Hellburner

Chapter 14

5EQ. 285MII. Dekker, Paul F. Authorized. He waited, clinging to the line, felt like a fool inputting the card and checking the tape serial number on the display for the second time, but the cold feeling in the pit of his stomach refused to go away, and nothing seemed right, or sure enough.

Couldn’t remember if he’d done it. Things he’d done weren’t registering. He was thinking on things other than here and now and the number didn’t damn matter. There wasn’t a training tape he couldn’t handle.

Come apart on an orientation run, for God’s sake? Their input couldn’t have overridden his displays if he hadn’t let it, and they were apologizing to him for screwing up? If he was glitching on their input, he could have spared a hand to shut them out. He could have let go the damned yoke and recovered it at leisure. The number one sim was a walk down the dock if you didn’t seize up like a fool—

Muscle spasm. Point zero five second bobble—not wide enough to invoke the braces or trigger an abort on a sleeper run like that; and he’d spaced on it—in that five-hundredth second, he’d been in the Belt, he’d been back at Sol, he’d been with Pete and the guys and lost with Cory—God only where his head had been but he hadn’t known his next move. He’d blanked on it, without reason, without warning.

Pod drifted up, opened for him. He grasped the handholds and slid into the dark inside—respiration rate coming up. Sweat starting. He could feel it on his face, feel it crawling under the flightsuit as he prepped the boards. Belts, confirm. Power up, confirm. Single occupant, tape 23b, Dekker, P, all confirm.

He adjusted the helmet. The dark and the glowing lights held a surreal familiarity. It was no time. It was every time.

Some drugs came back on you, wasn’t that the case?

But the guys weren’t with him now. If he screwed it he screwed it by himself. Wasn’t going to let them do to him what they’d done to Meg and Ben and Sal, wasn’t going to take that damned tape—

No.

“Dekker.”

Sim chief again.

“Dekker, you want to stand down for an hour?”

Didn’t like their telemetry. Picking up his heartbeat.

“No. I’m all right.”

“Dekker.”

Series of breaths. “Porey’s orders. Free ticket. I’m all right, let it go.”

Seemed like forever that light stayed red.

They had guys over in hospital that couldn’t walk straight, that never would fly again...

Had guys in the mental ward...

Sim chief was probably checking with Porey’s office.

Calm the breathing down.

Light went from red to green.

Punch it in.

GO!

“Dek,” it was, “how’d the run go?” and “Dek, you all right?”

He winced, shrugged, said, Fine, working on it.

And stopped the lift on three-deck, made it as far as the nearest restroom and threw up non-stop.

From Meg, back in barracks, a shake at his shoulder: “Dek, cher. Wake up. Mess call. You coming? You’d better come.”

He hauled himself out of half-sleep and off the bunk, wobbled into the bathroom to pop an antacid—the meds didn’t restrict those, thank God—-and to scrub normal color into his face. He walked out again to go with Meg, navigated ordinary space, trying not to see the glowing lines and dark, not to hear the mags or feel the destabilizing jolts of thrust.

Familiar walls, posters, game tables, drift of guys out to the hall. Ben and Sal gave them a: Come on, you’re late, and he wondered suddenly where this hall was, or why he should stay in it, when there were so many other like places he could be—spaced, he told himself, sane people didn’t ask themselves questions like that, sane people didn’t see the dark in the light...

“Hey, Dek, you all right?”

Mason. “Yeah. Thanks.”

Hand on his shoulder. Guys passed them in the hall.

“He all right?” Sal asked.

“Yeah,” he said. Somehow he kept walking as far as the messhall, couldn’t face the line. “I’m just after coffee, all right? I’m not hungry.”

They objected, Meg said she was getting him a hamburger and fries, and the sumbitch meds and dieticians would log it to her, the way they did every sneeze in this place, maybe screw up her medical records. He waved the offer off, went over to the coffee machine and carded in.

Nothing made sense to him. Everything was fractured. He was making mistakes. He’d glitched the target calls right and left this morning.

It had been this morning. It had to have been this morning... but he’d run it so many times...

He walked back toward the tables, stood out of the traffic and muttered answers to people who talked to him, not registering it, not caring. People came and went. He remembered the coffee in his hand and drank it. Eventually Meg and Sal came out of the line, so did Ben, and gathered him up.

Meg had the extra hamburger. “You’re eating,” she said. “You want the meds coming after you?”

He didn’t. He took it, unwrapped it, and Ben hit him in the ribs. “Pay attention, Dek-boy.”

“Huh?”

“Huh,” Ben echoed. “Salt. Pass the salt. God. You are a case today.”

“Thinking,” he said.

Ben gave him a look, a shrug in his direction. “He’s thinking. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before.”

“Ben,” Meg said.

“Dekker. Pass the damn salt.”

“Shit!” Wasn’t approved com, the sojer-lads got upset, but she was upset, so what?

“It’s all right, it’s all right,” the examiner said. “You’re doing fine, Kady.”

“Tell me fine, I screwed my dock...”

You couldn’t flap the voice. “It gets harder, Kady. That’s the object. Let’s not get overconfident, shall we?”

“Overconfident, my—“ She was shaking like a leaf.

Different voice. Deep as bone. “You shoved a screen in over your pilot’s priority. Did your pilot authorize that?”

Hell, she wasn’t in a mood for games. She thought she knew that voice. It wasn’t the examiner.

“Kady?”

“Had to know,” she muttered. Hell, she was right, she’d done the right thing.

“Not regulation, Kady.”

Screw the regs, she’d say. But she did know the voice. There weren’t two like it.

“Yessir,” she said meekly, to no-face and no-voice. Dark, that was all. Just the few yellow lights on the V-HUD and the boards, system stand-down.

“You think you can make a call like that, Kady?”

Shit. “Yessir.”

Silence then. A long silence. She waited to be told she was an ass and an incompetent. She flexed her hands, expecting God only—they sometimes started sim on you without warning.

Then the examiner’s quiet voice said—she wasn’t even sure now it was alive—

“Let’s go on that again, Kady.”

She couldn’t stand it. “Was I right?”

“Your judgment was correct, Kady.”

“Ms. Dekker, do you have proof of your allegations?”

“Talk to my lawyer.”

‘ ‘Is it true your son is in a top secret Fleet project?”

“I don’t know where he is. He doesn’t write and I don’t give a damn.”

“How do you feel about Ms. Salazar’s allegations—“

More and more of it. A Paris news service ran a clip on Paul Dekker that went back into juvenile court records and fee other services pounced on it with enigmatic references to ‘an outstanding warrant for his arrest’ and his ‘work inside a top-secret Fleet installation.’

Graff punched the button to stop the tape, stared at the blank screen while Demas hovered. FSO had sent their answer Regarding your 198-92, Negative. Meaning they’d turned up nothing they cared to say on the case—at least nothing they trusted to FleetCom—or him.

“Influence-trading,” Demas said. “Scandals of the rich. Young lovers. Salazar and her money against the peacers. The public’s fascinated.”

The Fleet didn’t need this. He didn’t. Dekker certainly didn’t. A bomb threat involving Salazar’s plane, the peacers denying responsibility, the European Police Agency finding a confidential report in the hands of the news services. Rode the news reports outside Sol Two almost as hot and heavy as the Amsterdam Tunnel collapse.

While Demas and Saito only said, Hold on, Helm. Hold on. Don’t make a problem, the captain doesn’t need a problem.

“I honestly,” Demas said, “don’t think Dekker needs to see this particular broadcast, regardless of any promises.”

“She’s never called him. Never returned the call.”

“Lawyers may have advised against. I’d advise against. Personally, J-G.”

“I knew you would.”

“So you didn’t ask.”

“I don’t know Earth. Now I wonder if I even know Dekker. He’s never asked me, either—whether there was word.”

Light and dark. The AI substituted its interlink for crew, he was fine till the randoms popped up, till he saw the wicket he had to make and the pod reacted—bobble and reposition, reposition, reposition—

Fuckin’ hell\

Screwed it, screwed it—screwed mat one—redlight—

You’re hit. Keep going. Don’t think about it.

Chest hurt, knees hurt, right arm was numb. Damn hour and five sim and he was falling apart—

Made Five. Lost one.

Randoms again, five minutes down. God, a chaff round....

Blinked sweat. Tasted it. Hate the damn randoms, hate the bastards, hate the Company, dammit—

Overcorrection. Muscles were tired, starting to spasm, God, where was the end of this run?

Couldn’t hold it. HUD was out, the place was black and blacker—

“Dek, Dek, wake up,” from the other side of the door and Ben, with the territory behind his eyes all full of red and gold and green lines and red and yellow dots, hoped Meg would just put a pillow over the sumbitch’s face. Beside him. Sal moved faintly.

“Dek!”

“Shit,” Sal moaned, and elbowed him in a muzzy catch after balance.

“Dek? Come out of it.”

“Son of a bitch,” Ben muttered, felt a knee drop into the cold air outside the covers and set a foot on the floor, hauled himself to his feet and banged into the chair by the bed.

“Ben?” Sal murmured, but the blow to the hip did it. He shoved the door open into the dark next door and snarled, “Dekker!”

Dekker made a sound, Meg gave a sharp grunt above a crack of flesh and bone meeting. The son of a bitch had got her.

“Dekker!” He shoved past a smooth female body to get a shove of his own in, got a grip and held it. “Dekker, dammit, you want to take a cold walk?”

Same as he’d yelled at Dekker on the ship, when Dekker got crazy. He had one hand planted against a heaving, sweating chest, right about the throat, and Meg had cleared back, gotten to the light switch. He couldn’t see anything but a blur, and he didn’t let up the pressure—if Dekker moved to hit him Dekker was going to be counting stars, he had his mind made up to that. Dekker was gasping for breath—eyes open now.

“Spooks again,” Meg panted.

“I’ll say it’s spooks, this is the damn spook! I dunno why yon sleep with him.”

The inside door opened and Sal came in at the periphery of his vision. He heard Meg saying, “It’s all right, it’s just surface,” and kept his own hold on the lunatic, who still looked spaced and shocky. Dekker’s heart was going hard, felt like detonations under his hand. Dekker’s eyes had lost their glaze, started tracking around him.

Drifted back again, looked halfway cognizant.

“Let up,” Dekker said.

He thought about that. He thought about Meg saying for the last damn week Dekker was just confused, and Sal saying back off and give him some space. While Dekker kept a sim schedule the other crews were talking about. He gave Dekker a shove in the chest. Hard.

“Let up, hell. I’ll solve your problem, I’ll break your neck for you. You hit Meg, you skuz, you know that?” Dekker didn’t say anything, so he asked, for Dekker’s benefit, “You all right, Meg?”

“Yeah.”

“Hell of a bruise coming,” Sal muttered.

Dekker set his jaw again, didn’t exactly say go to hell, but that was the look he gave, along with the impression he might not be in control of his voice right now. When Dekker shut up, you either kept a grip on him or you got out of his way. So he kept his hand where it was, asked, civilly, “You still talking to him, Meg?” ,

“Wasn’t his fault, Ben.” Mistake. Meg sounded shaky herself, Meg had evidently gotten clipped worse than he thought, and that wobbly tone upset Dekker, he saw that. Dekker quit looking like a fight, just stared at the ceiling, gone moist-eyed and lock-jawed.

Great.

He gave Dekker another shove, risking explosion. “You want to, maybe, get a grip on it, Dek-boy? Or you want to schitz some more?’’

Dekker made a move for his wrist, not fast, just brushing him off. He let Dekker have his way, stood back and let Dekker sit up with his head down against his knees a moment, to wipe the embarrassment off his face.

“You know,” he said, pressing mat advantage, “you do got a serious problem, Dek. You busted Meg who’s trying to help you, the meds are bitching you’re pushing it too damned hard—you seriously got to get your head working » Dek-boy, and we got to have a talk. Meg, Sal, you want to leave him with me a minute?”

Dekker looked away, at the wall. Sal shoved Meg out of the room and Dekker didn’t look happy with the arrangement, didn’t look at him when the door shut, just sat in bed and stared elsewhere.

Towel on a chair. Ben got it and wrapped it around himself—wasn’t freezing his ass off, wasn’t matching physique with pretty-boy, either—wouldn’t effin’ be here arguing with him, except he was supposed to go back into pod-sims with a guy who couldn’t figure out what time it was.

“Just drop it,” Dekker said.

“Drop it, huh? Drop it? Wake me up in the Middle Of, and I should drop it? We’re getting back in that pod at 0900, I’m not seriously inclined to drop it!”

Dekker leapt up off the bed and shoved him. “Just fuck off! Fuck off, Ben, all right? —I’m resigning.”

Took a second for that to make sense. Didn’t look as if Dekker was going to shove him twice, didn’t look as if Dekker was anything but serious. Resign from the Fleet? You couldn’t. From the program? Moonbeam had cold feet of a sudden?

Serious problem here, damned serious problem, from a ; guy who had dragged him into this so deep he couldn’t see t out, whose neck he had every moral right to break already; Dekker was piling the reasons higher, except Dekker wasn’t exactly copacetic enough for a fight at the moment, and there were two women in the other room, primarily Meg, but Sal, too, who would take severe exception to his murdering the skuz.

“Resigning,” he echoed Dekker.

Dekker leaned an elbow against the wall, wiped his shave-job mop out of his eyes and muttered, “Before the sim. First thing I can get anybody on mainday.”

“When did this notion take you?”

Dekker’s jaw locked again, visibly. Knot of muscle. Nowhere stare. But you waited and it would unlock, sometimes in ways you didn’t want, but he waited. Dekker took a second swipe at his hair, and stood with his hand on the back of his neck.

“I haven’t got it, Ben, mat’s all. I’m schitzing out.”

“Yeah?” He wasn’t eager to climb into that pod with a lunatic, he didn’t know why in hell he had this urge to pull Dekker out of his funk and assure he was going to have to do that—it was instinct kept him here, to hold the seams of the partnership together, maybe, what they had right now being better than the hellish situation they could have. “Schitz I’m used to. You want to explain this new idea?”

“Doesn’t need explaining. I can’t cut it anymore. Can’t do it.”

“Nice of you.”

“Yeah.”

“Dekker, you are the absolute nicest son of a bitch I ever met, God, what do we do to deserve how nice you are? We are stuck in this fool’s outfit, they’re feeding us this damn experimental tape on account of they got it off your crew and you skuz out on us. Do you think they’re going to give up on the investment they got in us? —No, they’re going to put us out on the line with some only skosh saner fool and take stats on how long we take to make a fireball! Thanks, thanks ever-so for the big favor, Dek, and mercy for the vote of confidence, but you got to excuse us if we don’t all break into party, here.”

“I’m sorry.” Dekker turned his back on him, leaned a second against the bathroom door, then went in and shut the door.

“Dekker, —“

Didn’t like that sudden cut-off. Didn’t like that, I’m sorry, out of the son of a bitch. There weren’t locks on the doors. Not in this place. So he hauled the door open.

Dekker was bent over the sink. Mirror-Dekker looked up, white as death, with a haggard expression that scared hell out of him.

“You contemplating anything stupid, Moonbeam?”

“What time is it, Ben? You know what time it is?”

“You know what the hell time it is.”

“Not all the time, Ben, not all the fuckin’ time I don’t know what time it is, all right? I’m losing it!”

“You never knew where it was in the first place.”

“It’s not funny, Ben. It’s not damn funny. Let me the hell alone, all right?”

Hell if. He grabbed Dekker by the elbow and steered him out of the closet of a bathroom, Dekker balked in the doorway and Ben slammed him hard against the doorframe. “Listen, Moonbeam, you don’t need to know where the hell you are, that’s Meg’s department. You don’t need to wonder what’s coming, that’s Sal’s. You don’t need to know a damn thing but where the targets are and get me a window, you hear me? Time doesn’t mean shit to you, it doesn’t ever have to mean shit, you just fuckin’ do your job and leave ours to us, you hear me?”

Door opened. It was the marines or it was Meg to

Dekker’s rescue. But Dekker wasn’t fighting the hold he had, Dekker was backed against the bathroom doorframe with a kind of consternation on his face, as if he’d just heard something sane for once.

“Ben, back off him.”

“Yeah, yeah, he’s all yours, I got no designs on him.” He let Dekker go and Dekker just stood there, while Sal grabbed his arm and said, “Benjie, cher, venez, venez douce.”

Hell of a mouse Meg had on her cheek. Meg was wearing a towel around the waist and not a stitch else when she put her arms around Dekker’s neck and said something in his ear, Come to bed, probably—but he wasn’t sure that was what Dekker needed right now, Dekker needed somebody to bounce his head off the wall a couple more times, if it wouldn’t wake the neighbors.

“Cher. Come on.”

Sal tugged at him. He went back to their room, Sal trying to finesse him into bed. Ordinarily nothing could have distracted him from that offer. But he was thinking in too tight a loop, about Dekker, the sim upcoming, and the chance of a screw-up. He sat down on the edge of the bed. Sal massaged his back, then put her arms around his neck, rested against his shoulders.

“Meg’ll handle him,” Sal said.

“Meg should take a good look at him. Sal, we got a problem. Major. He says he’s quitting.”

“Quitting!”

“You want to lay bets they’ll let him? No. Nyet. No way in hell. We got ourselves one schitz pilot. I got nightmares. He’s got ‘em. He’s been pushing himself like a crazy man—“Put Meg in?”

‘ ‘I think we better consider it. I think Meg better consider it—at least on the one tomorrow. I don’t know if they’ll stand for it. But that’s our best current idea, if we’re going to get in there with him.”

Sal gave an unaccustomed shiver. “They give us that damned tape. Hell, I’m used to thinking, Ben. I’m used to making up my own damn mind. I can’t. I don’t know that I am. It’s a screw-up, soldiers no different man the corp-rats, you get the feeling on a screw-up.”

“You’re doing all right.”

“The scores are all right. But I still never know, Ben, I don’t get anything solid about what I’m doing, I don’t ever get that feeling.”

He didn’t either. He hauled Sal around in front of him, held on to her, Sal being warm and the room not.

Sal held on to him. He buried his face in Sal’s braids and tangled his fingers in the metal clips. “Dunno, Sal, 1 dunno. I’ve done everything I know. Meg should screw him silly, if he wasn’t so skuzzed.”

“Won’t cure everything, cher.”

“Makes a start, doesn’t it?”

“He’s a partner,” Sal said.

“Yeah. Moonbeam that he is.”

“Soldier-boys aren’t going to listen to him or us.”

“Dek-boy’s on total overload. I’ve seen this guy not at his best and this is it. He’s not stupid. Lot of tracks in that brain—mat’s his problem. All he has to do is follow one and he’s in deep space so far you need a line to bring him back. But none of them pay off. His crew’s dead, he’s still hurting, not a damn word out of his mama, Porey’s on his back, we’re in deep shit, and he’s not thinking, he’s just pushing at the only track he’s got. The only one that’ll move. Don’t give this boy time as a dimension. He’s just fine—as long as it’s now.”

“Yeah. Yeah. I copy that. What do they say, hyperfocus and macrofocus?”

“And dammit, you don’t let this boy make executive decisions. Paper rank’s got nothing to do with this. It’s who can. Effin’ same as the merchanters.”

“Meg?”

He hesitated over that. Didn’t have to think, though. “Meg’s Meg. Meg’s the ops macrofocus. The Aptitudes pegged her exactly right. Meg always knows where she is. Knows two jumps ahead. Dek’s the here and now, not sure what’s coming. No. I’m the exec.”

Silence a moment. Maybe he’d made Sal mad. But it was,; the truth.

“So how do we tell them!” Sal asked.

“Sal, —you want to switch seats tomorrow morning?”

She sat back and looked him in the face, shocked. “God,; you’re serious. They’d throw us in the brig.”

“Is that new? No, listen, we can do it: same boards, different buttons. You got eight different pieces of ordnance, mat’s the biggest piece of information to track on. I can diagram it for you. Inputs, you got two, one from Meg if you got time to sight-see, one from longscan, which you know what that looks like...”

“Ben. What are you up to?”

“Surviving this damn thing.” A long, shaky breath. Going against military regs wasn’t at all like scamming the Company. But it did start coming together, now that he was thinking about the pieces. “Because I want the damn com p. Because, screw ‘em, it’s what 1 do. Because I think mat ET sumbitch in there effin’ knows we’re in the wrong spots and it doesn’t feel right to him and it’s killing him. I don’t know this crew that died, but I can bet you, one of them was the number one in this unit, no matter who they had listed. That guy died and they bring us in and put Dekker in charge? No way.”

“What’s that make me, mister know-all? Why in hell did they Aptitude me longscan and you the guns?”

He’d spent a lot of time thinking on that. He reached up and laced his fingers with Sal’s. “Because you want ‘em too much, because you enjoy blowing things up. —Because mat’s not what the tests want on that board.”

She let go. “Where’d you get that shit?”

“Hey. Hetldeck psych. Cred a kilo. And I know what the profiles are. I’m from TI. TI writes these tests. They got this Command Profiles manual, lays out exactly what qualifications they want in fire-positions and everything else. Enjoying it’d scare them shitless. We’re not inner system. You got to lie to the tests, Sal, you got to psych what they want us to be and you got to be that on those tests—only way you get along.”

“Meg—Meg is doing all right with this stuff. Tape doesn’t bother her.”

“Meg’s an inner systemer, isn’t she? She knows how to tell them exactly what they want to hear. Meg’s doing what she wants. We’re not.’9

“So what do we do? Is Aptitudes going to listen, when they made the rules?”

“Lieutenant might.” If Graff could do anything. If it wasn’t too late. He was scared even thinking about what occurred to him. But running into a rock was scarier than that. And that was likely. A lot of scary things were likely. Like a crack-up tomorrow morning. Stiff neck for a week after Dekker’s twitch at the controls.

“Should we go talk to him?”

“No. Not direct.” He eased Sal off his lap, went and got a bent wire out of a crack in the desk drawer.

“What—?” Sal started to ask, and shut up fast. She watched in silence as he bent down and fished his spare card out of a joint in the paneling.

He put it in the reader, typed an access, typed a message, and said, “ ‘Scuse, Sal. Taking a walk.”

Sal didn’t say a thing. He opened the door, went out through Dekker’s and Meg’s blanketed, dark privacy—towel and all.

“Ben?” Dekker asked.

“ ‘S all right,” he said, “forgot something.”

He slipped out to the corridor, around to the main room of the barracks, and around to the phones.

Linked in. Accessed the station’s EIDAT on system level. With a card with a very illegal bit of nailpolish on its edge.

“What in hell?” Dekker asked when he came through again.

“Hey,” Meg said. “Easy.”

He got through the door and Sal didn’t ask a single question, not while he folded up, not while he put the card away in its hiding spot behind the panel joint. You grew up in ASTEX territory, you learned about bugs and you developed a fairly sure sense when you might be a target for special monitoring. He didn’t honestly think so. But he took precautions and hoped to hell the bugs, if they existed, weren’t optics.

Most of all he hoped the lieutenant was one of the good guys, because the lieutenant was no fool: (he lieutenant knew enough to figure who around here could get into the system and drop an unsigned message in his file. They didn’t have TI techs above a 7A in this place. He’d checked that, already.