“Yessir.” Aboujib had a solid grip, a steady eye, a distractingly quirky dimple beside a pretty mouth—and she was outside his crew and off limits, end it, right there. Not many women among the Shepherds and a consequent shortage of women in the program; and one of Dekker’s former partners?
The captain had put Dekker’s unit together again. That was what was happening. Keu wasn’t saying a thing—so FleetCom wasn’t secure: the captain was just doing it, case by case: somebody had moved a carrier in from the Belt, for God’s sake, or Victoria was back in-system: no other way to ferry Aboujib and Kady here since the accident.
Which could mean the captain hadn’t been on Sol One for the last week; could mean Mazian had interrupted his diplomatic receptions to take a hand; or it might mean Keu had help: cooperative command in action—Col. Tanzer, sir.
He said, “Very glad to have you aboard, Aboujib....” and the phone beeped. His calls were routing through the carrier’s board and that wasn’t to be ignored. He picked up the receiver, said, “Graff here,” and heard:
“Lieutenant?” Thin voice. Strained. “Dekker. Need some help, sir.”
“Shove it!” he heard in the background. Female voice. And something happened.
A hand came under Dekker’s arm. Pulled. The nurse took hold of Meg’s arm and lost that grip. Fast.
“You want those fingers, mister, you keep ‘em the fuck off my arm.”
The nurse had hit an alarm, or something: a light was flashing. But Dekker knew where he was, he knew who was keeping his balance for him and he’d trust Meg in the black deep of space. He said, “Door, Meg. Now.”
“He’s not released,” the nurse said. Other meds showed up. Higgins arrived at the desk, looked at Meg and said, “Who are you?”
“Ben Pollard right now,” Meg said. “Ben’s getting my pass straightened out.”
“Get security,” Higgins said to someone in the hall. “Lt. Dekker, they’ll take you to your room.”
“No such.” He held his feet. “I’m going.” Head was killing him. But standing was easier. “Where’s my uniform?”
Security showed up, MPs, UDC. An MP grabbed for Meg, and next thing he knew he’d grabbed the MP—the guy looked at him, he looked at the guy with his fist doubled, but the MP with a fistful of his pajamas wasn’t about to hit a hospital case. So he kept his hold on the MP, the MP kept his hold on him, and they stared at each other while the interns tried to drag him away. “You tell Tanzer fuck himself. Hear? —Meg? Get. Get out of here.”
They told her, “You’re under arrest. You’re not going anywhere,” and Meg said, “Hell if. Spiel on, chelovek, a judge is going to hear every word of this. You seriously better not bruise him.”
“Now wait a minute.” Higgins pulled the MP off—tried to: he wasn’t about to let go his only anchor, and Higgins was upset. “All right, all right, calm down. Everybody calm down. Lt. Dekker, let go of him.”
Things were graying out. But he got a breath and held on, said, rationally, he hoped, “I’m walking out of here and I’m going back to my barracks.”
Meg said, “Dek, calm down.”
Her, he listened to. Kept his grip the way the MP held on to him and listened to Meg say, “He had a seriously bad time with Company doctors. Fed him full of prescription drugs, while he was spaced. You let him go. He’ll be all right.”
“I’m not a damn mental case, Meg.”
Higgins said, smooth as silk, “We’re not maintaining that. He’s had concussion and broken bones. If you’re a friend of his, persuade him back to bed.”
“I’ve been in bed too damned long. Won’t let me up, won’t let me walk—”
“You’ve been to therapy, lieutenant. Don’t you remember?”
Scared him. He wasn’t sure. He didn’t argue with what they might be able to prove. Or fake records for. He was afraid he was going to pass out, and end the argument that way. “I want my release. Now.”
Higgins frowned, bit his lip. Finally, “I’ll release you to your CO. Personally. If he wants you. Ms. —?”
“Kady. Magritte Kady. Meg, to whoever.” She stuck out her hand. Higgins looked confused and angry. “Higgins, is it?”
He ignored the hand, “Do you mind explaining who the hell you are and where you came from?”
“Manners,” Dekker said. Still with his grip on the MP, he looked the man close in the eyes and said, “You want to let go? I want to let go.”
Man wasn’t amused. Man said, “Doctor?”
“Let him go.”
Took a bit just to get his hand unclenched. The MP’s uniform had a circle of sweaty wrinkles. The MP refused to straighten it. Man was cold and thin-lipped, and mad as hell. UDC was full of those types. He reached for Meg’s hand and said, “Let’s go.”
“There are forms to fill out,” Higgins said. “And a physical.”
“Had one,” he said, walking—he hoped Meg knew where the door was: he didn’t. He halfway expected the MP was going to have his way after all. He remembered he was in pajamas when he saw the door. He didn’t know any way back to the barracks but the Trans. Didn’t know how he was going to stay conscious through that ride. Little bit of g it pulled would wipe him out.
But Meg steered him for a bench by the door and set him down. “You just stay mere a minute. I’m going to go back there and call your CO. Isn’t anybody coming near you. —Is your CO going to pull you out?”
“Yeah, yeah, I mink he’s already got somebody coming.”
“Then I’ll stand here and wait. If you’re sure. —You going to be all right?”
“Yeah,” he said. His teeth had started to chatter. He was barefoot. The pajamas weren’t worm much. Meg took off her coat, put it around his shoulders, and made him hold on to it. She left him a moment and came back with a blanket, God knew how.
She said, “Higgins is severely pissed. He’s on the phone. But the nurse is all right. Nurse asked if you wanted a chair.”
Nurse was the one he’d hit. More than once. He shook his head, with some remorse for that—and regret for missing his chance at Higgins. Meg tucked the blanket around him, and under his bare feet, and sat down and offered him a warmer place to lean. They’d never been to bed together, had just been letter writers, at 830 million k remote from each other. They’d discovered they were attracted to each other too late to do anything about it, except that goodbye kiss. And now a hello one, a hug and a place to lean on, when he’d gotten to the absolute bottom of his strength. Meg never found him but what he was a mess. And here she was, he’d no idea how. She hadn’t come straight with him. And maybe sitting here with her like this was all another hallucination. If he was hallucinating this time he didn’t want to come back again, didn’t want to fight them, didn’t want to get even, didn’t want to prove anything to anybody. Just sit, long as he could, long as he could hold himself awake.
Meg said, “Well, well, blue uniforms, this time. That us?”
He focused stupidly on figures the other side of the glass. On one young, fair-haired.. .Graff, for God’s sake. With Fleet Security.
He bit his lip til it hurt enough. He said, “Don’t let me fall, Meg,” and stood up, letting go the blanket, as Graff came through the Perspex doors. “Lt. Graff, sir.”
Graff looked at him, up and down, Graff frowned—you could never tell what Graff was thinking. Could have been of skinning him alive, for all he could read.
Meg said, “They’ve been drugging him to the gills, sir. He never did do well with that.”
Graff said to the MPs, “Take him to the ship.”
“Barracks,” Dekker said, then was sorry he’d objected. He’d take anywhere but here. But he didn’t know the ship.
He wanted somewhere he knew. He wanted people he knew, namely Meg, and Sal, and Ben.
“Just long enough for a check-up,” Graff said. “I want you on record, Dekker. From the outside in. You behave yourself, hear? No nonsense.”
“Yessir,” he said. He let Security take hol
d of him, he sat down and they said they were going to borrow a chair; he heard Graff tell Meg Welcome in; and: “Hereafter, don’t start a war. Wait for the UN to declare it.”
“Yessir,” Meg said. Which wasn’t a word he ever recalled from Meg Kady. But Meg had enlisted. The fool. The absolute fool, if that was the price of Meg’s ticket here. He felt tears in his eyes, thinking about that.
But damned if he could figure out how she’d managed it, all in all.
Time had gotten away from him again. It kept doing that. So maybe he was, the way Ben said, crazy.
CHAPTER 6
WELCOME back,” they said, “welcome back, Dek.” Jamil and Trace, Pauli and Almarshad and Hap Vasquez—they intercepted him at the door when he was only calculating how much strength he had to get to his own quarters and fall into bed. Jamil warned the rest about grabbing hold of him, thank God, most of all thank God for Ben and Meg and Sal Aboujib showing up out of the depth of the room to rescue him from too much input too fast... he was tracking on too much: he knew and didn’t know in any detail what he’d said to the guys or what they’d said to him, and for one dislocated moment he really thought Pete or Elly or Falcone was going to turn up in the barracks; they always had... But they weren’t going to do that ever again, dammit, end report, o-mega; he was here on this wave of time, and by a break of bad luck they weren’t, and he was going to fall on his face if the guys didn’t let him get to his quarters. He’d spent hours out in a null g sickbay, been prodded and probed and sampled and vid-taped from angles and in a condition he didn’t want on the evening news, and his imagination until now had only extended to lying down in quiet, not running an emotional gauntlet of friends of dead friends— who could see how absolutely he’d been screwed over, dammit, when he should at least have gotten some of theirs back. He didn’t know what had happened to him in hospital, not all of it; he didn’t know what he’d admitted to, most of all he couldn’t remember what had put him there, and by that, he’d evidently let the lieutenant down, too, in some major way...
“Come on,” Meg said, and he walked across a tilting, unstable floor, around a comer, down a short hall to a familiar door and a room that had been—images kept flashing on him out of a situation he didn’t remember—cold and empty the last time he’d left it, clothes in the lockers nobody was going to use any more....
Now it was alive with voices and faces out of a period of his life that never should have recrossed his track, except it was like a gravity well, things didn’t fly straight, they kept coming around at you again and he didn’t even know the center of mass. That should be a calculable thing. He should be able to solve that problem, with the data he had....
“Get him in bed,” Meg was saying, “he’s severely spaced,” and Ben said, “Damned fool had to walk it, where’s his head anyway?”
Ben never minced words. He could cope with Ben far better than he could Sal Aboujib, who, after Ben had got him onto his bunk, pinned him with hands on either side of him, looked him in the face so close he was cross-eyed and said, “Oh, he’s still pretty. Dek, sincerely good to see you. So good you’re in one piece—”
“Let him alone. God!” Meg shoved Sal aside. “Man’s severely had enough for a while. Go get his supper. Do you mind?”
Numb at this point. Completely numb. You hyped, and if things wouldn’t calculate, what could you do but handle the things you could? He said, “Not reg.”
Sal said, “Nyet. Lieutenant cleared it. Sandwich all right, Dek? Chips?”
“Yeah, I guess.” Sandwich meant fish of some kind and that nauseated him. Then he thought of what he did want. What he’d wanted in his lucid moments in the hospital. “Hamburger and fries. —” And simultaneously remembered what happened to Belters who ventured the quick food in the cafeteria. “You watch the hamburgers, Sal. It’s real stuff—”
“Dead animals,” Ben said, and shuddered.
“Fish are animals,” Meg declared.
“No, they’re not.”
The argument went completely surreal. The noise did. He was lying here and people promising to get him a hamburger were arguing Belter sensibilities, enzymes and whether fish were intelligent. “Milkshake,” he said. But he was tired and he wanted to get under the sheets he was lying on, which took far too much effort. He just shut his eyes a moment and something warm settled over him. Blanket. And a weight pressed the mattress beside him and an arm arched over him.
He focused blearily on Meg. “Why in hell did you come here? You got no business here—”
“We’ll talk about it later.”
“We’ll talk about it while there’s still a chance, before you get into the security stuff—” The meds would say his blood pressure was getting up again. His eyes were blurry. He made the effort to lean on one arm, the one that hadn’t been recently broken, and gathered all the detail of a face he’d never thought he’d see again. He’d wanted her once. He didn’t know if he still did—didn’t want to want her. Didn’t know if he could take another dead friend. “Damn thing’s a meatgrinder, Meg, the colonel’s an ass—”
“Yeah, so Ben said. —Are you getting out? Seems to me you got a serious excuse here. Thinking about a Medical?”
His mind went blank on that. He couldn’t see himself doing anything else. He couldn’t see himself shoving freight around, going back to pusher work. But the future he’d had before the accident was black and void in front of him, just—not do-able now. For the last year he’d chased after being the first pilot to run that course. Making it. He’d believed that, even through the funerals of those who hadn’t. And that wouldn’t happen, couldn’t happen, now, everybody was dead but him—
“You want to get out of the service?” Meg asked him.
He kept trying to look at that dark ahead. And finally he shook his head. No, he didn’t want out. He didn’t know what he was going to do, but he didn’t want out of the Fleet—didn’t know who might go with him next run, didn’t know what they could pull together into a crew that wouldn’t take another one apart—didn’t want that. Maybe that was why he couldn’t see where he was going. Crew was gone, they might well drop him back in training, let him shape up with Meg and Ben and Sal from the beginning up—granted Tanzer didn’t kill the program.
Meanwhile some other crew would make that first run; and the second; and the third—he’d take the controls after someone else had flown the ship and it was documented and tame enough for the second line to try.
And maybe that was sanity. Forget his notions: maybe it wasn’t what he’d trained for, wasn’t what he’d wanted, but it was a way back into the cockpit, forget the naive confidence he’d had in his invincibility. He wasn’t a kid any more. God hope he wasn’t a fool any more, who had to have that number one status or kill himself and everyone with him.
He gave up the prop of his arm, fell back again and gathered the bedspread and pillow under his head. He looked in Meg’s eyes and didn’t see a woman who was young and mind-fried with love—just a friend, a sane, brave friend, who was older than he was, and whose reasons he didn’t honestly know.
“Meg, I’m serious, don’t want to offend you. Good to see you. Good you came. But if you’ve got any loophole out of enlisting, any way in hell back to the berth you had, you should go back....”
“Five hundred-odd million ft, I come for this man. What about those letters you wrote? ‘Getting along fine, a real chance at something, the first thing in my life I know I want to do—’ “
“That was bullshit. It’s like anywhere else. We got a fool in charge.”
“Yeah, well, we dealt with fools before. Got no shortage of ‘em in the Belt. Some have even got seniority.”
“They got plenty of it here. —Too damn many funerals, Meg. I’m sick to death of funerals—”
“Death is, jeune rab. Better to burn than rot.”
Plasma spreading against the dark. Whiteout on the cameras. He said, urgently, “Meg, go back where you’ve got a life, for God’s sake. You’ve
got a berth—”
“—without shit-worth of seniority.”
“Well, you won’t get any here. They won’t count your hours, just give you a flat 200. Spend your whole life out in the Belt and that’s all it’s worth. They’ll screw you any way they can.”
“Mmmnn. Yeah. Sal’s seriously pissed about that—but she’s computers anyway. Straight quantifiable skills stuff. / was an EC shuttle pilot, remember? Earth to orbit. LEO to Sol One. You name it, I ran it, four years riding the gravity slopes. And it’s all in the EC’s own infallible records. Here, I got seniority.”
“Shit,” he said, cold inside, he didn’t know why, except Meg was hell to stop when she had an idea, and Tanzer was a damned fool. It’d be like the UDC, to look at just that record of Meg’s hours and do something seriously stupid. Like put a shuttle jock on the combat line. “Meg, you don’t know. We got innate stupidity here, serious innate stupidity. The equipment’s a real stress generator, you understand me? They made the sims realtime to start, but the UDC guys won’t spend four, five hours in the sims, hell, no, we’re too short on sim-time for that, and we got guys too experienced to need that, so what do we do? We pitch the sims down to be do-able. Comfortable. Spread the time around. You read that?” His head ached. His voice was going. The capacity to care was. “They’re killing us. Take guys with reflexes to do the job, and then they fuck with the sims till you got no confidence in them. That’s a killer, Meg, that’s a damn killer, ship’s so sensitive you can screw the thing if you twitch—”
“You fly it?”
A memory chased through his nerves, oxygen high and an adrenaline rush, hyper-focused—
“Yeah,” he said, voice gone shaky with memory. “Yeah. Mostly the sims. But twice in the ship.” And he knew why he wasn’t going to take a Medical. Better to burn, Meg had said. And he did that. He did burn.
Door opened. “Mustard or ketchup?” Sal’s voice. “Got one each way....”
“Mustard,” he said, grasping after mundane sanity. The smell ought to make him sicker than hell, the hospital food hadn’t smelled of grease and he’d all but heaved eating it. But maybe it was the company: maybe it was the smell that conjured the cafeteria and the sounds and shoptalk over coffee: he suddenly wanted the burger. He took a real chance with his stomach and his head and hitched his shoulders around against the wall so he could sit up to eat, and handle the milkshake. A sugar hit, carbohydrates and salt, a guaranteed messhall greaseburger with dill pickles, chili sauce, tomatoes and mustard—