Devil to the Belt (v1.1)

by C. J. Cherryh

  Porey said softly, “You’re an honest man, Jurgen. How do you plan to get out of Earth system alive?”

  “By keeping my CO from making mistakes.”

  Long, cold stare. A slow smile. “You don’t have any resentment, do you, for my being installed here?”

  “I’m not command track. I never pretended to be.” Still the stare. “You think I’m pretending?”

  “I don’t think you’re pretending anything. I know you.” Feed the fantasy—and the anxiety. Porey didn’t like to be known, but he liked to be respected. The man did have an ego. A parsec wide. Porey smiled slowly, in a way that almost touched the eyes. “Good. A vote of confidence from you, I appreciate, Jurgen. I truly do.”

  Odd chill of unease as the pod cruised up to the access. Thump of the pressure seals. Hydraulics as it opened and offered its dark, screen-lit interior. Ordinary sounds. Shadows moved on the white plastic of the control console as Dekker put the tape in and he felt an irrational urge to look behind him, as if his crew wouldn’t be there.

  No damned reason to get nerves. But it had been Pete on the line beside him, all the times before. It wasn’t now. It wasn’t Elly, it wasn’t Falcone. It was Meg, on Pete’s tape, and Ben and Sal—they belonged here. He made himself believe that, stop remembering what had been...

  For no reason, a piece of the puzzle snapped in, unbidden. Null-g. Shadows on the console. He felt the blow at the base of his skull. He knew where he had been—at the entry. Knew where they’d been. Shadows. Two of them...

  Dammit. Not the time to be woolgathering. He looked back at Ben—Ben looked scared, but Ben looked On, tracking wide and fast on the pod, taking in everything, the same as Meg and Sal. All business—the way they were when the jokes stopped and they were thinking and absorbing. He gave them the lecture tour, the buttons on the console, the read-out window, the authorizations procedure— “Card and tape in the slot for a check-out. It reads your ID, takes your personal numbers and sets, and double-checks the tape for authorizations. Ready?”

  “Are you serious?” Ben said. Then: “Yeah. Yeah. Go.”

  He caught the handholds on either side of the entry, angled his feet for inside and eeled into his station. “Sal,” he called back, over the hum of a passing pod, caught her by the arm as she sailed into the dark, shadow against the lights, a glitter of braids tied into a cluster, for safety’s sake. He aimed her for the far side of the four-wide cockpit. “Ben.” Same as Ben came feet-first through the hatch, for the seat between him and Sal. Meg came last, for the seat between him and the hatch, settled in. Green-lit gold on plain stud earrings. Green dyed her side-shaved profile, green turned her red curls black. Ringed fingers found the belts and buckled in, eyes glowed wide and busy in the light of the screens, assessing the instruments.

  He drew his own belt over—he waked reaching for them at night, with a recurring nightmare of drifting free. Suit braces powered up as he plugged in, and the helmet cut off side vision. It was deep-field V-HUD now. Switches on, power up. “Comfortable?”

  “Yeah,” from Meg. “As possible,” from Ben.

  Belts were tight. Second tug, to be sure. Orientation run. Starting over, primer stuff—only he wasn’t the neo this run. There was something surreal in the moment, in the familiar lights, in the ordinary sounds of the pod, the dark masquerading as routine. They were On. Anxious. Wanting to be right. But he kept expecting other voices.

  “This thing got any differences?” Meg asked, last-minute.

  He shoved the tape into the console, pushed LOAD. “One. See that yellow ABORT, upper left? Doesn’t exist on the real boards. It’ll stop the pod—if you don’t get a response from me, or if you detect anyone in trouble, you hit that. Takes you right back to the bay.”

  “Cher,” came Meg’s low voice, “you just do. I got confidence in us.”

  “More ‘n I got,” Ben muttered. “Hold it, hold it. I’m not set yet.”.

  “Response check, thing doesn’t glitch, but be sure. Boards are all in test mode.”

  Passengers was all they were required to be; but that wasn’t Meg’s style, wasn’t Ben’s or Sal’s either. He tried his own boards, set his arms in the supports, heard Meg’s voice saying, “I got it, right on.” Ben muttering, “Don’t screw it, Dek-boy. Yeah, I’m on, on, go.”

  Sal’s, saying, “Hit it, Dek.”

  Dark, flash of lights—

  He kicked the thumb switch on his keys. Readout glowed green against the dark. Finger moves on opposite hands, the undock sequence switch.

  Bang! of grapples. Mag-levs and human voices mixed—a 6 g shove butt-first for ten eternal seconds to a sustained straight-at-the-spine shove at +9 g.

  Green lines wove fast and faster... the pod was alive and the tons of thrust were mag-lev sim, but it was all in his hands, responsive to a breath, a stray thought, a moment’s doubt—where he was, when he was, who he was with—

  He didn’t want to do this.

  Serious panic, a flash on instruments in chaos—

  Then. Not now. Now was now. Not a time to lose track, God, no—

  Focus down. Focus wide. Attention to the moving lines, that’s all—

  “Politics,” Porey said, “pure politics. Let me explain it to you. Fifteen of the fifty carriers have to be UDC—-that’s the deal we cut, and that’s what we have to do. The accident gave us Hellburner, and that tape’s going to give us the program. The parliaments on Earth want responsible individuals in policy positions—read: no captains will violate policy laid down by the JLC. And this won’t change in the field.”

  Graff stared at Porey. He thought he’d heard the depth of foolishness out of Earth.

  Porey made a small, sarcastic shrug. “They have our assurances. And if the news services should call your office, Jurgen, and since you’re over Personnel, they might, the answer you give is: No, of course these ships are launched at carrier command discretion, with specific targets. No, they will never be deep-launched, with less specific orders. That tactic won’t work.”

  “You mean I lie.”

  “I mean the Joint Legislative Committee’s expert analysts say not. The changing situation over time—read: the commanders of individual ships making decisions without communicating with each other—would make chaos of strategic operations. So it can’t be done. End report. The JLC analysts say it’s not appropriate use of the riders. The legislators don’t like what these ships can do, combined with the—irregular character—of the crews we’ve picked to handle them. These crews are, historically, trouble Earth got rid of. Earth’s strategic planners are obsessed by the difficulty they’ve discovered of conveying their orders to ships in the Beyond—they’ve apparently just realized the time lag. They can’t phone Pell from here and order policy about—”

  “They’ve always known that.”

  “The ordinary citizen hasn’t. The average businessman can get a voice link to Mars now. Or the Belt—if he wants one.”

  Lag-com was a skill, a schitzy kind of proceeding, talking to a voice that went on down its own train of logic with no regard to your event-lagged self. That was one of the reasons senior Com and psych were virtually synonymous. And Earth hadn’t realized until now you couldn’t talk to a launched rider—or a star carrier? He refused to believe it.

  “Lag-com has finally penetrated the civil user market,” Porey said, “since we increased the pace of insystem traffic. Earthers are used to being told the antenna’s gone LOS, used to being told Marslink is out of reach for the next few months, used to shipments enroute for years and months— supply the market counts but can’t touch. Their ship-borne infowave was so slow as to be paralytic, before we started military operations insystem. The last two years have upset that notion—this, from the captain. So if anyone asks you—of course we’re going to have a strong mother-system component hi FleetCommand. Of course riderships will never make command decisions. We’re going to loop couriers back to Earth constantly.”

  “Mazian’s promised this?
”

  “The same as they promised us. —Jurgen, you have far too literal a mind. This is a game. They play it with their constituents. The legislature’s technical advisers are under influences—corporate, economic, political... but you’ve met that. They certainly won’t deviate from party line. Where does the funding for their studies come from, anyway?”

  Lights flared, green numbers bled past in the dark. Do the run in his sleep, Dekker kept telling himself, piece of easy.

  But it didn’t stop the heart from pounding, didn’t stop hands and body from reacting to the situation on-screen—you didn’t brake the reactions, you didn’t ever, just presented the targets to your inert armscomp, accepted Ben was going to miss most of the time and tried not to let that expectation ever click into the relays in your brain.

  “Screw that,” he heard Ben mutter, and all of a sudden got input on his aux screens, targets lit, armscomp prioritizing.

  Chaff, he determined. Then targets flashed and started disappearing. Longscan was coming from a living hand, not the robot inputs. He heard “Shit!” from Ben and saw the scan image shift, tracking fire. Meg’s gold data-sift to his highside HUD was making sudden marginal sense. Not like Pete.... Not the same.... “Doing all right, doing all right,” he muttered, “just—” Heart jumped. Hands reacted. Sim did—

  He stopped the bobble before his vision cleared. Guys weren’t talking, someone had yelped, short and sharp, but the dots that meant conscious were still lit, data was still coming up on the screens, fire was still happening, longscan shaping up. Had three scared guys in the seats. Next four shots were misses. His fault. He’d pulled a panic, lost it—had no time now to be thinking about it—targets— dammittohell!—

  “The UDC,” Porey said, rocking back his chair, “believes in a good many myths. We don’t disabuse them. And, yes, this room is secure.”

  “What else haven’t we said? What else hasn’t filtered out here? Or is this a longstanding piece of information?”

  “The ECS4,” Porey said, “is fully outfitted. Putty outfitted. We’re operational, and we have a com system they can’t penetrate. To our knowledge—they haven’t even detected its operation. Installation on the ECS8—is waiting a shipment. Communications between you and FSO have been, I understand, infrequent. That situation is going to improve.”

  “When?”

  “Estimate—two months, three.”

  “Until then? Edmund, —I want to know. Who pulled Kady and Aboujib out of the Belt? Who opted Pollard in? Where did this damned new system come in?”

  “Exact origin of those orders?” Porey asked with a shrug. “I’m sure at some high level.” Meaning Keu or Mazian, which said no more than he knew. “But the reason for pulling them in—plainly, they were Dekker’s crew, we know things now about Hellburner we didn’t know. We’ve adjusted the training tape to reflect that, we’ve chosen a crew with a top pilot to start with a—tragically—clean slate. It’s the best combination we can come up with.”

  “Not to rush into schedule. Dekker’s just out of hospital. Look at his psychological record, for God’s sake. You’re putting an outrageous load on this crew.”

  “I leave that to the medics. They cleared him. He’s in.”

  “Cleared him with how much pressure from command?”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “That there’s too damned much rush on this. That Dekker’s not ready to go into schedule.”

  Porey leaned back hi the chair, frowning. “You expressed a curiosity about the tape system. Have you ever had deep-tape, Jurgen?”

  “No.” Emphatically. It occurred to him at the moment that Porey could order that even in his case. And he didn’t like the thought.

  “Ordinary DNI tape isn’t so different from deep teach. Less detailed, in general. But the real difference is the class of drugs. Deepteach trank suppresses certain types of brain activity. Eliminates the tendency to cross-reference with past experience. General knowledge is still an asset. Specific training isn’t. Hostility to the process certainly isn’t. The other trainees have both handicaps. They’ve been trained otherwise and they won’t trust a tape telling them differently. But this crew knows nothing else. They have general knowledge. They’re not afraid of it. So their judgment can override the tape.”

  “Theoretically.”

  Another shrug. “So the technicians assure us: that with no trained response to overcome—they can do it and not panic. We cut a new tape from what succeeds—and bootstrap the others.”

  “You bring this tape business in,” Graff said, “you slip it on a novice crew without an explanation—then you want to shove off Belt miner reactions on Shepherd crews that’ve risked their necks for a year training for these boards? What do I say to these people? What’s the official word? Because the rumor’s out, Edmund, they didn’t take that long to put two and two together.”

  Porey looked at him long and coldly from the other side of what had been his desk. “Tanzer’s complaining. You’re complaining. Everybody’s bitching. Nobody in this facility wants to take this program to implementation. I have other orders, Jurgen. If crews the—they’ll the in the suns. We do not lose another ship on display. We haven’t, as happens, another ship we can lose.”

  “We haven’t another core crew we can lose, either. Where are you going to get recruits if you kill our best with this damned tape? Draft them out of Earth’s pool? Persuade the Luna-Sol cargo runners to try what killed the Shepherds?”

  “Maybe you don’t have enough confidence in your recruits.”

  “I have every confidence in them. I also know they’ve never been cut free to do what they know—not once. They’re a separate culture from Earth, separate from Mars, separate even from the Belt. The UDC regulated them and played power games with their assignments and their schedules. The JLC changed the specs and cut back the design. These crews thought when the Fleet came in here that somebody was finally on their side. So what do I tell them when they ask about this tape? That we took it off the last spectacular fatalities? That’s going to give them a bell of a lot of confidence.”

  “Dekker should trust it. The tape did come from his crew. And he certainly knows the crew we’ve given him.”

  “The crew we’ve given him never worked ops together. They were financial partners. Everyone seems to have forgotten that!”

  “Dekker’s confident.”

  “Confident, hell! Dekker’s numb. He’s taken the chaff that’s come down from the UDC, his crew’s dead, somebody tried to kill him, he’s got a personal problem with a MarsCorp board member, which is why the UDC pulled him from that demo in the first place, on somebody’s orders I still haven’t heard accounted for. You put him into the next mission and what guarantees you won’t get the same communiqué Tanzer got: Pull Dekker, keep him out of the media, take him out of the crew that’s trained for that run—and then what will you do? Fold like Tanzer did? Or tell the EC go to hell?”

  Cold stare. Finally Porey said, “I’m aware of Dekker’s problem.”

  “Is that all? You’re aware? —Do you realize his mother and the peace party lawyers are all over the news right now? The case is active again. Do you think that’s coincidence? Salazar doesn’t care what she brings down.”

  “I’m aware of Alyce Salazar.”

  “So are you going to pull Dekker? Or are you using him as test fodder? Doesn’t matter if he cracks up in the sims, it solves a problem—is that it?”

  “You have a personal attachment to this boy—is that your problem?”

  No re-position. Straight through. Straight through. He got a breath and tried to tell himself it was all right, it was only a sim. A last target.

  Miss. Sal said, “Damn,” and: “Sorry, Ben.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Ben said.

  “Dekker.” Sim chiefs voice. You didn’t hear them break in like that, they didn’t remind you they existed unless you were totally, utterly screwed. “Dekker. What’s the trouble?”

  P
od was in neutral now. They wouldn’t abort you cold—a shift like that messed with your head. But nothing further was going to happen in the sim. Virtual space was running, green lines floating in front of his eyes, but without threat. His heart was going like a hammer. Breams came in gasps.

  “Muscle spasm.”

  He lied to the sim chief. Chief was going to order them in, no question. New crew—he could well glitch their reactions— He’d never, never gotten called down over com. Never gotten a stand-down like this.

  “Going to order a return. Your crew ail right?”

  “Crew’s fine.” He didn’t get any contradiction over com.

  “You want to push the button?”

  Abort was quicker. Abort would auto them to dock. His nerves wanted that.

  “I’ll go manual. No abort.” Hell if he was going to come hi like a panicked neo. He got his breathing calmed. He lined them up, minute by excruciating minute. He brought it as far as basics. “Meg,” he said then, “take it in. Dock it, straight push now. Can you do that?”

  “Got it,” Meg said. “Take a breath, Dek.”

  Three more minutes in. Dock was basic—now. Lesson one. Punch the button. Mind the closing v. They’d killed one man and a prototype module getting that to work realtime, before Staatentek admitted they had a problem.

  Whole damned program was built on funerals...

  “Doing all right, Meg.”

  He unclenched stiff fingers. Watched the numbers run, steady, easy decline in distance: lock talked to lock and the pod did its own adjustments.

  Bang into the grapples. System rest.

  A damned pod, not the ship, but he was having trouble breathing as the hatch opened, to Meg’s shutdown—

  “Shit!”

  His heart jumped. “Easy, easy,” he told her, as she made a frantic reach at the board. “Lock’s autoed, not your fault, not your fault, it’s automatic on this level.”

  “Not used to these damn luxuries.” Breath hissed between her teeth. “Got it, thanks.”

  No word out of Ben. Ben wasn’t happy. Sal wasn’t. He could feel it out of that corner. He thought about saying Don’t mind it, but that wasn’t the case, you damned well had to mind a screw-up like this, and they did. He thought about telling them some of those were his fault, but that wasn’t what they needed to set into their reactions either. He just kept his mourn shut, got the tape, grabbed the handholds and followed Meg out the hatch.