“She hasn’t got any politics that I know of. She didn’t when I lived there. I don’t think she would change.”
“She was never politically active. Never expressed any opinions, for or against the government, or the Earth Company?”
Bit by bit the line of questioning made him uneasy. It wasn’t like Graff—at least as he knew Graff—to probe after private information. He didn’t think it was necessarily Graff’s idea—and that meant whoever was investigating. So he offered a bit of his own reasons: “I was rab when I was a kid, the clothes, the haircut—Kady says I was a stupid plastic, and I guess I was; but I thought I was real. I used the words. My mother—got hot about it, said politics was all the same, didn’t matter what party, all crooked, she didn’t want any part of it—told me I was a fool for getting involved. They’d shot these people down on Earth. I think—”
Meg was there, he almost said. But that was more than Graff needed to hear—if a deep spacer cared about the Company, the Earthers trying to emigrate...
“Think what?” Graff asked.
He couldn’t remember his thread for a moment. He shrugged. “Doe
sn’t matter. She’s just not the kind. Works a full shift, mostly over, if you want extras you have to do that—and that was all she wanted. A nice place. Maybe a station share. Security. That kind of thing. You wouldn’t get her involved in anything.”
“You know the Civil Liberty Association?”
“No, sir. I never heard of them.”
“They’re the ones funding your mother’s lawyer. They’re headquartered in Munich. They support lawsuits in certain causes, that’s mostly what they do. Their board of advisers has some of the same associations as the Sun Party, the Peace Front, the Karl Leiden Foundation—the Party of Man—”
He shook his head. “I don’t know anything about them. I doubt she does.”
“They’re Earth-based Internationals: of several related groups, only the Civil Liberty Association and the Human Research Foundation maintain offices off Earth. They apparently do each other’s business. So I understand. I’m no expert in terrestrial affairs. But I thought you should know, this organization does have political overtones that aren’t friendly to the program or to the Fleet.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“I only thought you should be aware of the situation.”
Deeper and deeper. He thought of saying, I’m in no position to restrain her from anything. I can’t do your politics for you. But it was all on their side and nothing on hers. And probably the lieutenant didn’t want a blunt question, but it wouldn’t be his first offense this week. “So hasn’t the Fleet got strings it might pull?”
“Possibly.”
“So what do you want me to say to her?”
“Nothing. Nothing on that score. I just want you to be aware of these things.”
Why? In case of what, for God’s sake?
“Do you still want to call her?” Graff shifted a glance toward the phone on his desk.
He had never believed of himself that he was smart, no matter what Evaluations told him—if he was smart, he wouldn’t be here now, put on the spot to make an excruciatingly personal phone call in front of a man he’d thought he trusted, whose motives he didn’t now entirely understand.
And, God, he didn’t want to talk to her... he was fast losing his nerve.
“Do you want to do that?”
“Yes, sir,” he said, before all of it evaporated. “If you can get me through.”
Graff took up the handset and punched in. “FleetCom. Route this through our system, FSO, Sol One. —Number there?”
“97...2849. Dekker, Ingrid. Routing can find her.” 2210 mainday and she ought to be home. She didn’t have a nightlife—at least she hadn’t had, when he’d been living at home.
“Takes a bit,” Graff said, and gave him the handset. “It’s going through, now.”
He held it to his ear. Listened to the clicks and the tones. His heart was beating fast. What in hell was he going to say? Hello, mother?
Click. Click-click. Beep.
“There’s a noise on the line.”
“A beep?”
He nodded.
“Somebody’s got it monitored. FleetCom’s picking that up.”
Hell. It was going through. He listened for the pick-up. But the answering service came on instead. Ms. Dekker is out at the moment. Kindly leave your name and number....
You’d know. “Mother. Mother, this is Paul. I’m sorry to hear about the trouble you’re having....” It was hard to talk coherently to a machine, hard to think with that steady beep that meant the police or somebody else was listening. “I don’t know if I can help, but if you just want to talk, I’m here. I’d like to talk to you. I’d like to help—” He wondered if he should mention money. But while he was thinking, it clicked off and connections broke, all the way back along the route, leaving him the sound of static.
“She wasn’t home,” he said, and gave the handset back. “I left a message on the machine.”
“Anything that comes through—you will get. I promise you.”
“Thank you.” They’d taught him to say thank you. Please. Yes, sir. No, sir. Stand straight. Answer what you’re asked. They’d told him he wouldn’t fly if he didn’t. His mother hadn’t had that advantage in dealing with him. He didn’t remember he’d ever said Yes, ma’am or Please or whatever boys were supposed to answer to their mothers. Fuck you, he’d said once, in a fit of temper, the week she’d bailed him out of juvenile court, and she’d slapped his face.
He’d not hit her. Thank God, he’d held it back, he hadn’t hit her. Only respect he’d ever shown her, that last year... and if they shipped him out from here—the only respect he might ever have a chance to show, except that phone call.
“Forgive me,” the lieutenant said. “I have to ask this—in your judgment, is it possible—is it remotely possible she did make threats against MarsCorp?”
Ingrid Dekker wasn’t a walkover. She wasn’t going to stand and take it—not without handing it back. “If they threatened her. But she wouldn’t—wouldn’t just take it into her head to do that, no, I don’t believe that.” I have to ask this...
At whose orders... sir....
“Are you close to your mother—still?”
God. He didn’t want to discuss it. But the lieutenant had been on his side, Graff if anybody was still his lifeline. He didn’t want to put his mother in a bad light. She was the one in trouble and she needed all the credit she could get. He said, looking at a spot on the front of Graff’s desk: “I was a pain in the ass, sir. She said if I went to the Belt I didn’t need to come back. I—was sincerely a pain in the ass, sir. I was eighteen. I was in with a rough crowd. —I was stupid.”
Graff didn’t say anything to that, except: “Have you corresponded with her?”
“No, sir.” He stared fixedly at that spot on the desk, wondering if they might search his room and bleed his datacard for it, next use he made. Maybe they already had. “Not recently. —I’ve got about four, five k I’d like to send over to her account. If I could do that. She’s not working, she’s going to need the money.”
“I’ll talk to Legal. See what the procedures are. —As I said, we’re going to be looking into the case. If mere are strings to be pulled, maybe we can pull them.”
“I appreciate that, sir.”
“Are you ready to get back to work?”
“Yes, sir.”
Graff keyed something on the deskcomp. Glanced at it. “I don’t know if they can get your friends back to quarters this watch. But you’re their unit commander, you have access there on any shift, if you want to check up on them.”
Not back to quarters? Not in this watch? His heart did a tic and a speed-up. He looked at Graff, met a level, I-can’t-tell-you kind of stare.
“What are they doing?” he asked Graff. “They’re hi there for Aptitudes—it’s a four-hour test, for God’s sake...”
“You have access there.”
“I’ve been over there. They wouldn’t tell me a damn thing!”
Graff had never been one to hold back information, not under Keu, and not under his own administration. Now...
“I suggest you go over there,” Graff said. “That’s all I can say.”
Didn’t like the damned drugs. Didn’t effin’ like the floating feeling. Told you stuff you didn’t want to hear. Told you you’d effin the if you screwed it... and Ben didn’t want to the, he sincerely didn’t want to the...
“Fire!”
His heart took a jump, he felt neg g, he went spinning away—you should feel blood pooling in your head and your feet and he didn’t, didn’t feel anything right except cold breeze on his face and his lungs getting air again—
He could see light. Felt somebody holding his sleeve. He was fiat on his back in g and Dekker was holding on to him, saying, “It’s all right, it’s all right, Ben—”
Wasn’t who he wanted to wake up in the arms of. He stared at Dekker, with his heartbeat still thumping away like explosions, and recalled they were surrounded by dots all but six of which were trying to kill h
im— except he was in bed and Dekker wasn’t flying the ship.
He took slow assessment of this fact. He took a look around the ceiling of a disgustingly barren room, recalled signing his name, and them telling him Sal was in, and him talking to the tech and screwing with the sim, because he’d been mad as hell and wanting to get court-martialed and wanting to go to bed with Sal Aboujib if he had to get shot at to do it—only viewed backwards, as he had to see it now, that sequence didn’t highly make sense.
Neither did Dekker sitting on his bedside. He’d come here to sit with Dekker. He wasn’t in the hospital. He was in the sims lab and Dekker, with this scared look on his face, was holding him by the wrist.
“Ben.”
“Yeah?” He began to think he’d better wake up.
“Ben. You all right?”
Dekker asking really worried him.
“Don’t agitate him,” somebody else said. “You know the rules.”
“Trying to give him a heart attack, what’s the damn hurry?”
There wasn’t any answer. Dekker took hold of his hand. Said, “Shit...”
Dekker holding his hand? He’d really rather not. Unless he was dying. He didn’t feel like he was dying. He stared at Dekker, made his fingers bend and his hand draw back and decided in this moment of clarity that he wanted his foot on the floor.
“Ben. Ben, —don’t do that.”
Froze right there. Face down in the bend of Dekker’s arm. And couldn’t think how to get out of that situation.
“Skuzzed,” Dekker said. Light came back. Dekker swore at nothing in particular. That was all right. Saved him the bother.
“Aboujib did pass,” he wanted to know.
“Yeah.”
“Meg?”
“Yeah. I got three of you. Same condition.” With which Dekker got up and stalked out.
That was Dekker, all right. Boy had a lousy temper.
“Shit!” he heard from the hall.
CHAPTER 11
2345H and all Dekker wanted was his own bed, didn’t want to talk to anybody, just skuzzed through the door into a darkened barracks, went straight to his quarters around the corner and down the corridor, and got undressed on autopilot—wasn’t even thinking clearly when he heard the stir outside. A knock came at his door and he stared at it and blinked.
Devil to the Belt (v1.1) Page 58
