Graff keyed the dictionary for ‘forecast.’ It said something about 1) terrestrial weather patterns and, 2) prediction. The latter, he decided, but keyed it up; and found something, as he’d suspected, different than his own definition of ‘prediction.’ These were the people who designed the computers and the software that ran the sims, for God’s sake, and they were giving him messages about Old Earth weather patterns and fortune-telling?
He tried to read these reports out of Tanzer’s staff. He felt responsible in the captain’s absence. He worried about missing something. He worried about not understanding Tanzer face to face, and these were the only lessons in blue-sky usage on his regular reading list.
‘Effectuated/ he could guess from particles. And he didn’t have that small a vocabulary. He didn’t use that many semicolons in his reports; he wondered was his style out of fashion; and he wished not for the first time that he’d had at least one of the seminal languages—given the proliferation of derived meanings, that was what Saito called the problem words, cognates; and metaphor. All of which meant a connection between ‘forecast,’ planetary weather, and the Lendler Corp techs who, between working on the sims and writing reports, danced a careful and convolute set of protocols between his office and Tanzer’s—’effectuate,’ hell. Obfuscate’ and ‘delegate’ and ‘reiterate, but nothing effectual was going to happen with that investigation except Lendler Corp gathering evidence to protect itself against lawsuits from the next of kin.
Save them the trouble. Stick to Belters. Belters didn’t sue Corporations, Belters didn’t have the money or the connections to sue Corporations.
But come into their territory—
Lendler didn’t want to do that. Didn’t want to interview the Belters. Even when he had it set up.
The phone beeped. He hoped it was Saito coming on-line: he could use a linguist about now—and he could wish Legal Affairs hadn’t left their office to a junior: the Fleet needed to enlist a motherworld lawyer, was what they needed, maybe two and three of them, since they never seemed unanimous— he’d had the UDC counsel on the line last night, talking about culpabilities and wanting releases from the next-ofs—
“Lt. Graff?” Young male voice. Familiar male voice. “Col. Tanzer on the line.”
He’d never been in the habit of swearing. But association with the Belters did suggest words. He kept it to: “Put him on, Trev.”
Pop. “Lt. Graff?”
“Colonel?”
“I’m looking at the file on Paul Dekker. Just wondered if you had any last-minute additions, before we write our finish on this accident business.”
“I’d appreciate that, colonel, as soon as we finish our own investigation.”
“Dekker’s been released from hospital, I understand, on your orders.”
Possibility of recorders. Distinct possibility. “Released to Fleet medical care. His blood showed high levels of tranquilizer and pain medication. My medical staff says it was excessive. Far excessive. The word malpractice figured in the report.”
A moment of silence. “Blood samples taken after he was in your doctors1 care, lieutenant. I’ll inquire, but you’ll excuse me if I choose to believe our own personnel. File a separate report if you like. Call the Surgeon General. It’s completely of a pattern with the rest of your actions. But you may find some of those chickens coming home to roost very shortly.”
Another one for Saito. But the gist of it got through, quite clearly.
Tanzer said: “The phone isn’t the place for this discussion. I’ll see you in my office in ten minutes. Or I’ll file this report as is, without your inspection, and add your objection in my own words.”
Moment of silence from his side. A moment of temptation to damn Tanzer for a bastard, hang up, and call the captain on uncoded com. He might be a fool not to have done that: Tanzer made little moves, niggling away at issue after issue, day after day; damn the man, he could be recording the conversation right now. But caution won. Follow the forms. “I’m on my way,” he said.
The sojers had this perverse habit called reveille, which meant after the com scared hell out of you and you hauled yourself bleary-eyed awake, you ran for the breakfast line before the eggs disappeared—Meg had gotten into that routine on the ship coming here, got a few days spoiled on the shuttle, and here she and Sal were again—standing in line, the only females in sight, with two guys who drew their own kind of attention.
Orientation, the lieutenant had told her, outside hospital. Keep him busy. Push him, but not too hard. Don’t let him off by himself.
Which meant they were a kind of bodyguard, she supposed. Against what, she wasn’t sure—against Dek’s own state of mind, high on the list: too much death, Sal put it, for anybody to tolerate. Everybody he’d gotten really close to, except Ben and her, had died; he’d watched it happen every damned time; and last night he was telling her to try to de-enlist, get out of his life?
Only convinced her how seriously she meant to follow the lieutenant’s orders and keep a tag on him.
So Dek was supposed to show them around, get them acquainted with the classrooms and the VR labs and the library, get their own cards picked up. Lab schedule, soon as they could get settled, hell and away different than she’d learned flying, but that was the way they did it in the Fleet: Dek said you took a pill and they hooked you up to a tape and they fed the basics of the boards into you by VR display like programming some damned machine—
“Confuses you at first,” Dekker was telling them, in the breakfast line, the other side of Ben. “Reactions cross what you know, you face it the next day and you don’t remember learning something new—-your hands know. They use it just to teach you the boards. The brain takes a while to get used to it—a while to know it knows. Handful of people can’t take the pills. But it’s rare.”
She listened. She tried to imagine it.
“They’re experimenting with that stuff over at TI,” Ben said. “Hell if they’re going to mess with my head. I’m a Priority 10. Programmer. Security clearance. Damn chaff, feat’s what’s going on, it’s that screwed-up EIDAT they’re using—drop me in here and my level isn’t in the B Dock system, oh, no, all it knows is pilots and dock monkeys, so I got to be one or the other, right? Right.” Dollop of synth eggs onto Ben’s plate. “So it lets some damn keypusher screw with my assignment. Does somebody over at Sol wonder where I am? Not yet. Personnel isn’t supposed to think, oh, no, they trust the EIDAT. I got a post waiting for me, God hope it’s still waiting. —What the hell is that stuff?”
“Grits,” Dek said.
“Was it alive?”
“It wasn’t alive.” Dek slid his tray to the end of the line and drew his coffee.
“You want me to carry that?” Meg asked.
“I’m fine,” Dek said, and stuck his card in the slot. “That’s present and accounted for. Laser scans the bottom of the containers, figures your calories and your allotments— dietician’s worse than—hell.” Reader’s read-line was blinking.
“You have a message,” the checkout robot said, as if Dek couldn’t read.
“Scuse.” Dek carried his tray over to a corner table, quiet spot, Meg was glad to note, following him, while Ben waited for Sal to check through—a skosh too many Shepherd eyes in this place for her personal comfort, all picking up every move they made. Hi, Dek, they’d say soberly, sounding friendly enough. Giving her and Sal the eye, that was a natural—women being severely scarce here; and sort of glossing Ben.
But me UDC boys looked at Ben and looked at them and heads sort of leaned together at tables, she could see it going on all over that other corner of the hall, thick with UDC uniforms.
Dek set his tray down. “I’ll check that message blinker. Probably your stuff. Hope it’s your stuff.”
As Sal and Ben showed up with their trays and set them down.
“What’s he doing?” Ben asked with a glance over his shoulder. “You don’t ask what a message is before breakfast, you never ask what a
message is before breakfast—”
“Thinks it could be our accesses.” Meg set her tray down and cast a glance at Dek over by the phone, a skosh anxious, she couldn’t even tell why, except Dek had had this edge in his voice: he was On about something, she read it in his stance and his moves, and she hadn’t been able to read all the codes that had popped up. She said, still on her feet, “Ben? You capish the code on that blinker?”
“Accesses stuff,” Ben said, sitting down.
“Uh-oh,” Sal said.
Understatement. Serious understatement. Dek hit the phone with his open hand. “Scuze,” Meg said, and went that direction.
Dek snatched out his card, and ricocheted into her path. “What is?” she asked, catching at his arm. “Dek?”
“They clipped me, Tanzer’s fuckin’ clipped me, the son of a bitch.” Dek shoved her and she didn’t know whether to hang on or not—her hand stung as he blazed past her. But that didn’t matter. Dek going for the door like a crazy man—that seriously mattered. Dek knocking into guys inbound—
Mitch, for God’s sake—
Dek got past. Hot on his track she hit the same obstacle, who didn’t give way a second time. Neither did the other guys. “Kady,” Mitch said, not friendly. “I heard they’d gotten desperate.”
“I got a seriously upset partner—out of my way, dammit!”
“So what’s with Dekker?”
“Something about getting clipped.”
“Shit!” Mitch said, and: “Pauli,” to the big guy behind him, Shepherd from the hall yesterday. She remembered. “Haul his ass back here. Fast.”
“What’s going on?” Sal asked as she and Ben showed up with a handful of other curious.
“Dekker’s been clipped,” Mitch said. “Just calm down, we’re going to see what the lieutenant says about this.”
Hell if she understood ‘clipped,’ she didn’t know Pauli from trouble, she knew Mitch too damn well, but Mitch’s outrage at least sounded to be on Dek’s side and stopping Dek seemed to be a priority on their side too. Pauli-whoever took out in the direction Dek had gone, and she went with, at a fast walk.
First comer showed an empty hall; but Pauli broke into a jog for a side corridor as if he knew where he was going, she caught up, and spotted Dek, all right, traveling at a fair clip himself.
“Dek!” she called out; and he stopped, took a damn-you stance and stared at them cold as cold.
All right. That was the surly young sumbitch she knew. She panted, “You got friends, chelovek, capish? Slow down. Deal with people.”
Dek looked half poised to walk off. Pauli said, “Is it true? They pulled you?”
“Yeah.” Dek’s mouth didn’t look to be working real well, he clearly didn’t want to talk; but about that time Ben and Sal showed up with some of the other Shepherds from the messhall, Ben with:
“What’s going on? —Dekker, are you being a spook?”
“Ben,” Meg exclaimed. Sal said the same. But Dek made a disgusted wave of his hand and managed to unlock his jaw.
“Nothing’s wrong, nothing’s the hell wrong. Sorry I got you here. Sorry I got you into this.”
A sane woman had to get things off personals. Fast. “Ben, Sal, this is Pauli, friend of Mitch’s; Pauli: Ben Pollard, Sal Aboujib. Say how-do, and somebody answer a straight question, f God’s sake. What’s going on here?”
“The damn UDC,” Dek said, “that’s what’s going on. Tanzer’s just tossed me out of the program.”
“He can’t do that,” Pauli said. “Screw him. He can’t do that.”
Somebody else said, “No way, Dek.” And another one:
“Mitch is on his way to talk to the lieutenant right now. No way that’s going to stick.”
Dek wasn’t highly verbal. He was white, and sweating. Sal said, quietly, with her arm in Dek’s: “You want to go back to the room, Dek?”
Ben said: “Screw it, he’s got a breakfast sitting back there, we all got breakfast back there, if nobody’s grabbed h.”
Leave it to Ben. Sal had a crazy man halfway turned around and stopped from strangling the colonel and Ben wanted his effin’ breakfast. Dek was looking at Ben like he was some eetee dropped by for directions.
“You mind?” Ben asked him impatiently.
“Yeah. All right,” Dek muttered. And went with him.
God, both of them were spooks.
“I’m looking at Dekker’s record,” Tanzer said, tapping a card on his desk, “right here: the medical report and his disciplinary record—including his violent behavior here in hospital, his defiance of regulations in the sims—”
“His behavior, colonel, was thoroughly reasonable, considering the level of drugs in his system. Drugs with possible negative psychological impact considering his history— which is in that file. That from my medical experts. He has grounds for malpractice.”
“This is the accident report.” Tanzer shoved a paper form across the desk at him. “Sign it or don’t, as you please. I’ll spare you the detail. I’m not calling the hospital records into question, I’m not charging him with flagrant violations of security with that tape, I’m not charging him for disregard of safety regulations. I am concluding there was no other person involved in the sims accident but Ens. Dekker.”
He kept every vestige of emotion from his face. “How ate you proposing he got into that pod?”
“I’m supposing he got in there the ordinary way, lieutenant, the same as any fool can climb in there. He just happened to be on trank. These are the records of his admission—he was flying before he got in there.”
“Was put in there.”
“He was in illegal possession of a tape that should have been back in library—”
“He had license to possess that tape, colonel. He’d been in hospital, he’d just been released, in condition your medics knew when they let him out with a prescription drug in his system—”
“Whatever drugs were in his system, he put there, before he decided to go on a sim ride.”
“Pardon me if I don’t rely on those doctors’ word, colonel, or their records.”
“Rely on whatever you like. I’ll tell you one thing: Dekker’s barred from the sims.”
“He’s going in there on my orders, colonel.”
“Check your rules, lieutenant. The sim facility and its accesses are under UDC direction.”
“You restrict one of my people from the sims, colonel, and the case is going clear to the Defense Department.”
“Then you better start the papers moving, lieutenant, because he’s barred. And if you give a damn for your program you won’t fife—that’s my unsolicited advice, because you don’t want him in public. Take my word for it you don’t want him in public. But until I get cooperation out of your office, you don’t get cooperation out of mine.”
“Do I understand this as blackmail? Is that what you want? My signature, and Dekker’s back in?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way. But let’s say it might signal a salutary change of attitude.”
“No deal. No deal, colonel. And you can stand by for FleetCom to be in use in fifteen minutes.”
“Good. About time you woke up your upper echelons. Tell them they’ve got a problem with Dekker. A serious problem.”
Trays were still sitting. They came into the mess hall and guys stopped and stared in that distant way people had when they were trying to spy on somebody else’s trouble. Talk stopped, mostly, and started again, and Dek didn’t look at anybody, didn’t talk to anybody, just sat down at his place at table and put the straw in his orange juice.
Ben gave her a tight-jawed look. Table was still all theirs. Pauli and the guys had gone off toward the breakfast line, but they hadn’t made it: they’d gotten snagged, talking to guys over by the wall, all Shepherd. There were UDC guys on the fringes—tables were either UDC or they were Shepherd, Meg marked that suddenly: there wasn’t another mixed table in the whole damned hall.
She didn’t like the quiet. Didn’t
like the feeling around them. Dek was having his eggs. Ben was having toast. Sal gave her a look that said she was right, everybody else was crazy but them.
Young woman, blond hair in a shave-strip, came up, set her tray down, said, “You mind, Dek?”
Dek shrugged. That one sat down. “Trace,” the interloper said, looking her way, and offered her hand across the tray as a dark-skinned Shepherd kid took the seat next to Sal: “Aimarshad. Friends of friends.”
Pauli sat down, him with no tray, and said, “It’s us Tanzer’s after. —Pollard, you mind to answer whose side you’re on?”
Hell of a question, Meg thought. She watched Ben frown and think, then say, with a cold sweet smile on his face: “Hell, I’m not in Tanzer’s command. I’m Security-cleared. I’m Computer Technical, out of TI. I’m due somewhere else, and if I get there, frying Tanzer’s ass’d be ever so little effort. So why doesn’t somebody get me out of here?”
“Hear you were a good numbers man,” Pauli said.
The frown came back. “Damned good,” Ben said. Ben wasn’t lying. “But I’m not flying with him. I’m not flying with you guys. I’m not friggin’ going near combat...”
“Small chance you’ll have in my company,” Dek said under his breath. “If they get this mess cleared, it’ll just be one more thing they find. Dammit, Pete and Elly—what in hell is it with me that—”
Pauli’s hand came down on Dek’s wrist and shut him up. Thank God, Meg thought. She didn’t know the danger spots here, but her personal radar was getting back severe oncomings.
Hadn’t even gotten back to the office before he had a hail from behind and a “Lieutenant, we’ve got to talk to you—”
No doubt what it was before Mitch and Benavides overtook him. Graff said, “Dekker’s banned from the sims, is that what this is about?”
“Tanzer’s doing?” Mitch asked—and didn’t ask was it his.
“Col. Tanzer,” he reminded them. “In the office, Mitch. Let’s keep it out of the corridors—”
“It’s in the corridors, sir, it’s all over the messhall. The UdamnDC doesn’t care where it drops its—”