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Originally published in hardcover by Warner Books. First Printed in Paperback: June, 1993
10 98765432 I
CHAPTER
1
STOCKHOLM Is a city of islands and gardens, a stunningly eclectic architectural mix, from the Wgsdagshus to the 23rd century Cariberg Museum, from the restored Riddarsholm Kyrka to the Academy gardens…
Founded in the mid 13th century, the dry of Stockholm holds abundant evidence of a thousand years of Baltic seafaring tradition, plus a lively nightllfe centered in modem Gustavsholm—
Ben indexed through the motile pictures and the text, the statistics about rainfall and mean average temperature which the Guide cautioned a visitor did not in any sense mean a constant temperature. Useless statistic—unless one contemplated Antarctica, where a mean temperature of -57° C and an average hours of sunlight only slightly better than Sol Station core meant Ben Pollard had no interest in McMurdo Base. Ben Pollard had seen a good deal of cold and dark and rock in his life. Old rock. This 13th century business amazed him. The whole damn human race dated itself in eighteenths of Jupiter’s passes about the sun, to the astonishingly recent number of about 10k such fractions, if you took the oldest cities. ASTEX R2 out in the Belt had been a skuz old place and a friend of his had sworn it had seen better days just in his lifetime, but when Ben Pollard thought old, he thought in millions. The rock he’d handled out there was old. Humankind was a real junior on those terms.
He sipped real orange juice, imported up from the blue, cloud-swirled globe you could see at any hour on channel 55, along with the weather reports anywhere in die motherwel.
Weather—was a novelty. Real weather. You got weather in a station core when they were blowing cold rock down the chute. You got condensation in your spacecraft and you swore like hell and wiped and dried and tried to find the source of it. But in the motherwel condensation fell out of the sky in frozen balls or slow flakes or liquid drops depending on the low level atmospheric temperatures, and k-wide clouds threw out electrical discharges that made it a very bad notion to stand (the Guide said) at the highest point of the landscape.
Daunting thought.
The Guide said 70% of the Earth was water.
The Guide said water in the oceans was 10k meters deep in places, and because it wasn’t frozen, Luna’s gravity pulled it up in a hump of a wave that rolled around the globe and washed af every shore it met, enough to grind up rock into beaches.
AH that unfrozen water. Gaseous nitrogen and liquid water that made all that sparkle when the sun hit the wrinkles on it that the Guide said were waves.
He planned to stand on a beach and get a good close look at that unfrozen water. On a clear day, when there were no lightnings. You could do it from the station. You could be there while you were here, but VR was a cheat, you could be a whole lot of places that weren’t real. He wanted to stand at the edge of the ocean and watch the real sun disappear behind the real world, at which point he figured he would really believe he was standing on a negative curvature.
The Guide said some spacers got dizzy, with the horizon going the wrong direction. There were prescriptions for vertigo. There were preparatory programs. But hell, he’d monkeyed around the core at R2, and stared straight at the rotation interface. That had to be worse.
The clock on the screen said: 0843 June 14, 2324. And there was plenty of time this morning for coffee. Dress maybe by 0930h. Exams were done, the last score was going up today, but, hell, that was Interactive Reality Sampling and he had that one in his pocket, no question, no sweat. Probably set the curve: him or Meeker, one or the other: just let the UDC get that score, and Stockholm was in his pocket for sure, motherwel assignment in the safest, softest spot in the service except Orlando. Stockholm was where Ben Pollard was headed, yeah! soon as the interviewers could get up to station.
Hell and away from the Belt, he was. Here you didn’t jam two guys into a fifteen by six, hell, no, Sol Station and Admin? You got a whole effm’ fifteen by six .9 g apartment by yourself, with a terminal that could be vid or VR whenever you opted. If you qualified into the Programming track in the UDC Technical Institute, you got an Allotment that afforded you 2c/d Personals per effin’ seven-day week, which meant oj that was real, coffee that was real, red meat that was real, if you had the stomach for it, which Ben personally didn’t—you lived like an effin1 Company exec and had a clearer conscience. And if you could get that on world posting, your tech/2 graduation rating equaled a full UDC lieu-tenancy in the motherwel, with an Army first lieutenant’s pay to start, full grade technical/1 promotion guaranteed in a year, and access with a capital A to all the services that pay could buy. You knew there was a war out in the Beyond, but it wasn’t going to get to Earth, that was what they were building that Fleet out there to stop—and even if it did nobody was going to hit the motherwell, humans just didn’t do that. You were safe down there. You’d be safe DO matter what.
He’d got his graduation With Honors, he was certain of it; he’d sweated his Security verifications, but they’d come through months ago, and nobody had come up with an objection; he’d sailed through the Administrative Service exams four weeks ago, and the only complication in his way now was the formal interview, as soon as the personnel reps from the various agencies could get seats on a shuttle up here—funding time and some legislative hearing in Admin had had the shuttle up-slots jammed with senators and brass and aides for the last three days; but that was thinning out, thank God. The agency interviewers might turn up by the end of the week, after which time—
After which he could book himself a seat for Earth on whatever assignment shook out—maybe even take his pick: Weiter had dropped him a conspiratorial word that he had three different computer divisions fighting over him, including strategic supply modeling and intelligence, and the prestigious A! lab in Geneva (which was for his personal ambitions a little too scientific and academic—give him something with a direct line to politics, God, yes. There was money in that, and a protected paycheck).
Money. A nice apartment down where you navigated a perceptually planar surface at a 300kph crawl, when be was used to thinking in kps and nanosecond intersects. Life on Earth went so much slower and death came so much later for a man who had money, brains, and position.
He’d had a partner back in the Belt, Morrie Bird, who had used to talk to him about Colorado, and cities and sunsets and Shakespeare. Bird had set a lot of personal store by Shakespeare. Bird had thought Shakespeare was important to understand. So when it had turned out of all things that he was going to the inner system, he had made it a certain point to see this Shakespeare guy—translated tapes.
of course. V-vids, where you could wander around and watch the body language. And Bird had been a hundred percent right: Shakespeare really helped you figure Earthers. Blue-skyers. People who had never felt null-g, never seen (he stars all the way to forever—different people, with numbers hard to figure; people who thought they had a natural right to orange juice and gravity, people who (the Guide maintained) felt the moon tides in their blood.
Getting the right numbers in a new situation absolutely mattered. On Earth air was free and ship routes and energy were what the old Earthers had fought bloody wars over. Sincerely skewed values—but you had to think about that two-dee surface constantly, and it was limited that way. Finite. Finite resources. Shakespeare helped you see that— helped you see how certain old Earthers in control of those resources had thought they could run your life, the same as Company execs. And how these king-types always talked about God and their rights, like the preachers on R2’s helldeck, who snagged you with tracts and talked to you about free-shares in their particular afterlife and argued whether the aliens at Pell had souls. Only these old kings had been the preachers and the law and the bank.
Long way to come, from the Belt, from Company brat in a Company school learning nothing but Company numbers— to figuring Shakespeare and human history. But there it was, the motherlode of all living stuff and the home of humankind back when humans had been as backward as the Downers at Pell—Earth was full of museums, full of artifacts, pots and tombs and old walls graffitied with stuff that was supposed to make you live forever. The Guide said so.
Most of all, it was the motherlode of information, data, old and new. And the right numbers and enough data on the systems that ran the Earth Company and the United Defense Command could make him rich; rich made a man safe, and got him most everything Ben Pollard could put a name to.
Visitors to Stockholm may be impressed with the Maritime Museum or the Zoological Garden in Haga Pork….
A planet that wasn’t a radiation hell was a novelty. Earth with its completely outsized moon was a novelty. And life thriving at the bottom of a gravity well was a radically upside down way of thinking. Life that made good wine and food that wasn’t synth, a surface where plants grew and cycled the O2 and the CO2 on sunlight and dark; the habitats where animals lived. Fascinating concept, non-human things walking around where they decided to walk and looking at you with unguessable thoughts going on behind their eyes. People searched the stars for life, and there was all this life on Earth, that blue-skyers took for granted, and ate, if it didn’t look too much like people.
He wanted to see a zoo. He wanted to look at a cow or a dog and be looked back at, when he’d never expect to see any real thing more exotic than miners on R&R and bugs under a lab scope.
Humans had existed such a scarily short time. With this war going on in the Beyond they seemed scarily fragile.
He wished he could talk to Bird about that. Bird had had a peculiar perspective about things. He wished he could really figure out what Bird had been, or recall half that Bird had said over the years. There was so much blue-sky attitude he still couldn’t get the straight of. Baroque, was the word. Curves all over their thinking, like gold angels on the old buildings, that didn’t have a damn thing to do with useful—
The message dot flashed on the corner of the screen.
God, it could be the interview notice. His fingers were on the Mod and the 1 to Accept Mail and the Dv and the 3 to Print faster than he could think about the motion.
It said: TECH/2 Benjamin J. Pollard CTVSS/UDC 28 DAT 2 0652JUN14/24 SN P-235-9676/MLR Report to F5O-HQ, 0900h/ref/Simons
Fleet Strategic Operations? Fleet Ops?
What in bloody hell?
MRL. Automatic log. No way to pretend he hadn’t gotten the message. No way to query the CO. Weiter would tell him it was a report-to, he didn’t have the answer, and he’d effin’ better answer it and find out what the Fleet wanted with a UDC lad, hadn’t he?
It wasn’t an interview. God, no. Fleet Strategic Operations didn’t need a UDC programmer tech/2 with a Priority 10 for economic/ and strategic/supply modeling. Did they?
Shit, no—the damn tight-fisted legislature insisted on trying to interface the UDC EIDAT with the Heel’s Staatentek system through the EC security screen, that was what. The Fleet Staatentek system tried to phone the UDCs EIDAT 4005 to ask for available assignees, and the 4005, behind (he EC’s security cloak, spat up a UDC Priority One assignee for a Fleet data entry post—
But you couldn’t ignore it. You didn’t want to face the interviews with an interservice screw-up or a Disciplinary in your record. Damn the thing!
No second cup of coffee. He drank the half he had left while his fingers tapped up the station map and asked it where in hell FSO-HQ was on the trans system from his apartment in TI 12 for a 0930h appointment.
9:15 2 green to 14, blue to 5-99: pass required for entry.
Hell and gone from TI, and it was already 9 o’clock. Ten effin’ minutes to shave, dress and find his copy of his rating, which clearly said UDC Priority Technical/2, before the
Fleet grabbed him and stuck him at Mars Base doing data entry in Supply.
He burned the beard off, pulled on his dress blues: never wear fatigues to an interservice glitch-up. He had to talk to officers, no question, before this one was straightened out, maybe all the way up the effin’ C/O/C in the UDC and the Fleet. It could be a long day.
Envelope from UDC Technical at Geneva in the briefcase, where it belonged. He put it in his breast pocket.
Never a friggin’ situation without a last friggin’ minute complication. God, he didn’t know why things like this happened to him. His interview appointment could come through at any hour, he didn’t want Meeker to grab the first slot—first effin’ thing he was going to do if they gave him Geneva was put the shove on that damned EC Software.
He checked his watch. 0908. Five minutes to walk to the trans. Orders in his pocket. Yes. And out the door.
Trans was packed. A whole wide-eyed batch of shiny new C-l’s with their entry tags and their hand-baggage occupied all the seats, and Ben clung with an elbow about a pole and punched buttons on the hand reader, running down the applicable rules on interservice transfer apps.
Wasn’t any reason to sweat it. Couldn’t be. Weiter’d shoved him through three levels in a year…. He was Weiter’s fair-haired baby, best Weiter had ever had in the department. Him and Meeker, neck and neck all the way. No way Weiter wouldn’t go up the chain for him.
Green 14. He made the transfer and lost the C-l’s—thank God. He got a seat, sat down and read.
Right of appeal. Ref: Administrative Appeal, Sec. 14…. Through chain of command in service of origin.
In service of origin. Which meant the United Defense Command, which wasn’t, never mind Fleet Captain Conrad
Mazian’s performance at the UN, going to let the Fleet get its hands on whatever it wanted.
Blue line now. Institution blue. The walls outside the spex in me doors grew skuzzier and skuzzier and the air that sucked in when the doors opened was cold and smelled of oil.
Descent into hell, Ben thought. Like R2 all over again. He sat in his dress uniform and watched the scenery, dark tunnel and grim flashes of gray-blue panels and white station numbers as the trans shot past stops without a call punched. Thump of the section seals. He could almost smell helldeck, all but hear the clash of metal and the hard raucous beat of the music echoing down the deck. He smelled the peculiar taint of cold machinery and kept having this most damnable feeling of—
—belonging in the dark side, living on the cheap, getting by, scamming the Company cops and knowing he could always slip through the system, knowing far more about the company computers and access numbers than the Company thought he’d learned. Him and Bud. —And Sal Aboujib.
Damn.
Helldeck wasn’t a place you’d miss. He was someone else now. Spiff uniform and a tech/2’s collar phi. Clean fingers—in all senses. He didn’t do a thing illegitimate with the computers he worked with. He didn’t know anybody who did, no, sir, didn’t even dream about that h-word near the Defense Command computers.
He’d got away with it. Was still getting away with it. He’d dumped the card on R2, and it had never surfaced; he’d gotten his security clearance. He’d gotten his rank. Nobody was going to screw that up. Nobody could have found anything to screw him now…
5-99. The sign outside the doors said: SECURITY AREA.
RESTRICTED. SHOW PASS.
He got up and got out in a beige, plain hallway, warmer here, thank God, it wasn’t going to freeze his ass off or have him shaking when he was talking to the desk. He straight-
ened his coat, clipped his fancy-tech reader onto his belt and walked up to the only door available, under a security array that was probably reading his respiration rate and taking notes.
He put his card in the slot: the door clicked and opened. Reel Security occupied the solitary desk in the foyer; beyond it was a potted silk palm, an abstract picture, and another beige windowless door.
“Pollard,” the officer said, with no attention to the protocols in the rulebook. Or his face. Just the readout on his screen. “Benjamin J. You’re carrying electronics.”
“Reader.”
The officer held out his hand. Ben surrendered it and watched the officer turn it on and punch buttons.
“Fancy.”
Break his effin’ neck getting here and this cop-type stalled him playing games with a piece of expensive and delicate equipment. He said, “I’ve got an appointment at 0930.”
The guard said, “HQ,” and motioned with the back of his hand. “Lieutenant Jackson.”
Jackson, was it? Fleet Lieutenant. Which, in the much-argued and protested Equivalencies, was a rank just under Maj. Weiter’s; and one over his. Ben drew himself up with a breath, thinking, with part of his brain: Son of a bitch deep-spacer Attitude, and minded for half that breath to make an issue of interservice protocols; but the rest of his brain was still wondering if the Fleet could have any legitimate interest in him and hoping all he had was a pocket full of EIDAT-screwed orders. So he saluted, got a flip of the hand and walked to the inner door, that clicked open on a long bar of a desk and a sober-faced clerk who said (efficiency, at least) “Lt. Pollard?”
“Yes.” Manners. Finally. He took the offered escort to a side office. Jackson took the salute, offered him a seat. Young guy. Pleasant, serious face.
Better, he thought.
“Thank you, sir.”
Jackson folded his hands on the desk, “Lt. Pollard, —I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news: a friend of yours has been involved in an accident.”
“Friend of mine?” That was a complete mental shift. He honestly couldn’t think if he had a friend. Not lately. Bird was dead. Sal?
“Name of Dekker,” Jackson said and Ben all but said, Shit! before he remembered he wasn’t in the Belt and swallowed it.
“Fatal?”
“Serious. He’s asking for you.”
“For me?” He was vastly relieved it wasn’t Sal. Distressed if Dekker’d gotten in trouble. He didn’t hate Dekker. Not really. Dekker had enlisted with him, gone off into some secret pilot training program… real hot piece of equipment, Dekker had said.
Jackson said, “His doctors fee! it might be some help, a familiar face….”
He thought. Oh, God, I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to see the guy again—I hate hospitals… I don’t like blood—
But there it was, the brass had made a humanitarian move, no way to explain all the old business between them—it could drag up too much he didn’t want on record; if Dekker had killed himself in some top-secret operation he was sincerely sorry, and if he was all Dekker could dredge up for a request—well, hell, the guy had saved his neck, sort of, back in the Belt—
And cost Bird’s life, damn him, however indirectly.
“Sorry to drop this on you,” Jackson said.
“Not a problem. Truth is, we weren’t friends. —But I guess I owe him to drop over there.”
“I’ve got a travel voucher for you.”
“Travel voucher.”
“B dock.”
“Oh, now, God, wait a minute—” B dock wasn’t on Sol One, it was on an auxiliary station three and more days out,
on Sol Two. Ben reached for his pocket, right then. “I can’t do that. I’m sorry. This is a priority rating. There’s an agency officer coming for an interview this week. I can’t leave.”
Jackson laid an envelope on top of his. “There’s a B dock shuttle leaving at 1205. That’s your travel voucher and your leave. It’s already signed and cleared.”
“Sir, —that’s six days even if I get a same day turnaround,” He gingerly eased his letter from underneath and laid it gingerly to the side, in Jackson’s view, where the United Defense Command logo showed. “This is from HQ Geneva. It says I’m a military priority.”
“This one’s from Captain Keu, in this office. On a classified priority. You’re going.”
“Dekker isn’t a friend of mine!”
“He’s listed you as next-of-kin.”
“We’re not related! God, —he’s got a mother right here on the station, Astrid, Ingrid, something like that. Talk to her!”
“He’s in a classified program. Only certain people are approved for contact in a next-of-kin emergency. You’re it. You’re not to call anyone. You’re not to talk to anyone. Your CO will be advised simply that you’re on humanitarian leave—”
“I’m UDC essential personnel!”
“Show me an assignment.”
Shit!
“So you’re going.”
“What about my interview?”
“That’s not my information flow. I’ll log it as a query.”
“Look, this is important. If I miss this slot I could wait six months!”
Jackson shrugged. “We all have our hardships, lieutenant.”
“Look, this is a screw-up. It’s an absolute screw-up. God, Dekker and I don’t even like each other.”
H EL L BU
Cold as a rock. “I don’t have that information. Transport will pick up your baggage at your quarters. Just leave it. Report to the shuttleport by 1145.”
“It’s near 1030 right now. It’s twenty minutes to quarters—”
“I’d be on that shuttle, Lt. Pollard. When you get to B • dock, report directly to the FleetOps office on the dock, give them this pass and they’ll see you get straight to the hospital. Don’t mistake that instruction.”
“Listen, —sir, you know what happened—Dekker wrote me in as a joke. He never thought they’d be using that information. It’s a damn joke!”
“If it is, I’m sure they’ll straighten it out at the other end. I’d be moving, lieutenant.” Jackson stood up and handed him the two envelopes as he rose. “Good luck.”
“Yes sir,” Ben said, took his papers and his orders, saluted the son of a bitch and left.
Collected his reader from the front desk, and made a fast, desperate consultation of the trans schedule while he was walking to the doors.
Twenty minutes to his apartment, thirty to the shuttle dock, ten to pack. If he risked a phone call to Weiter to request a rescue, it was a 90% certainty that Weiter couldn’t do a damned thing against FSO before 1145 or later and he’d be screwed with Weiter for putting him in a Position. You didn’t crack a security screen. Not if you hoped to keep your clearance in UDC computer tech.
They’d get him back in maybe six days?
Hell. Six days too late if he was on humanitarian leave on ‘ B dock when the UDC filled the Stockholm post. He’d get the scraps, the cold left-overs after Meeker got posted; and Hamid; and Pannelli— The next best choice he had was to appeal to Weiter when he got back and hang on as staff til something else came through, oh, six months, seven, eight months on, who knew?
Dekker had screwed up, the Fleet was evidently about to
lose ite investment in him—and, not in his most copacetic state, Dekker had asked for him?
Ben thought, with every thump of the trans on its homebound course: I’ll kill him when I get my hands on him, I’ll fuckin’ kill him.
CHAPTER
2
DEN hated institutions, hated hospital smells and institution colors and most of all he didn’t look forward to this, in his first hour on B dock. He felt like hell, he’d slept in a damn cubbyhole of a berth hardly larger than a miner-ship spinner, his feet had swelled, he’d had sinus all the way: he’d spent too long in the null-g hi his life and his body had a spiteful overreaction to the condition. They didn’t issue pills and stimsuits for a three-day shuttle trip, no, that prescription’s not on your records, lieutenant, sorry… If you’d just checked with medical—
It was damned well going to be on the record when he left Sol Two. Talk to the doctors in this hospital, get some damn good out of this end of the trip… because he meant to be on that shuttle on its turnaround tonight. Six hours was plenty of time to see Dekker, and get out of here.
—after three days of floating in a three-berth passenger module on a cargo shuttle, ahead of a load of sanitation chemicals and spare parts. He’d had no one to talk to but a couple of machinists who were into some vegetarian reli-
gion and hooked on some damn VR game they wanted to explain to him; and he had had ample time to drift weightless in the dark and think—too much time to imagine this meeting, and what kind of damage a pilot could take in an accident. Missing limbs. Blood. He hated blood. He really got sick at his stomach if there was blood…
They’d had some sort of missile test that had gone bad out here. Nobody said what. There’d been a lot of long faces in Technical. A lot of emergency meetings last week. Dekker couldn’t have been involved in any missile test. A pilot trainee didn’t have anything to do with missile tests. Did he?
Jackson had done the talking. But why in hell did a Fleet captain sign the order and bust him out here? What was Dekker that the Fleet cared? The Fleet was fighting for its life in the Appropriations Committee. Dumbass pilot cracked up and UDC Priorities got overridden—for humanitarian reasons?
Not in the military he knew. That was the tag end that had disturbed his sleep and his thinking moments all the way out here. Their high-level interest in this affair was what had his stomach upset, as much as the stink of disinfectant and pain and helplessness in this place. He didn’t like this. God, he didn’t like this, and if Dekker wasn’t dead he was going to strangle him bare-handed for writing him into that damned blank.
God, he was.
Reception desk. He presented his orders to the clerk and got a: “Lt. Pollard. Yes, sir,” that did nothing for his stomach or his pulse rate. The receptionist got him a nurse, a doctor, and Dekker’s attending physician, all in increasingly short succession. “How is he?” Ben asked the last, bypassing long introductions. “What happened to him?” and the doctor said, starting off down the hall:
“No change.”
“So when did this happen?”
“That’s classified.” More white coats. More people leaning into his face. They wanted him to open his eyes, but Dekker knew the game. They wanted answers to fill the blanks they had on their slates, but they wanted their own answers, the way they wanted the case to be.
Company doctors. He’d been here before. And they wouldn’t listen. He asked, “Where’s Cory?” because sometimes he couldn’t remember what had happened, or he did, but it was all a dizzy blur of black and tights. The ship was spinning. He fought to get to the controls, because he had to stop that spin, with the blood filling his nose and choking his breath, and his hand dragging away with the spin, his grip going—
“Cory? You damned bastard, stop!”
But sometimes he came loose from that time and he was in hospital, or he was going to be, scon as Ben and Bird got him there, and they would lie to him and tell him there never had been a ‘driver ship and he never had had a partner named Cory.
The Company had lied to him. They said he was hallucinating, but it was all lies. And sometimes he thought the hospital was the hallucination, that it was all something his conscience had conjured to punish him for losing his grip on the counter and for losing the ship.
For losing Cory And Bird.
Sometimes he was back in the shower, and sometimes tied to the pipes, because he was crazy, and he couldn’t figure out how the ship had come to the hospital.
Thirty days hath September, March eleventh, and November. …
There were green coats now. Interns. He hoped for Tommy. But Tommy wasn’t with them. “Where’s Tommy?” he asked. “Why isn’t Tommy on duty? —God, it’s afire, isn’t it? Meg? Meg, wake up, God, don’t die on me—”
“Ens. Dekker, you have a visitor.”
“I don’t want any fuckin’ visitor. Get away from me. Get out of here.”
“Ens. Dekker, —”
“Tell him to go to hell! I don’t want any damn Company lawyer! —Put Tommy back on duty, hear me? I want Tommy back.” They grabbed hold of his arms, they were going to put the restraints on. Tommy wouldn’t do that. Tommy would ask, Are you going to be quiet, Mr. Dekker? and he would say, Yes, yes, I’ll be quiet, and Tommy wouldn’t use them.
Wouldn’t. But Tommy wasn’t with them. And they did. They told him then if he wasn’t quiet they’d have to sedate him. So he said, “I’ll be quiet,” and shut his eyes.
“Dekker,” Ben said. And he opened his eyes. Ben was leaning over his bed. Ben was in uniform. UDC. That was different. But odder things happened in mis place. He didn’t blink. Things changed if you did. Finally he said, “Ben?”
“Yeah.”
There was a ship out there. He remembered that. “Ben, we’ve got to go back. Please, we’ve got to go back, Cory’s still out there—”
Ben grabbed a fistful of his collar, leaned close and said, in a low voice, “Dekker, shut it down right now or I’m going to kill you. You hear me?”
He said, “That’s all right.” He felt Ben’s hand on him. He saw Ben’s face. He knew where he was men, Bird was asleep and Ben was about to beat hell out of him. But that was all right. He really liked Ben, most of the time. And there hadn’t been much to like where he’d been.
What could a guy do? Ben disengaged himself, and Dekker caught his hand. He pulled free and got out of the door to get his bream.
The doctor was out there, several doctors this time. “He knows you,” Dekker’s surgeon said. Higgins was his name. “You’re the first person he has recognized.”
“Fuckin* hell! Then he’s cured. I’m out of here.”
“Lt. Pollard,” another doctor said, and offered his hand. “Lt. Pollard, Fm Dr. Evans, chief of psychiatry.”
“Fine. Good. He needs a psych. That’s all that’s going to help him!”
“Lt. Pollard, —”
“Look, what do you want from him? The guy’s schitz, completely off the scope. He doesn’t know where he is, he doesn’t know what happened—”
“Lt. Pollard.” The psych motioned off down the farther hallway. “There’s coffee in the lounge. You’ve had a long flight.”
The psych wanted him to sit down and be reasonable, which he was in no mood to be. But coffee appealed to his upset stomach and his sleep-deprived nerves. And it was not at all a good idea to have a psych telling the local CO you’d been hysterical. You didn’t need that on a record behind another service’s security screen. So he went with the psych, he went through the dance—”White or black, sugar?” “That’s enough, thanks,”—until he could get the weight off his feet, sink into a chair and try not to let Evans see his hands shake while he was drinking.
“So what happened to him?” he asked, before Evans could fire off his own questions.
“That’s what we want to know.”
“So how’d he get like this?”
“That’s another question.”
Deeper and deeper. Ben stared at the doctor and scowled. “So a door got him. Is that it?”
“A simulator did.”
Flight simulator? Dekker? “Hell of a simulation, doctor.”
“Didn’t lock the belts, strong dose of sedative in his bloodstream.”
Shit. Pills again.
Evans said: “We’d like to know how he got there.”
Or maybe not. “You mean somebody put him there?”
“It’s one possibility.” “Guy has a talent for making friends. Yeah. There’s probably a dozen candidates.”
“Why do you say that?”
Psych question. He thought, Because he’s a fuck-up. Because he has this way of getting himself in trouble and slapping the hand that helps him. But that led to more questions; and screwed Dekker worse than he was with this guy, to whom he owed nothing yet. He said, finally, “Say I didn’t really know him that well.”
“He listed you as next-of-kin.”
“It was a joke. The guy’s foil of them, tot of laughs.”
“We don’t rule out suicide.”
Dekker? he thought. Dekker? Suicide? The idea was more than unlikely. It upset him. And he didn’t figure that, either why they could think mat—if they knew Dekker, which they might not; or how Dekker could come to that—here, in this place that swallowed people down without a word.
“You don’t agree?”
He shrugged. “It’s not him. It’s just not him.”
You didn’t come from where Dekker came from—didn’t survive what he’d survived—and check out like that in a damn sim. Something wasn’t right, not with the questions, not with Dekker lying in there thinking he was back in the Belt, not with this whole max-classified operation that took a will to live like Dekker’s and put him in that bed, in that condition.
Dekker had looked at him like he was what he’d been waiting for, and said, to his threat of killing him barehanded, that’s all right…
Every time you got near the guy mere was a disaster, Dekker attracted disasters, you could feel it, and, God of all the helldeck preachers, he wanted on that shuttle tonight. Do this effin’ job, get Dekker to figure out where he was, and when he was, make him talk to the psychs, and get out of here while there was still a chance of making that interview—and getting out of this mess. “I’ll talk to him,” he said.
“You’re sure you’re all right about that?”
Another psych quiz. Correct answer: “A long trip with no information, run in here straight from the mast, I was a little shaken up myself.” He tossed off the rest of the coffee, got up and pitched the cup into the bin. “I’m fine to talk to him. What do you want out of him?”
“His health,”
“Yeah, well, he’ll pull it out. Knock him down and he bounces.”
“Don’t stress him, lieutenant. 1 really don’t advise another confrontation. He’s been concussed. We want to keep that blood pressure under control.”
That was about worth a laugh. Dek was already stressed. Dek was in an out-of-control ship in a ‘driver zone with his partner lost. He said soberly, “I’ve no intention of upsetting him.”
The doctor opened the door, the doctor walked him back to Dekker’s room and signaled an orderly for a word aside in the hallway.
Ben walked on in, pulled a chair over and sat down by Dekker’s bed. Dekker’s eyes tracked his entry, stayed tracked as he sat down, he wasn’t sure how focused. Dekker had been a real pretty-boy, a year ago, fancy dresser, reb hair, shaved up the sides. Still looked to be a rab job, give or take the bandage around the head; but the eyes were shadowed, one was bruised, the chin had a cut, lip was cut—not so long back. The hollow-cheeked, waxen look—did you get that from a bashing-about in a simulator a few days ago?
“You look like hell, Dekker-me-lad.”
“Yeah,” Dekker said. “You’re looking all right.”
“So what happened?”
Dekker didn’t answer right off. He looked to be thinking about it. Then his chin began to tremble and Ben felt a second’s disgusted panic: dammit, he didn’t want to deal with a guy on a crying jag—but Dekker said faintly, shakily,
“Ben, you’ll want to hit me, but I really need to know—I really seriously need to know what time it is.”
“What time it is?” God. “So what’ll you give me for it?”
“Ben, —”
“No, hell, I want you to give me something for it. I want you to tell me what the hell you’re doing in here. I want to know what happened to you.”
Dekker gave a shake of his head and looked upset. “Tell me the time.”
Ben looked at his watch. “All right, it’s 1545, June 19th—”
“What year?”
“2324. That satisfy you?”
Dekker just stared at him, finally blinked once.
“Look, Dekker, nice to see you, but you really screwed everything up. I got orders waiting for me back at the base, I got a transfer that, excuse me, means my whole career, and if you’ll just fuckin’ cooperate with them I can still catch a shuttle in a few hours and get my transfer back to Sol where I can stay with my program. —Dek, come on, d’ you sincerely understand you’re screwing up my life? Do me a favor.”
“What?”
“Tell the doctors what happened to you. Hear me? I want you to answer their questions and tell them what they want to hear and I don’t, dammit, 1 want to be on that shuttle. You want me to call them in here so they can listen to you explain and I can get out of here?”
Dekker shook his head.
“Dekker, dammit, don’t be like that. You’re a pain in the ass, you know that? I got to get back!”
“Then go. Go on. It’s all right.”
“It’s not the hell all right. I can’t get out of here until you tell them what they want to know! Come on. It’s June 19th. 2324. Argentina’s won the World Cup. Bird’s dead. Cory’s dead. We came out here on a friggin’ big ship neither of us is supposed to talk about and Gennie Vanderbill is top of the series. Do you remember what put you here?”
“I can’t remember. I don’t remember—”
“Because you climbed into a friggin’ flight simulator tranked to the eyeballs—does that jar anything loose?”
A blank stare, a shake of the head.
Ben ran a hand over his head. “God.”
“It’s just gone, Ben. Sometimes I think it’s the ship again. Sometimes it’s not. You’re here. But I thought you were before. What are they saying about the sim?”
“Dekker, —” He gave a glance to the door, but the doctor-types were conferring outside. He said, in a low voice: “You’re not hooked on those damn pills again, are you?”
Dekker shook his head. Scared Lost. Eyes shifted about. Came back to him.
“Ben, —I’m sorry. Please tell me the time again.”
He didn’t hit Dekker. He leaned forward and took Dekker’s hand hard in his despite the restraints and said, very quietly, “It’s June 19th. Now you tell me the year, Dek. I want the year. Right now. And you better not be wrong.”
Dekker looked seriously worried. A hesitation. A tremor of the lips. “2324.”
“Good. You got it memorized. Now there’s going to be a test every few minutes, hear me? I want you to remember that number. This is Sol Two. You had a little accident a few days back. The doctors want to know, mat’s not so hard to hold on to, is it?”
“I can’t remember. I can’t remember, Ben, it’s just gone…”
“Shit.” He had a headache. He looked at Dekker’s pale, bruised, trusting face and wanted ever so much to beat him senseless. Instead he squeezed’Dekker’s hand. “Dek, boy, listen. I got a serious chance at Stockholm, you understand me? Nice lab job. I’m going to lose it if you don’t come through. I really need you to think about that simulator.”
Something was beeping. Machine up there on the shelf. Doctors were in the door. Higgins said, “Lt. Pollard. He’s getting tired. Better leave it. Ens. Dekker, I’m Dr. Higgins, do you remember me?”
Dekker looked at him, and said faintly, “Ben?”
“You do remember him,” Ben said. “Hear me? Or I’ll break your neck!”
“Don’t go.”
“He’ll be back tomorrow.”
“The hell,” Ben said. “Dekker, goodbye. Good luck. I got to catch a shuttle. Stay the hell out of my life.”
“Lieutenant.” That was Evans. “In the hall.”
He went. He got his voice down and his breathing even. “Look, I’ve done my job. I’m no doctor, you’re the psych, what am I supposed to do?”
“You’re doing fine. This is the first time he’s been that sure where he is.”
“Fine. I’ve got orders waiting for me on Sol One. I haven’t got time for this!”
“That’s not the way I understand your orders. You have a room assignment—”
“I haven’t got any room assignment.”
“in the hospice a level up. It’s a small facility. Very comfortable. We’d prefer you be available for him 24 hours. His sleeping’s not on any regular pattern.”
“No way. I’ve got a return order in my pocket, my baggage is still right back there in customs. Nobody said anything about this going into another shift. That wasn’t the deal.”
“Nobody said anything about your leaving. You’d better check those orders with the issuing officer.”
“I’ll check it at the dock. I’ll get this cleared up. Just give him my goodbyes. Tell him good luck, I hope he comes out all right. I won’t be here in the morning.” “Hospice desk is on level 2, lieutenant. You’ll find the lift right down the corridor.”
Ben had been there a while. Ben had told him—
But he couldn’t depend on that. Ben came and Ben went and sometimes Ben talked to him and told him—
Told him about an accident in the sims. But if it was a sim then maybe people he thought were dead, weren’t, even if they told him so. The doctors lied to him. They regularly lied, and Tommy didn’t come back. They kept changing doctors, changing interns, every time he got close to remembering….
Only Ben. Ben came and he started to hope and he knew that hope was dangerous. You didn’t hope. You just lived.
Ben asked him was he on drugs. He had been once. He had been crazy once, now and again, but Ben and Bird had pulled him out. The ship was spinning. Cory was out there alone, and somebody had to pull him out—
Ship was spinning. Pete was yelling. And Cory—
Ben said he would kill him if he was crazy and he hoped Ben would do that, if he truly was, because he didn’t want to live like that.
Ben said remember. But he couldn’t remember any specific time in the sims. He could remember an examiner giving him his C-3. He could remember the first time he’d Men me boards. Remembered pushing beams at Sol. Supervisor had said all right, he could do that: he was under age, but they needed somebody who wouldn’t ram a mass into the station hull. His head was bandaged, his ribs were. His knees ached like hell, he thought because he had hit the counter, trying to hit the button, but he wasn’t sure of anything. You blinked and you got green numbers and lines, and if you followed them too far you never came back. Midrange focus. Back it up, all the way inside.
There’d been an accident and the ship had blown up. And his partners were dead. Or maybe never existed. It was a sim. Bright ball of nuclear fire. And he was here and they
were in it, and it was all green glowing lines out there, whipping and snaking to infinity.
He remembered faces now. People he thought he liked— Bird. Meg and Sal. Cory, and Graff. Pete and Elly and Falcone. Faces. Voices. Falcone yelling, Hey, Dek, see you tomorrow.
But Falcone wouldn’t. Elly wouldn’t. They never would.
“You damn bastards!” he yelled. “Bastards!”
Interns came running, grabbed hold of him. “No,” he said, reminded what happened when he yelled. “No. Tommy!”
“Get the hypo,” one said, and he got a breath, he got a little sanity, said, “I’m not violent. I don’t need it. It’s all right. Let go, dammit! Get the doctor!”
They eased up. They stopped bruising his arms and just held him still.
“Just be quiet, sir. Just be quiet.”
“No shots. No damn shots.”
“Doctor’s orders, sir.”
“I don’t need one. I swear to you, I don’t need one.”
“Doctor says you’re not getting any rest, sir. You better have it. Just to be sure.”
He looked the intern in the face. Big guy, red face and freckles, lying across him. Out of breath. So was he. And two other large guys who were leaning on him and holding his legs.
“Sorry,” he said, between breaths. “Don’t want to give you guys trouble. I really don’t want to. I just don’t want any shot right now.”
“Sorry, too, sir. Doctor left orders. You don’t want to be any trouble. Right?”
“No,” he said. He shook his head. He made up his mind he had better change tactics. Agreeing with them got him out of this place. It would. It had. He couldn’t remember. It was only the drugs he had to worry about.
“Just hold still, sir. All right?”
“Yeah,” he said, and the hypo kicked against his arm. Stung like hell. His eyes watered.
He said, “You fuckin’ get off me. I can’t breathe. Let me up, dammit.”
“Soon’s you shut your eyes, sir. Just be quiet. You loosened a couple of John’s teeth yesterday. You remember?”
He didn’t remember. But he said, out of breath, “I’m sorry. Sorry about that. I’m better. A lot better.”
“That’s good, sir.”
“Friend of mine was here,” he said. But the drug was gathering thick about his brain. He said it again, afraid he might not remember when he waked. Or that it hadn’t happened at all.
He went to sleep when they drugged him and he waked up and he never knew where or when. He was going out now. He felt it happening. And he was scared as hell where he would wake up or what would be true or where the lines would lead him.
“Ben,” he cried, “Bird. Ben, come back— Ben, don’t go— they killed my partners, Ben, they fuckin’ killed us—”
“This isn’t validated,” the check-in clerk said, and slid the travel voucher across the desk in the .6 g of 8-deck. “You need an exit stamp.”
Ben took the voucher with a sinking heart. “What exit stamp? Nobody said anything about an exit stamp. There’s no exit stamp in the customs information.”
“It’s administrative, sir. Regulation. I have to have a stamp/’
“God. Look, call Sol One.”
“You do that from BaseCom,” the clerk said. And added without expression: “But you need an authorization from your CO to do that, sir.”
“And where do I get that?” You didn’t yell at clerks. It didn’t get you anything to yell at clerks. Ben said quietly, lestrainedly: “My CO’s on Sol One—I need the UDC officer in charge.”
“This is a Fleet transport voucher.”
“I know it is,” Ben said. “But this uniform is UDC. Is it at all familiar to you? Where’s the UDC officer in charge?”
The clerk got a confused look, and focused behind him, where someone had come into the office, to stand in line was Ben’s initial reckoning; but whoever it was said, then, “Lt. Pollard?”
Voice he’d heard before. A long time ago. He turned around, a little careful in the .6g, saw a blue uniform and a black pullover, a thin, angular face and nondescript pale hair. Brass on the collar.
The trip out from the Belt. The Hamilton. And Jupiter’s well.
“There’s an office free,” Graff said, meaning very evidently they should go there. Now. Urgently. A Fleet lieutenant wanted to talk to him, and he was stuck on Fleet orders in something that increasingly felt like a deliberate black hole?
“I’ve got a flight out of here at 1800. They’re talking about an exit stamp. I need some kind of clearance.”
“You don’t have a flight out of here. Not this one.”
He slowed down, so that Graff had to pull a stop and look at him. “Sir. I need this straightened out, with apologies, sir, but I’ve got a transfer order waiting for me back on Sol One, I was told not to communicate with my CO, I’m not Fleet personnel. I understand the interservice agreements, but—”
“Five minutes.”
“I’m UDC personnel. I want to see a UDC ranking officer. Sir. Now.”
“Five minutes,” Graff repeated. “You don’t want your friend screwed. Do you?”
“My friend— Sir, I don’t care what happens to my friend. I’ve got an appointment waiting for me back on Sol One, and if I lose it, I’m screwed. I’m just a little uneasy about this whole damn arrangement, —sir. This isn’t what I was told.” • “There’s another shuttle out the 22nd. 2100 hours.”
Ben caught a breath. Three days. But GrafTs moves meant business and you didn’t argue a security matter on the open dock—no. Even if it was blackmail. Extortion. Kidnapping.
Graff waited. He came ahead. He went with Graff into a freight office and Graff waved the lights on.
“Yes, sir?” he said.
“We need him,” Graff said. “We need him to remember.”
“Sir, I just graduated from TI. If I’m not back there for the interviews they’re going away. They’re going to assign those slots and I’m stuck teaching j-1 programming to a class full of wide-eyed button-pushers, —sir. Excuse me, but I’ve not been in contact with any officer in my chain of command, I’ve gone along with this on the FSO’s word it had notified my CO. I’m not sure at this point I’m not AWOL.”
“You’re not. You’re cleared.”
“I’ve got your word on that. I haven’t seen any order but the one that had me report to the FSO on One. What have you done to me?”
“You have my word. I’ll get a message to your CO.”
“You mean they haven’t?”
“I’ll double check. We’ve played poker, haven’t we, Mr. Pollard?”
“Yes, sir.” Days of poker. Him. Dekker. Graff. No damn thing else to do on a half-built carrier.
“This is poker,” Graff said. “For the major stakes. How is he?”
“What does it matter? What’s he into?”
“Say I need him sane.”
“He’s never been sane.”
“Don’t joke like that. In some quarters they might take you seriously.”
“I am serious. The guy’s good, but his tether on reality’s just a little frayed.”
“Maybe that’s what it takes to do what he does.”
He stood there close to Graff, looking into GrafTs sober face in this very unofficial office and suddenly wondering who and what Graff was talking about and what Dekker did regularly do that had put him where he was. He said, carefully, “Dekker got lost out in the Belt. Banged around a lot. Real disoriented.”
“We know that.”
And how much else? Ben wondered. God, how much else? News didn’t escape the Belt. Security didn’t let anything get out. Even yet. Everything about the mining operation out there was under wrap. You didn’t know how much the Fleet might know. Or what tiny, inadvertent slip would let them guess what they’d done track there and what they might have been involved in that might screw his security clearance for good.
“I knew this man a handful of months. I’ve seen him like mis before—when he Fust got out of hospital on R2. I can’t make him make sense til he wants to make sense. I couldn’t then. Nobody can.”
“You made a good advance on it. Three days, lieutenant. I want him to talk.”
Bream came short. “Do I get to beat it out of him?”
“Let’s be serious, lieutenant.”
“What am I supposed to be asking? Have I got a clearance to hear it? Or what happens when he does talk? What am I looking for?”
“As much as you can know—and it’s not been released yet—there was an accident. Dekker wasn’t in it. Friends of his were. Dekker’s crew was lost.”
“Oh shit.”
“Top command subbed in another pilot with Dekker’s crew on a test run. The test didn’t go right. Total loss. Dekker was hospitalized, treated for shock. The day he got out—he either climbed into a simulator under the influence of drugs or something else happened. It’s a matter of some interest—which.1′
Ben chewed his Up. Missile test, they’d said on Sol One. Tech committee meetings. Place crawling with brass and VIPs. Hell. “So isn’t there an access record?”
“Computers can be wrong. Can’t they?”
Ben’s heart rate picked up: he hoped to hell there wasn’t a monitor hearing it. He tried to think of some scrap to hand Graff, for good will’s sake. He finally said, “Yes. They can be.”
“I want him functioning,” Graff said. “Say you’re on jnterservice loan—at high levels. It could be good. It could be bad. To take maximum advantage of that… you need to deliver.” Graff pulled a thick envelope from his jacket and held it out to him. “He listed you next-of-kin. So you have a right to see this.”
“I’m not his next-of-kin. He’s got a mother—”
“She’s specifically excluded. Don’t worry. There’s nothing in this packet outside your security clearance.”
He took it. He didn’t want to.
“I wouldn’t leave that material lying about unattended,” Graff said, “all the same. —You’ve got your quarters in hospital. I can’t order you not to use the phone. But if you do, if you contact anyone else, do you understand me, you’re not behind our screen any longer. Take my personal advice: get back to the hospital and stay there—and don’t use that phone.”
He looked at Graff a long, long moment. Lieutenant j-g. Carrier command officer. A tech/1 to a tech/2’s rank. But he had the impression Graff was leaning on some executive and clandestine authority to do what he was doing. It was in GrafTs tone, in the clear implication he should avoid his own chain of command.
“Whose office does this originate in, sir? You mind to tell me how official this is? Who’s in charge?”
“Ultimately, the captain.”
Two and two suddenly made four. Keu. Sol FSO. He looked Graff in the eyes and thought—I don’t like this. Damn, I don’t. He said,
“Is your captain the only authority that’s covering me?”
Graff said, “No.”
Conrad Mazian? The EC militia commander who was romancing his way through the UN hearings? “In which service, sir? I want to know. I need to know that. I want orders in writing,”
“Ben. Take my word. I’d go back to quarters, immediately, if I were you. I’d stay quiet. I’d do everything I could to finish my job. If I were in your place.” Graff opened the door, and shut off the lights. “If you need me, for any reason—tell Dr. Evans.”
The keycard worked, at least. The room in the hospice was an institutional cubbyhole with a bunk, a phone, an ordinary flat-vid.
And no baggage.
Delivered, customs had said. Customs had showed him the slip. Delivered at 1500h. God only where.
He set down the soft drink he had carried up from level 1. He looked at his watch. 1845h.
He picked up the phone and went through hospital downside to call customs.
“This is Lt. Benjamin Pollard. I was just there. My baggage isn’t here. Is it still being delivered?”
“Who did you talk to?”
He sat down on the bed. He pulled a vending machine sandwich from his pocket, laid it on the table by the soft drink, and pulled out the customs claim ticket. “The claim number is 9798.”
A pause. “It’s been delivered, sir.”
“You didn’t deliver it to HOS-28.”
“That’s whafs on the ticket, sir.”
“That’s not what’s in HOS-28, soldier. I want to know where my baggage is right now.”
‘ ‘That’s alt the record I have, sir. You could check with Lost Baggage at 0700.”
“This shift doesn’t find baggage, is that it? It just loses it?”
A moment of silence. “/’// make a note of it, sir.”
“Thank you.”
He punched out. He did not break the phone. He took a sip of his soft drink and unwrapped the sandwich.
No official assignment, no cafeteria open at this hour, no card with food privileges. He had fifty on him. Period. And Mr. Lieutenant j-g Jurgen Graff and his unnamed captain hadn’t seen to that detail.
God, he didn’t like the feeling he had. Bet that Graff had contacted Maj. Weiter? Hell if. Bet that the UDC knew where he was right now?
He looked at the phone and thought how he could call the UDC CO here. He could do that. He could break this wide open and maybe be a hero to the UDC—or get caught in the middle of something, behind a security screen that didn’t have Stockholm anywhere inside it. A screen confined to this place. Right now he could plead total ignorance. Right now he had a transfer order signed by Keu and a Security stamp on it and he could plead he had regarded the order exactly the way it said in the Interservice Protocols. And he could do what they wanted and get out of here.
Dammit, he didn’t know why Dekker was crazy. Anybody who wanted to fly little ships and get shot at was crazy. If even the simulator could half kill a guy—
He could have said get Dekker off the drugs. He could have said don’t sedate him—but Dekker knew too much about him, damn him, Dekker knew enough to babble things that could end up on his record, if Dekker got to talking to the psych; and if Dekker had told certain things to Graff, God—Graff could have been sifting everything he had said against information he had no idea Graff had, and weighing it for truth. Graff could have had technical backup doing it, bigtime, interactive logic stuff you had no good chance to evade without a clearer head and a calmer pulse rate than he had had in that interview—
God only, what Dekker had involved himself in. Or why someone might have wanted Dekker dead.
Or what might happen if he picked up that phone right now and tried to get through to the UDC office—via hospital communications.
He didn’t know enough about how the lines were drawn here. He didn’t want to know enough. Do what Graff wanted and be on that shuttle on the 22nd, that was all. Any way he could. And if the UDC did land on him—spill everything immediately. Total innocence. No, sir, they showed me orders, they said it was cleared—
Somebody subbed a pilot on a test run? And somebody put Dekker into a simulator drugged out of his mind?
Bloody hell.
He pulled out the envelope, from inside his jacket. Opened it and pulled out cards and pictures, a couple of licenses and old IDs.
Flight certification. Picture of Dekker and three other people. Group shot. All in Fleet uniform. Woman and two guys besides Dekker. All smiling. Arms over each other’s shoulders.
Old vid advert for a truly skuz sex item. God. We all have our secrets, Dek-lad,…
Picture of Sol Station. Picture of a couple of people outside a trans station. Picture of Mars Base from orbit. If there’d been any of Cory Salazar, Dekker had lost those, a long time ago.
Datacard. The phone had a reader, but he shoved the card into his own. Personal card showed vid rentals. Commissary charges. Postage charges. Bank records. Bits and pieces of Dekker’s life since they’d parted company. Lad had 5300.87cc to his account and no debts. Not bad. Not rich either.
The other datacard was old notes and mail. Not much of it. Notes from various people. One letter months ago from Ingrid Dekker. Four, this last year from Meg Kady.
So Meg did write him. He would never have figured Meg for the letter-writing kind.
Would never have figured Meg for a lot else, either.
He keyed up Meg’s last letter, scanned at random through what must have cost a Shepherd spacer a mint to send:
.. . can’t complain. Doing fine. I’m working into the crew, got myself onto the pilot list. ..
Sal and 1 dropped into The Hole, just on a look-see. Maybe it’s what we are now. Maybe it’s just the place is duller. It doesn’t feel the same—
So what does? he thought, and thought about Sal, and good times in the Hole’s back rooms. But Sal Aboujib probably had herself a dozen guys on a string by now, swaggering about in rab cut and Shepherd flash, visiting pricey places like Scorpio’s—if Scorpio’s still existed. Sal had her a berth, had her a whole new class of guys to pick from. And Ben Pollard never had gotten a letter from Sal Aboujib. A hello from Dekker once, months ago. He’d said hello back. Only communication they’d had. And it was on here. Hope you’re doing all right. Everything fine. Only longdistance letter he’d ever gotten, tell the truth. And what did you answer, to people you didn’t want to be tied to? Good luck, goodbye, Dekker?
Bills. Note from one Falcone—Dek, we don’t like it either. But nothing we can do right now. They want a show. We’ll sure as hell give them one.
He skimmed back to the letter from Ingrid Dekker. A short one. Don’t come here. I don’t want to see you. You went out there by your own choice and maybe it wasn’t any of it your fault what happened, but things are hard enough. Paul, and I don’t need any more trouble. Stop sending me money. I don’t want any more ties to you. I don’t want any more letters. Leave me alone.
Shit.
He set the reader on his knee, gave a deep breath, thinking— Shit, Dek —He’d grown up on his parents’ insurance himself, both of them having been so careless as to take the deep dive with their whole crew. At first he’d really resented them doing that, thought if they’d given a damn about their kid they wouldn’t have been that careless,
but he’d stared into Jupiter’s well himself once—and he knew how subtle and sudden that slope was, in the pit of his stomach he knew it, now, and dreamed about it, on bad nights.
But his mama had never written him a letter like this one, and in that cold little spot marked Who’s left to care, he guessed why Dekker might have written him as next-of-kin: Meg with her letters about how she was working into the crew and everything was going fine for her-^tekker wouldn’t risk having another woman writing him, saying, Get out of my life, you skuz. Dekker already knew what Ben Pollard thought. And if Dekker was in trouble that needed a next-of-kin—whose life was he going to interrupt, who might remotely even know him?
He cut the reader off. He sat there in a cardboard cubby of a room with no damn baggage and for a moment or two had remorseful thoughts about Paul Dekker. Wished maybe he’d written a line or two more, back then, like—hell, he didn’t know. Something polite.
What friggin’ time is it?
Two months in a miner-ship with Dekker off his head asking him the time every few minutes. So here he was back there again—locked into a hospital with Dekker. One part of him felt sorry for Dekker and the other panicked part of him still wanted to beat hell out of the fool and get out of here….
Dammit, what am I supposed to do with this damn card? Why didn’t Graff give this stuff to the psych?
Sub in another pilot, did they? Why, if not Dekker’s attitude? And who did it,” if not the CO who’s supposed to want this stuff from Dekker? Real brand-new ship, Dekker said once. That’s why the Fleet had wanted him. He’d been real excited about it—wanted it more than anything in his life—
And a crew’s dead and Dekker’s screwed like that?
He sat there on the side of the bed desperately, urgently, wanting off Sol Two, he didn’t at the moment care where. This whole deal had the stink of death about it
Serious death, Sal would say.
No shit. Sal. What do I do with the guy?
CHAPTER
0
MR. Graff, urgent word with you. Down the hall. Sir. Please.” 0645 and the breakfast line in the green room was backed up to the door. Hardly time for coffee in the fifteen minutes before he was due in Tanzer’s office and Jurgen Albrecht Graff punched white coffee instead of Mack for his stomach’s sake. “Can it wait?” he asked without looking at Mitch, and caught the cup that tilted sideways and straightened it in time. Held it while it filled. “No, sir. A number of us want to talk, sir. Urgent business.”
Spit and polish. From Mitch. There was no one else in the rec nook of the mess hall and no reasonable chance of being overheard in the clatter of trays. “Tanzer wants to talk, too. I have an appointment in fifteen.”
“Hell.” Mitch was Shepherd, aggressively Shepherd, shaved up the sides, couple of earrings. Bracelet. “I swore you’d be there. Sir.”
Graff lifted out the cup, said, “All right, five,” and stole ‘ -07-
a sip as he walked with Mitch out the main door and down the hall to the conference rooms. Door to 6a was open. Mitch’s tech crew was there, Pauli and Jacoby, Jamil and his longscanner, Trace. Graff recognized a delegation when he saw it. Tanzer had said, Don’t discuss the hearings. Patently that was not the intention here.
Mitch shut the door. “Sir. We’re asking you to get one of us in front of the committee.”
“Won’t happen,” Graff said. “No chance. You want to get a haircut, Mitch?”
“Hell if.”
“That’s an Earth committee. Blue-sky as they come. They won’t communicate.”
“Yeah,” Jacoby said. “Is that why Tanzer killed Pete and Elly? Couldn’t let a Belter pull it off?”
“Ease off, Jacoby.”
“They won’t let us in hospital. You seen Dekker? You seen him, lieutenant?”
Pauli muttered: “Wouldn’t be surprised if Tanzer ordered him put in that machine. Didn’t want him at the hearings.”
“Shut that down,” Graff said. “Right now.”
Mitch folded his arms, set a foot on a chair, and said, “Somebody better hear it. They didn’t want any Belter son of a bitch in front of the cameras. Dekker couldn’t fly it? Then why didn’t they sub the crew, ask them that!”
“Mitch, I hope somebody does have the brains to ask it. But there’s nothing I can do. They’re not going to ask me that.”
“Hell if, sir! Tanzer’s pets are killing us. You want me to shave up like a—” Mitch looked at him—him and his regulation trim, and shut the epithet off unsaid. “You get me in front of that hearing and I’ll look like a UDC accountant.”
“Mitch, I’m in a position.”
“You’re in a position. You’re running safe behind shields— sir. We’re the ones with our ass on the line.”
HELLDURNEK • 39
Pauli said: “And they can’t automate these sumbitches any further. Why don’t they ask somebody who knows?”
‘•The designers will. Staatentek’s here. They’ll ask. That much I’ll get a chance to tell them.”
“Ask *em about the sim!”
Female voice: Trace. “They’re not interested. This is going to be a whitewash start to finish.”
“The designers have to talk to us, Trace. We’ll get our word in.”
Mitch said: “The engineers have to talk to us. The execs and the politicrats won’t and they have the say.”
“Mitch, I can’t listen to this.”
“Tanzer is a hidebound blue-skyer son of a bitch who thinks because he grew up with a rulebook up his ass is a reason to try to tell any spacer his business or to think that the salute-the-logo dumbasses they’ve pulled in off the Guard and the system test programs could do the job with these ships—”
“They can fly, Mitch.”
“Yeah, they can fly. Like Wilhelmsen.”
“Nothing wrong with Wilhelmsen. Listen to me— Shut it down, and listen: if we have a technical at work, we want to find it, we don’t want to whitewash that either. We have something more at issue here than Wilhelmsen.”
“Yeah,” Pauli muttered. “Tanzer.”
Mitch said, “Nothing wrong with that ship. Everything wrong with the pilot. And they aren’t going to find the solution to what happened to Wilhelmsen in Tanzer’s fuckin* rulebook. Sir.”
“Let’s just find out, shall we?”
“Just make the point with them, lieutenant: Wilhelmsen
wasn’t set with the crew. Wilhelmsen should have said not
ready, he was the pilot, he had the final say-so, demo be
• damned. It was his responsibility to do mat.”
\ “Yes, it was his responsibility, but it wasn’t in his
.jL judgment to do it, or he would have done it—die guy’s
dead. He got it the same as the rest, Mitch. Let’s give the experts a chance to figure out what.”
“What chance have they got, if they’re not getting the information? Their experts are blue-sky as Tanzer is!”
Jacoby said: “It’s the At-ti-tude in the UDC brass. They murdered Wilhelmsen and Wilhelmsen murdered that crew, that’s what they need to hear!”
“All right! All right! But there’s nothing I can do to get you in there right now, and if you act the fools and screw this, they’ll pull those design changes and you’ll be flying targets. Now leave it! Get off my tail! Give me a chance! That’s the order. I’ve got a meeting.”
There was quiet. It wasn’t a happy quiet. Graff handed the coffee to Mitch. “You drink it.” He started for the door in a dead silence and looked back. “It’s my life too, guys. You shit me, a carrier’s gone. Program’s gone. You understand that?”
They weren’t used to hearing Helm Two talk, like that. Not at all. There were sober faces.
Mitch said, “No offense, lieutenant.”
Graff passed a hand over his close-cropped hair. Said, “Hey, I have to deal with ’em, guys,” and ducked out, with an uncomfortable feeling of being square in the middle— merchanter and neither Shepherd nor regular UDC. Not part of the rab the EC had exiled to the Belt, not part of the EC, either, in the sense the rab had resisted it—didn’t even understand the politics in the ’15, but he was getting to.
Fast.
They’d hauled the Shepherd pilots into the Program for their expertise. They weren’t eighteen-year-olds, and they damned sure weren’t anybody’s boys. You didn’t use that word with them. Didn’t lead them, no way in hell. You fed them the situation and showed them where it was different from what they knew. You showed them the feel of it, and let it sink into their bones and they showed the interactive systems new ways to conceptualize. They designed a whole
new set of controls around the Shepherds, and software to display what they saw in their insystem-trained heads.
Explain that to Col. Glenn Evan Tanzer, of UDC R&D. God, he wished the captain were back here, that one of the captains would turn up; Kreshov hadn’t shown insystem for weeks; and exactly how it happened that one of the captains wasn’t here at B Dock, at the same time a stray investigative subcommittee had outflanked Keu at Sol and gotten here unchecked—he didn’t know. He couldn’t even swear FteetCom was secure from the UDC code experts. Shepherds thought so, but he wouldn’t commit any more to it man he had.
Not now. Not lately, in Sol System, where the enemy was mindsets that wouldn’t understand the realities in the Beyond. The Belt was closer to The Beyond than it was to Earth.
And closer to it than Tanzer by a far shot. Always Tanzer—who’d been sitting here in R&D so long they dusted him.
0657. By the clock on the wall. He walked down the ^corridor, he walked into Tanzer’s office, and Tanzer’s aide said, “Go right in.”
He did mat. He saluted, by the book. Tanzer saluted, they stared at each other, and Tanzer said, “Lt. Benjamin J. Pollard. Does that name evoke memory?”
Shot across the bow. Graff kept all expression off his face. “Yes, sir. Friend of Dekker’s. Listed next-of-kin on his card.”
“Is that your justification for releasing those records to Sol?”
“Captain Keu’s orders, sir. He sees all the accident reports.”
“Is this your justification for issuing a travel voucher?”
“I didn’t issue the travel voucher. Mr. Pollard’s presence here isn’t at my request.”
“Lt. Graff, you’re a hair-splitting liar, you’re a trouble-t. maker and I resent your attitude.”
*£ “On the record, sir, I hardly think I can be held ‘•r. accountable—”
“That’s what you think. You’re sabotaging us, you’re playing politics with my boys’ lives, and you have no authorization to bring in any outsider or to be passing unauthorized messages outside this facility to other commands.”
“That is my chain of command, sir. Dekker is my personnel, and Keu is my commanding officer. Sir. I notify him on all the casualties. What Captain Keu does is not in my control. And if the question arises, I will testify that in my opinion Dekker was not in that simulator by choice. Sir.”
Tanzer’s fist came down on the desk. “I’m in command of this facility, Lt. Graff. The fact that your commander saw fit to leave a junior lieutenant in command of the rider trainees and the carrier does not give you authority over any aspect of this operation, and it does not give you authority to issue passes or to take communications to anyone outside of BaseCom, do you understand me?”
“Where it regards your command, yes, colonel. But I’m responsible to Captain Keu for the communications he directly ordered me to make and which I will continue to make, on FleetCom. Lt, Pollard is here on humanitarian leave in connection with Fleet personnel. He’s Prioritied elsewhere. He’s here temporarily and he has adequate Security clearance to be here.”
“He’s also UDC personnel.”
“He’s under interservice assignment. On leave. And not available to R&D.”
“A friend of Dekker’s. Let me tell you, I’ve had a bellyful of your recruits, and I’m sick and tired of the miner riffraff and psychological misfits washing up on the shores of this program. Your own captain’s interference with design has given this program a piece of junk that can’t be flown—”
“Not true.”
“—a piece of junk that works in the sims and not in the field, lieutenant, because it doesn’t take into account human
realities. That firepower can’t be turned over to adrenaline-high games-playing freaks, Mr. Graff, and that machine can’t rely on the 50%’ers on the sims—how many ships are you going to lose on that 50%? Four billion dollars per ship and the time to train the crew and you’re going to gamble that on 50% of the time the pilot’s nerves hold out for the time required? We’re pushing human beings over their design limits, and they’re dying, Mr. Graff, they’re ending up in hospital wards.”
“Wilhelmsen didn’t die of fatigue, colonel, he died of communications failure, he died of not working with his own crew. He schitzed—for one nanosecond he schitzed and forgot where in hell he was in his sequence. There’s an interdict on that move—it’s supposed to be in the pilot’s head, and it failed, colonel, he failed, that’s the bottom line. Dekker—”
“Dekker ran that same flight on sim and he’s lying delirious in hospital. Don’t let me hear you use that word schitz again, lieutenant, except you apply it to your boy. There’s the problem in that crew. There’s the troublemaker that had to prove his point, had to shoot his mouth off—”
“Dekker didn’t run that sim. And the word is concussion, colonel. From the impact of an unsecured body in that pod. He didn’t forget to belt in.”
“He was suited up.”
“The flightsuits keep your feet from swelling, colonel: Dekker’s been exposed to prolonged zero g. The other crews say—”
“He was up there on drugs, lieutenant! Read the medical report! He was high on trank, he was in possession of a tape be had no business with, and he and his attitude got in that pod together, let’s admit what happened up there and quit trying to put Dekker’s smartass maneuver off on any outside agency. There wasn’t one.”
“I intend to find out what did happen.” ^ “Do you? Do you? Let me lay this word in your lap: U either you come up with proof that’ll stand up in court
martial, or this investigation is closed. Dekker climbed into that pod on drugs, because he has an Attitude the same as all the other misfits this facility’s been loaded with, he believes he’s cornered the market on right, he’s a smartass who thinks his reflexes make up for his lack of discipline, and if you drop that chaff in the hearing you won’t like the result. If you want this program to fly, and I assume you do, then you’d better reflect very soberly what effect your appearance and your testimony this afternoon is going to have on your captain’s credibility—on the credibility of your service and the judgment of its personnel. Don’t speculate. Keep to the facts.”
“The facts are, Dekker saw what was happening, he called the right moves. It’s on the mission control tape.. ..”
“You’re so damned cocksure what your boys can do, mister, but it’s easy to call the right moves when you’re not the one in the pilot’s seat. You won’t sit those controls. You won’t fly those ships. Will you?”
Fair question, except they’d been over that track before. “That’s exactly the point. I’m not synched to a rider crew. Cross-training would risk both ships.”
“The truth is, lieutenant, your Fleet doesn’t want its precious essential personnel flying a suicide ship, your Fleet won’t let go of its hare-brained concept before it stinks. Your Conrad Mazian isn’t a ship designer, he isn’t an engineer, he’s a merchant captain in a ragtag militia trying to prove it’s qualified for strategic decisions. This ship needs interdicts on a pilot that’s stressing out.”
“That ship needs its combat edge, colonel. If Wilhelmsen had had an AI breathing down his neck he’d have had one more thing on his mind: Is the damned thing going to take my advice or not? At what mission-critical split second that I happen to be right is it going to cut me out of the loop? You can’t cripple a ship with a damned know-it-all robot snatching control away because the pilot pushed the £*s for a reason that, yes, might be knowingly suicidal, for a reason that wasn’t in the mission profile. Besides which, longscan’s after you, and what are you going to do, give a Union longscanner a hundred percent certainty an AI’s going to interdict certain moves? If he knows your cutoffs, he knows your blind spots. If he knows you can’t push it and he can, what’s he going to do, colonel?”
“When the physiological signs are there, you’re going to lose that ship, that’s a hundred percent certainty, and nobody else is going to be exceeding that limit.”
“Wilhelmsen was leaning hard on the Assists. He could have declined that one target, that’s inside the parameters, that’s a judgment a rider’s going to have to make. But he’d have looked bad for the senators. He wanted that target. That’s an Attitude. There’s a use for that in combat. Not for a damned exhibition.”
“Wilhelmsen was saving the program, lieutenant, saving your damned budget appropriation, in equipment that’s got six men in the hospital and seventeen dead. You don’t push machines or human beings past the destruct limit, and you don’t put equipment out there that self-destructs on a muscle-twitch. The pilot was showing symptoms. The AI should have kicked him out of the loop right then, but it can’t do that, you say he can’t have it breathing down his neck—a four-billion-dollar missile with a deadman’s switch, that’s what you’ve got—it needs an integrative AI in there—”
“Watch the pilots cut it off. Which you can’t do with that damned tetralogic system you’re talking about, it’s got to be in the loop talking to the interactives constantly, and no matter the input it got after, its logic systems are exactly the same as the next one’s, same as the ships are. The only wildcard you’ve got is the humans, the only thing that keeps the enemy longscanners guessing. The best machine you’ve got can’t outguess the human longscanner—why should you assume they’re going to outperform the pilot?”
“Because the longscanner can’t kill the crew.”
“The hell he can’t!”
“Not in that sense.”
“Your tests don’t simulate combat. That’s what we’ve
been telling you—you keep concentrating on the fire rate, always the damned fire rate and you’re not dealing with the reason we recruited these particular crews. Nobody at Lendler Corp has been in combat, none of your pilots have been, the UDC hasn’t been, since it was founded—your tests are set up wrong!”
Not saying Tanzer himself hadn’t been in combat. Red in the face, Tanzer got a breath. “Let’s talk about exceeding human limits, lieutenant: what happened out there was exactly why we’ve got men in hospital over there who can’t walk a level floor without staggering, it’s why we’ve had cardiac symptoms in men under thirty, and those aren’t from four-hour runs.” A jab of the finger in his direction. “Let me tell you, lieutenant, I’ve met the kind of attitude your command is fostering among the trainees. Show-outs and ego-freaks. And I wish them out of my command. You may have toddled down a deck in your diapers, and so may Mazian’s ragtag enlistees out of the Belt, but how are you going to teach them anything when they already know it all and you acquired your know-how by superior genes? You can’t lose 50% of your ships and crews at every pass. 96% retrievability, wasn’t that the original design criterion? Or isn’t that retrievability word going to be in the manual when we put this ship on the line?”
“If a Union armscomper gets your numbers you have zero retrievability, colonel, that’s my point. You have to exceed your own numbers, you have to surprise your own interfaces in order to surprise that other ship’s computers and that means being at the top of the architecture of your Adaptive Assists. The enemy knows your name out there. Union says, That’s Victoria, that’s Btzroy or Graff at Helm, because Victoria wouldn’t go in with Helm Three. They know you and they know your style, and it’s in their double A’s, but you innovate and they innovate. One AI sitting on top of the human and his interfaces is like any other damn AI sitting on top of the interfaces—there aren’t that many models, the enemy knows them all, and the second its logic
signature develops in the enemy’s intelligence about you, hell, they’ll have a fire-track lying in wait for you.”
“Then you’d better damn well improve your security, hadn’t you?”
“Colonel, there are four manufacturers in friendly space for this tetralogic equipment and we can’t swear there’s not an Eye sitting right outside the system right now. Any merchanter who ever came into system could have dropped one, before the embargo, and it’s next to impossible to find it. Merchanters are your friends and your enemies: that’s the war the Company made, and that’s what’s going on out there—they don’t all declare their loyalties and a lot of them haven’t got any, not them and not us. They’ll find out the names. They’ll find out the manufacturers and the software designers. They’ll learn us. That’s a top priority—who’s at Helm and who’s in command, and if it’s even one in four brands of tetralogic—”
“All the more reason for interchangeable personnel.”
“It’s doesn’t work that way! You don’t go into an engagement with anybody who just happens to be on watch. You try to get your best online. No question. You don’t trade personnel and you don’t trade equipment. You haven’t time at .5 light coming down off jump to think about what ship you’re in or what crew you’re with. I’m telling you, colonel, my captain has no wish to raise the substitution as an issue against your decisions, but on his orders, as judiciously as I can, I am going to make the point that it was a critical factor. We cannot integrate a computerized ship into our operations. In that condition it is no better than a missile.”
“You haven’t the credentials to say what it is and isn’t, lieutenant. You’re not a psychiatrist and you’re not a computer specialist.”
“I am a combat pilot. One of two at this base.”
A cold, dark silence. “I’ll tell you—if you want to raise issues this afternoon, I’m perfectly willing to make clear to the committee that you’re a composite, lieutenant, a shell
steered by non-command personnel and an absentee captain, and you clearly don’t have the administrative experience to handle your own security, much less speak with expert knowledge on systems you’ve never seen. I’ve held this office for thirty years, I’ve seen all sorts of games, and your commanding officer’s leaving that carrier to subordinates and your own abuse of your commanding officer’s communications privileges is an official report in my chain of command. This is not the frontier, this is not a bare-based militia operation, and if your service ever hopes to turn these trainees into competent military personnel you can start by setting a personal example. Clean up your own command and stop fomenting dissension in this facility!”
“I do not accept that assessment.”
“Then you can leave this office. And if you are called on to testify, you’ll be there as one of the pilots personally involved in the accident, not as a systems expert. You’d be very unwise to push past that position—or you’ll find questions raised that could be damned embarrassing to your absentee superior and your entire service. I’m talking about adverse publicity, if you give grounds to any of these senators or to the high command. Do you understand that? Because 1 won’t pull any punches. And the one security no one can guarantee is a senator’s personal staff.”
“Are you attempting to dictate my testimony, colonel? Is that what I’m hearing?”
“In no wise. Give my regards to your captain. Good day, lieutenant.”
Something had come loose. Banging. The tumble did that. Dekker reached after the cabinet, tried to get to the com.
Hand caught his arm. Something shoved him back and he hit pillows.
Bang from elsewhere.
“Hey, Dek. You want eggs or pancakes?” He couldn’t figure how Ben had gotten onto the ship. Ben had rescued him. But he didn’t remember that.
“Eggs or pancakes?”
“Eggs aren’t real,” he said. “Awful stuff.”
“They’re real, Dek-boy. Not to my taste, living things, but they’re real enough to upset my stomach. Eggs, you want? Orange juice?”
He tried to move. Usually he couldn’t. But his arms were
free. He stuffed pillows under his head and Ben did some-
.thing that propped the head up. Ben went out in-the hall and
came back and set a tray down on the table, swung it over
him.
“Eat it. That’s an order, Dek-boy.”
He picked up a fork. It seemed foreign, difficult to balance in .9 g. His head kept going around. His arm weighed more than he remembered and it was hard to keep his head up. But he stabbed a bit of scrambled egg and got a bite down. Another. He reached for the orange juice but Ben did it for him, took a sip himself beforehand and said, “We got better at Sol One.”
Maybe it was. Maybe he was supposed to know that. Ben held the cup to his lips and he sipped a little of it. It stung cuts in his mouth and it hit his stomach with a sugar impact.
“Keep it up, Dek-boy, and they’ll take that tube out.”
He didn’t know there was a tube. Didn’t know how Ben had gotten here. Or where they were now. Didn’t look like the Hole at all. Didn’t look like R2 hospital. He reached after the fork, took another tentative nibble at the eggs. God, he was weak.
“Where’s Bird?” he asked.
“What year is it, Dek-boy? I warned you there’d be a test this morning.”
He shut his eyes. Opened them and Ben was still there. In this room. He recalled something like that. Ben was going to beat hell out of him if he missed.
“2324.”
“Good boy. Have some more oj.”
“Can’t.” His stomach suddenly felt queasy, when he thought about that number. Number had to be wrong. He waved the cup away and watched Ben drink it.
Ben, in a UDC uniform.
He was going crazy. It was 2324. Ben didn’t belong here.
Ben said, “You remember Meg and Sal?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Meg writes to you, doesn’t she?”
“Yeah, sometimes.”
“Real love affair,”
“We’re friends.”
“Yeah,” Ben said. “You looked it when you said goodbye. Remember saying goodbye?” He took an envelope out of his pocket. Held up a handful of cards and pictures. “Remember these?”
He’d seen them before. They’d lied to him, the doctors had. They made all these things up. They told him they were his, he’d thrown them across the room.
Now Ben had them. Ben held up a picture of him with people he didn’t remember and he couldn’t look at.
“What are their names?”
He shook his head.
“Woman’s Elly?”
The name jolted. Elly was dead. Pete and Falcone.
“Pete?”
Guy on the right. Big grin. Pete smiled like that. Pete had his arm over the shoulder. But he couldn’t remember the photo.
“Which one’s Pete?”
“I don’t know.” But it was a lie. Ben just didn’t belong with them. Everything was scrambled. Gory and Ben and Bird. He was afraid Meg was going to be in that picture if he went on looking at it.
Blood. Exploding everywhere. Beads floating, fine mist.
He squeezed his eyes shut. The eggs didn’t sit well at his stomach. Everyone in that picture was dead. He was in mere too.
“Who’s the other guy?”
“Falcone.”
“Said not to worry about him. Didn’t he? Left you a note? You remember?”
He shook his head. He shoved the table away, tried to get up. Ben pushed him back against the pillows and a stabbing pain went through his skull.
He grayed out for a moment. When he came back Ben was quietly finishing his toast. Ben said, “You ready to talk now?”
The cup hit the grid. Sideways. Two out of five. Graff lifted the cover up and righted it before the coffee hit, collected his overdue morning caffeine and turned in the general noise of the end of breakfast, straight into Villy’s intercept.
UDC Flight Chief. Captain Alexandra Villanueva—senior test pilot for the UDC, who said, all friendly, “Hear you and the old man went one this morning.”
Fast. Must have ricocheted off Tanzer’s wall, Graff thought, and shrugged in mid-sip while Villanueva stuck his card in the slot and punched up a coffee. He said, “We differed.”
Villanueva rescued his cup. “Damn thing.”
“Ever since they changed the cups.”
Villanueva took the coffee out and let the cover drop, said, quietly, “You know, back when we were doing the A-89, we had one of these runs of trouble. Lost twelve guys in six months. The old man just sat in that office and filled out the reports: you never saw him crack—but it broke him up. Same now. He wants to pull this program out. But we’ve got to come out of this with an answer. A right answer.”
“Redesign isn’t it.” He got on well enough with Villanueva. Villanueva had started out calling him son—never did think he’d quite gotten the man out of the mindset. Gray hair on Captain Villy, legitimately come by, rumor had it: handful of crack-ups and a few pieces of luck—if dealing with Tanzer
daily didn’t do it. They kept trying to promote him to a desk, God only wish he’d get Tanzer’s post and run the whole program, not just test ops—but Villy kept on making test runs himself, one of the UDC pilots who had real respect among the Shepherds.
“Graff,” Villanueva said, “dammit, we’re vulnerable on this project, we’re real vulnerable. Politicians are gathering like sharks. I know the old man’s hard to deal with. But let’s not hang the differences out in plain sight today.”
He thought about Mitch. About the frustration among the Shepherds, who wanted to fight Tanzer. And that did no good. “They won’t likely ask me anything but where I was, where the targets were. That’s all in the electronic record. Cut and dried, isn’t that the expression for it?”
Villanueva stood there a moment. Just looking at him. He expected Villanueva to say something in answer, but instead Villanueva walked off with his coffee and didn’t look back.
Maybe he should have given more back. Used a different expression. Read the signals otherwise. He didn’t dislike the man, God knew he didn’t dislike him. The man had been trying to say something, but somehow in the inevitable screw-ups between blue-skyer and spacer—he had the feeling the signals had gotten fuzzed.
Villanueva went over to a table with his own men. Sat down. Graff walked over to the other side, where a couple of the Fleet’s own gray heads inclined together. Demas and Saito. Nav One and Com One—no credence at all to the Equivalencies that the Fleet had had settled on them. Commdr. Demas, as happened. But Nav One meant it was Demas did the major share of the course plots, with the backing of eighteen techs interfacing with scan and longscan at any given instant, which meant that a prototype carrier on a test run knew so precisely where it was and where everything else was that a Lt. j-g at Helm couldn’t screw up if he worked at it.
Except with a wrong word to the UDC R&D chief. “Think I just picked a wrong word with Villy. Does ‘cut and dried’ describe what they’re going to ask at the hearings?”
Com One said, her almond eyes half-lidded, “Probably. ‘Rigged’ might too. On, is the man?”
Demas said, “A lot On. Deep in. Drink your coffee, Helm. Present for you.” Demas laid a bolt on the table. Fat one.
Damn. “What is that?”
“That, J-G, is a bolt. It was lying next the wall in a dark little recess in the carrier’s main corridor. Where the construction crew just installed the number eighteen pressure seal.”
Thing was good as a bullet lying there. “I want to see the count sheet. I want the last crew that worked in there. Damn those fools!”
“Station labor. Gravitied brains. What do you ask?”
Ben said, “You remember Graff?”
“Yeah,” Dekker said.
“What do you remember?”
“The trip out from the Belt. Here.”
“Good boy. Where are we?”
“Sol Two,” he said. Ben told him so. He had to believe what Ben told him: Ben was the check he had asked for. Ben was what he got and he had to believe everything Ben told him—he told himself that, this morning. Ben showed him pictures and showed him letters in the reader, that he remembered reading. The ones from Meg, the note from Falcone, the morning—
The morning they pulled him off the demo and put somebody else in.
Nothing you can do, Falcone had written. Left the note on the system. Came back like a ghost—after the accident. After—
“You remember where the sims are?”
“Which ones?”
“You tell me.”
He felt tired, wrung out. He lay back in the pillows and said, “Couple downside. They’re all the procedurals.” Tried to think of exact words and remembered Ben was a licensed pilot too. “Ops stuff—stuff you need your reflexes for—it’s in the core.”
“Null-g stuff.”
“Null-g and high-g.” His eyes wanted to drift shut. His mind went around that place as if it were a pit. He could see the chamber in the null-g core, the sims like so many eggs on mag-lev tracks, blurring in motion. Lot of g’s when they were working. . ..
“When’s the last time you remember using the sims in the core?”
Difficult question for a moment. Then not so hard. “Watch before the test. Wilhelmsen and I—”
“Wilhelmsen.”
“He was my backup.”
“friend of yours?”
Difficult to say. “Chad…”
“Wilhelmsen?”
He nodded, eyes shut. “Son of a bitch, but he was all right. Didn’t dislike him. We got along.”
“So they subbed him in. You watch the test?”
He didn’t know. Completely numb now. But the monitor on the shelf was showing higher points to the green line.
“You went into shock. They put you in hospital.”
Wasn’t the way he remembered. Wasn’t sure what he did remember, but not that shock was the reason. No. He hadn’t seen it.
“They give you drugs in the hospital?”
He nodded. He was relatively sure of that.
“Give you a prescription when you left?”
“Dunno.”
“They say they did.”
“Then I guess they did.”
“You guess. Were you still high when you left the hospital? Did you have drugs with you?”
“I don’t remember.”
“What time of day was it?”
“Don’t remember, Ben, I don’t remember.” But something was there, God, a flare on the vid, a light the cameras couldn’t handle Plasma Bright as the sun. Pete and Elly, and Falcone and the ship.
“You all right?” The monitor was beeping. No! Let him alone. It’s all right! Leave him the hell alone.”
Orderly was trying to intervene. He opened his eyes and looked toward the door, trying to calm his pulse rate, and Ben leaned over and put his hand on his shoulder Squeezed hard.
“You get in that sim by yourself?”
“I don’t know.”
“Somebody put you there?”
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know, Ben. I just can’t remember.”
“Come on, Dek, think about it. You got into the core. You remember that? You had to get that far. What happened then?”
He shook his head. He kept seeing dark Hashing lights Green lines and gold. Heard Cory saying, Nothing you can do, Dek, nothing you can do…
They were back in The Hole. In his room behind the bar. Had a drawer ful of pills….
He put a hand over his eyes, men stared at the ceiling and looked over at Ben again to be sure where he was and when he was. But the black kept trying to come back and the lines twisted and moved.
‘Driver ship, a k long. Loads of rock going to the Well at tremendous v.
Cory was dead. Dead a long time. So was Bird. He thought that Bird was dead. Fewer and fewer things were coming loose and drifting.
He pressed his hands over his eyes until it made sparks of color in the dark of virtual space. Red Phosphenes. Was that what they said the lights were?
Spinning, of a sudden. He grabbed the bed. Ben said, “God, watch it!”
Something was beeping. Ben said, to someone at the door, “He had a dream, that’s all.”
“Want you there this afternoon,” Graff said to his Nav One; and to Saito. Saito said,
“This won’t be like our procedures. An answer-what’s-asked. This is Earth. Don’t mistake it.”
Graff took a sip of cooling coffee. “I couldn’t. The old man hasn’t sent us a hint, except Pollard, and Pollard doesn’t know anything. I don’t know if that’s a signal to raise that issue or not—but I can’t understand the silence. Unless the captain’s leaving me to take the grenade. Which I’d do. Little they could do anyway but transfer me back. But he should tell me.”
“No grenades,” Demas said. “No chance of Dekker talking?”
“Pollard’s honestly trying. All I know.”
“You sure he’s the captain’s? He could be Tanzer’s.”
Graff remembered something he’d forgotten to say, gave a short laugh. “Pollard’s a native Belter.”
“You’re serious. Tanzer knows it?”
“Knows he’s a friend of Dekker’s. That has him the devil in Tanzer’s book. What’s more, this Belter claims he’s a Priority 10 tracked for Geneva.”
Demas* brows went up.
Graff said, “Bright. Very bright. Computers. Top security computers.”
“Tanzer can’t snag a Priority like that.”
Saito said, “Not without an authorization. I doubt Tanzer can even access that security level to realize what he is.”
“The captain set up Pollard with a room in the hospital. I told him to stay to it and Dekker’s room and keep his head down. With a security clearance like that, he understands what quiet means, I think. He’s got an appointment waiting
for him—if he can get out of here before he becomes a priority to Tanzer.”
“You signal him?”
“Every word I could prudently use. There were some I didn’t. Maybe I should have. But he’s UDC. You don’t know where it’ll go, ultimately.”
“No remote chance on Dekker?”
“No chance on this one. Too much to ask. They’ve requested the log. They’re going to ask questions on the carrier—they’ll want to ask questions about the trainees. But they won’t talk to them. They’re not scheduled. Trainees don’t talk to the EC. Trainees they’re designing those ships around don’t talk to the committee because the committee is only interested in finding a way that doesn’t admit we’re right. Another schitzy AI. Another budget fight.”
“The Earth Company makes a lot of money on shipbuilding,” Demas said. “Does that thought ever trouble your sleep?”
“It’s beginning to.”
The captain wanted to bust Demas up to a captaincy. Demas insisted he was staying with Kev. The argument was still going on. The fact was Demas hated administration and claimed he was a tactician, not a strategist, but Demas saw things. Good instincts, the man had.
Saito said, quietly: “Committee will be predominantly male, predominantly over fifty, and they won’t understand why the captain didn’t leave Fitz in charge and take me and Demas with him. That’s what you’re dealing with.*’
Fitzroy, Helm One, was answering questions for the committee at Sol One. Graff said, glumly: “Tanzer’s threatening to make an issue out of their command rules.’*
Demas shook his head. “Let him make it. That’ll get me to the stand surer than the nav stats would. And I don’t think he wants that.”
One could wish. But one couldn’t get technical with the legislative types. With the engineers, yes. “They’d talk to
Demas. But the engineers couldn’t talk policy to the legislators. Couldn’t get through their own management.”
“I keep having this feeling they’re going to blindside us.”
“You’ll handle it. No question. Easy done.”
Keu’s silence was overall the most troublesome thing. Graff finished off his coffee, took the bolt and pocketed it. “Paperweight. Every paperpusher should have one. Tell the construction boss I want to talk to him, in my office, right now.”
“Ought to give him the thing at max v,” Demas said.
“When we find the foreman who faked the parts count— I’d be willing.” Graff headed for the door, tossed his cup in the collection bin.
Ben was back. Ben had been in the hall a while. Ben sat down with his chair close to the bed, put his hand on his shoulder.
“How’re you doing, Dek?”
“All right.”
“You were remembering, you know that? Pete and Elly? You remember that?”
Ben scared him. “I was dreaming. Sorry, Ben.” If he was dreaming he could be in the Belt. Or the ship. But Ben shook at his shoulder and said,
“Dek, how did you get in the sim? What were you doing in there? I got to get out of here. I got twelve hours, Dek.”
Sim chamber. Pods spinning around and around. Racket. Echoes. Everything tried to echo. And Ben said he had twelve hours. He didn’t want Ben to leave. Ben came and Ben went, but as long as he knew there was a chance of Ben being there he knew what he was waking up to.
He said, “It’s June 20th, isn’t it? Isn’t it, Ben?”
Ben took a fistful of hospital gown, under his chin, and said, “Dekker, remember what fucking happened. I got to be on that shuttle. It’s my life at stake, you copy?”
He tried. Ben let him go, smoothed the covers, patted his
shoulder. Didn’t ask him anything for a moment. Ben was upset and he earnestly tried to pull the sim chamber out of the dark for Ben. But it wasn’t there.
Just that fireball. Second sun. They said it wasn’t Wilhelmsen’s fault. Maybe it wasn’t. You died when you overran your limits.
“Target,” he said. Ben said, “What?”
He said, “Target. Missed one….”
CHAPTER
4
THE hearing was set up in A 109, not the biggest of the classrooms—dressed up with tables and a couple of UDC guards with sidearm to do what, Graff asked himself bitterly, shoot down anybody who’d tell the truth out of turn?
Limited seating, they called it. No public access. That meant the workmen and the mechanics that worked for the EC, the vendors and the man who sold meat pies on 3-deck were barred, and those of them with security clearances still had to pass metal detectors. It meant that any military personnel showed if the committee knew they existed, and sent them passes: that meant ranking officers and the few like himself whose names were on the duty list the hour of the disaster. But there were passes issued for aides and for official representatives of the several services. And that meant the Fleet had Saito and Demas.
And the Shepherd trainees had Mitch and Jamil. They’d taken off the jewelry, taken off the earrings—couldn’t hide Jamil’s tattoos, but Jamil’s single strip of black hair was
braided tight against his scalp, and both of them were as regulation as die Shepherds could manage.
There were the various heads of department, maintenance chiefs, the ones who had security clearances. There was a big carrier schematic on one screen, others showing details of the docking ports. And an undetailed model on the table. Just the flat saucer shape. Mania shape, the blue-skyers called it. He’d seen a picture of the sea-dwelling creature and he saw why. Thin in one aspect to present minimum profile to fire or to high-v dust when it needed, broad and flat to accommodate the engines and the crew, and to lie snug against a carrier’s frame.
Black painted model. The real thing was grayer, reflective ceramic. But they didn’t advertise the coating. Thirty crew aboard when, please God, they got past the initial trials, thirty crew, mostly techs, mostly working for the longscanner. Core crew was four. The essential stations. The command personnel. The ones whose interfaces were with the active ship controls and the ones they had to risk in the tests.
The carrier dropped into a star-system and launched the riders—trusting that real space ships, launched like missiles, with more firepower than ability to maneuver at v, could do their job and make a carrier’s presence-pattern a far, far more diffuse element for an enemy’s longscan computers.
And trusting the human mind could keep going for four hours on intermittent hyperfocus at that v with no shields, only a constantly changing VR HUD display and a fire-power adequate to take out what threatened it—if reactions were still hair-triggered after that length of time immersed in virtual space; if human beings still had consistent right reactions to a dopplered infostream of threat and non-threat and every missile launched and potentially launched. A longscan of a fractional c firefight looked like a plaid of intersecting probabilities, overlaid cones or tri-dee fans depending on your traveling viewpoint; and you overran conventional radar, even orders from your carrier all you had was calc, com, and emissions.
Put an Artificial Intelligence above the human in the decision loop? Use a trained pilot for no more than resource to his own Adaptive Assist systems, with no power to override? Like hell. Sir.
He took a seat next to Demas and Saito, he cast a look down die row at Mitch and Jamil, and let the comer of his mouth tighten, surreptitious acknowledgment of their effort at diplomacy.
The committee filed in. Over fifty, Saito had said, and all male. Not quite. But the balance of the genders was certainly tilted. There were a handful of anxious execs from the designers and military contractors, from Bauerkraftwerke, who had designed the rider frame and some of die hardware; Lendler Corp, simulator software; Intellitron, which produced the longscan for both carriers and riders; Terme Aerospatiale, which did the Hellburner engines; and Staatentek, responsible for integrative targeting systems, computers and insystem communications. All of which could be pertinent. Lendler and Intellitron and Terme Aerospatiale were all Earth Company, but God only knew what side they were on. They’d doubtless been talking up the military examiners since last night: there’d been a UDC briefing.
“That’s Bonner,” Saito whispered, indicating a white-haired shave-headed UDC officer. Gen. Patrick Bonner, Graff understood. Tanzer’s direct CO. Ultimate head over R&D, not a friend. And what was he saying to an HI! contractor, both of them smiling and laughing like old friends?
People got to their seats. Bonner gave a speech, long and winding, a tactic, Graff thought, designed to stultify the opposition. Or perhaps his own troops. Not here to fix blame, Bonner said. Here to determine what happened and what caused it.
Introductions. Graff found himself focusing on the walls, on the topographic details of Bonner’s receding hairline, the repeating pattern in the soundproofing, on the nervous
fingers of the rep from Bauerkraftwerke, which tapped out a quiet rhythm on the table.
Statement of positions: Bauerkraftwerke insisted there was no structural flaw, that its engineers had reconstructed the accident and there was nothing to do with failure of the frame or the engines. Terme Aerospatiale agreed. Lendler said its simulation software wasn’t at fault. Staatentek, the patent holder of the local AI tetralogic, maintained that the random ordnance software, the communications, the targeting software, had not glitched. Nobody was at fault. Nothing was wrong.
But a redesign in favor of the tetralogic control couldn’t be ruled out.
Bangs and thumps again. “Ben?” Dekker called out. Ben had said he would be there. But he waked up in a corridor, on a gumey, with restraints he didn’t remember deserving. “Ben!”
A nurse patted his shoulder and said, “It’s all right, your friend’s just outside.”
He hated it when the illusions started agreeing with him.
He lay still then, listening to the rattle and clatter. Someone
said, from over his head, “We’re going to take you in,now,” and he didn’t know where. He yelled, “Ben! Ben!”
And somebody said, “Better sedate him.”
“No,” he yelled. “No.” And promised them, “You don’t need to.”
“Are you going to be all right?” they asked him.
“Yeah,” he said, and lay there getting his breath. But there was a whine of hydraulics and a clank, and they shoved him into a tube, telling him: “You have to stay absolutely still…”
Like a spinner tube, it was. Like back in the belt, in the ship. He lay still the way they told him, but it got harder and harder to breathe.
Flash of light. Like the sun. He heard a beeping sound that reminded him—that reminded him—
He screamed, at the top of his lungs, “Wilhelmsen, you damned fool—”
Fifteen-minute recess. Break for restrooms and the corridor and the hospitality table.
Mitch moved close enough to say, “They’re dithering, sir.”
Graff said, “Ease down. Not here.”
“They’re saying it can’t be flown. That’s a damn lie.”
“Ease down, Mitch. Nothing we can do out here.” He had Saito at his elbow. He could see Tanzer down die hall with Bonner, in hot and heavy discussion.
Demas came back from the phone in the office. Said: “A word in private.”
Graff said, “Mitch. Be good,” and took Saito with him, farther up die hall. “You get him?”
“Couldn’t get hold of Pollard. Talked to Higgins. The neurosurgeon wanted to run another brain scan. Higgins and Evans agreed. Dekker went off the edge, he’s under sedation. Higgins says he remembers the accident. Nothing further. He may never be able to remember how he got in that pod.”
“Damn.”
“You’ve got to tell it plain, Helm.”
“Break it wide open? We don’t know what the captain wants. We don’t know and if it were safe to use FleetCom he would.”
Saito said, “It can’t be worse. At this point I’d advise going past protocol. Worst we can do is alienate Bonner and a few handpicked legislators who came out here with him. This is a set-up. But it has records. The contractors are here defending their systems. And there may be a few line-straddlers in the senatorial party.”
That was a point. Bonner was already alienated. This was
likely a breakaway group of legislators Bonner favored putting in here to hear what Tanzer put together—but the fact that they let him talk at all was either a try at getting something incriminating out of him; or maybe, maybe there were members of the group that wanted more than one view. “God only knows what we’re dealing with. No Pollard, no Dekker. It’s a small hand we’re playing. All right. I’ll tell Mitch. Wraps are off.”
Past lunch and beyond, and Ben paced the waiting room. He’d read all the damned articles available to the reader, he’d become grudgingly informed in the latest in microbiologic engineering, the pros and cons of seasonally adjusted light/ dark cycles and temperature in station environments, the ethics of psychological intervention, and the consequences of weather adjustment in the hurricane season to the North American continent, not to mention five posture checks for low-g workers. He’d occupied himself making changes in a program he had stored on his personal card, he’d been four times at least to Dekker’s room to see if he was out from under sedation—he’d lost count. You could hear the clangor and rattle of lunch trays being collected—they had a damned lot of hurt and sick: people in here, people that had let a welder slip or gotten in the way of a robot loader arm, one guy who’d taken a godawful number of volts closing a hydraulic switch—he heard the gossip in the corridors coming and going, he was saturated with hospital gossip on who was missing what and how the guy with peritonitis was doing today and what was the condition of the limb rcattachment in 109?
While the orderlies were having lunch.
Another trip out to Dekker’s room. Can’t wake him, Higgins said. We’ve gotten the blood pressure down now. But he’s tired. He’s just tired—
“I’ve got a shuttle pulling out tonight—tell the lieutenant I’ve done everything I can do. I want to see him. I’ve got to get out of here.”
Higgins said, “He’s involved in a hearing this afternoon. I don’t know if I can reach him. I’ve left two messages with his office,’*
‘”Die hell! Doctor, my luggage is still lost, I’m out of money for the damn vending machines—I never got a cafeteria authorization and I’m sick of potato chips—I never asked to come here, Dekker and I never were friends, dammit, I don’t know why I’m his keeper!”
Higgins lent him five. Which wasn’t the answer he wanted, but it was lunch, at least, and he wasn’t going to offend Higgins by turning it down. Supper, he wasn’t even going to think about.
Tanzer’s turn with the mike. Nobody from the Fleet on the panel and no chance, Graff thought, of doing anything about that, except refusing to allow Fleet personnel to testify and trying to make an issue of it—but he was in a Position on that too, being one of the people on the list to testify; and he hoped the sweat didn’t show.
Demas’ advice, Saito’s, Armsmaster Thieu’s, for that matter, who might be called, was unanimous, and that it agreed with his only confirmed that if he was wrong and if he screwed this, the Fleet had to push him out the lock as a peace offering. That was one thing. He understood that kind of assignment.
But the thought that he could screw things beyond recall, offend the wrong senator, say something the media could get hold of and kill the riderships or bring the Fleet under UDC control—either of which would kill any hope of preventing the whole Beyond being sucked into Union’s widening influence—that was the possibility that had his bands sweating and his mind chasing random imaginations throughout Tanzer’s performance: he kept thinking, I’ve got to counter that; and, I’ve got to get that across to the committee, and, God, they’re not going to ask me the right questions.
No way Bonner’s going to let me answer those questions.
The general’s no fool. There’s something he’s got planned,
some grenade planted and ticking, only where is it? With Tanzer?
Tanzer was saying: “It’s the task of this facility to evaluate prototype systems and to take them to the design limits. The essential step before we risk human life is advanced, exacting interactive assist simulation. The second step is automated performance testing. And again, the simulations are revised and refined, and procedures and checklists developed in hours of Control Integration Trials, a process with which many of our distinguished panel are intimately familiar. They are also aware that in the world of high-velocity craft we are exceeding human capacities to cope with the infostream. We’ve overrun human reaction time. We’ve long since overrun conventional radar. Hence the neural net AA, which adapts and shapes itself threefold, for the pilot’s past performance, enemy’s past, pilot’s current behaviors—and the longscan technique that extrapolates and displays an object’s probability. We’ve developed dopplered communications and communications techniques to receive information faster than human senses can sort it, computer assemblies to second-guess the pilot on multiple tasks. The faster we go, the more the pilot becomes an integral component of the systems that filter information via his senses and the Adaptive Assists into the ship’s controls. Right now the human is the highest vote in the Hellbumer’s neural network; but we’ve long been asking the question at what point the sophistication of the computers to provide the information and the speed and power of the ship to react may finally exceed the engineering limits of the creator— that is, at what point of demand on human capacity to react to data, do we conceive a technically perfect and humanly unflyable machine?” ‘
The questioner, Bonner, said, “Have we done that, in your opinion?”
Tanzer said, “Yes. In my opinion, yes.”
“Go on.”
“The EC militia came here with a design within the
capabilities of the shipbuilding industry, and within the skills of its own pilots to operate. And the design for a companion ship they claimed could use off-the-shelf hardware and software—”
Damn him, Graff thought.
“—and serve as a high-velocity weapons platform. It was not, of course, operable as designed. The fleet insists that the unpredictability of human decisions without a tetralogic AI dominating the pilot-neural net interlink is essential to bigh-v combat. And we have six men in hospital and seventeen dead in the reaiworld discovery process.”
Hell.
“We*re putting crews into a ship that is in effect a high-v multilogic missile, with the sole advantage that the equipment is theoretically recoverable.”
There had been dead silence in the room. There was a small muttering now. Don’t blow, don’t blow, Graff wished Mitch and Jamil. We get our turn.
The gavel came down.
Tanzer went on: “A pilot with twenty years’ experience and no faults in the sims ran the course successfully for three hours, forty-six minutes and 17.4 seconds. The accident, which you’ve seen repeatedly, took place within seven tenths of a second. In the 17th second Wilhelmsen missed one random ordnance target on the approach and reoriented to catch it on the retreat, which he did. At this point telemetry leaves us to guess what passed through his mind— perhaps the recollection he was entering the probability fan of a target in his path. Pulse and respiration has increased markedly over the previous ten minutes. The armscomper and the co-pilot simultaneously indicated alarm as the maneuver started. The armscomper fired off-profile as required and missed. In the next .7 of a second the pilot’s telemetry recorded three muscle twitches in conflicting directions causing the craft to undergo successive shocks, and one extreme reaction which caused the pilot and the crew to lose consciousness and sent the ship into a tumble.
“Possibly—Dr. Helmond Weiss will provide more specifics in his testimony—but possibly prolonged hyperception to a microfocused event like the double miss caused a spatial confusion….”
Pens on Translates took rapid notes. Graff kept his notes in his head. And said to himself, on the memory of his own system entries: Wilhelmsen panicked.
“Seven tenths of a second,” Tanzer said, “from first mistake to the ship entering a fatal motion. 4.8 seconds later it clipped a targeting buoy at .5 light. There is no recoverable wreckage. Our analysis of events rests entirely on telemetry—in which, ironically, the speed makes the microgaps significant data fallouts.”
“Meaning the instruments couldn’t send fast enough.”
“Meaning our data-gathering had two phases: an infosift rapid transmission and a more detailed concurrent total transmission that was running 28 minutes behind the condensed report. Machines can’t transmit that fast. More Important, human neurons don’t fire that fast. We’re using “” human brains to improve a missile’s kill rate at a sustained rate of decision that exceeds human limits. Meaning we can’t think that fast that long. We’ve tried an Assisted handoff to a human co-pilot and it’s not practical. The “psychological stress is actually increased by the trade, and performance is critically reduced. Either we put an unexcepted AI override on the observed physical responses that preceded the incident, or we go back to design and put that ship Under a tetralogic AI with the pilot at the interface—as the heart, not the head, of the affair; or, unacceptably, we Outright admit that we don’t give a damn for human life, and we breed human beings to do that job and tape-train the fear and humanity out of them, the way they do in Union Space. There are no other choices.”
” Down the corridor to the vending machines, a cheese
fandwich and a soft drink. Cheese was edible. The fish
^Wasn’t even to mention. It had something green scattered
through it. Ben sat down, unwrapped the sandwich, tore the indestructible packaging on the chips and sipped his drink.
A guy came in, put chits in the machine. God, he didn’t want a couple of orderlies discussing kidney function during his sandwich….
But he caught the haircut and the uniform, took a second look, and found the shave-job staring back at him with sudden sharp attention.
“Pollard?”
The face almost rang bells, but he couldn’t place it. The haircut, pure rab, didn’t agree with the blue fatigues that said military. Civ docker, he thought. Then he thought; Dekker. Shepherd. And had a sudden notion in what packet of memory that face belonged.
“Mason?” he asked.
“Yeah!” the guy said, hands full. “Word is you’re here for Dekker, damn! How is he?”
“Like shit.” He indicated the place opposite him at the table and Mason brought his sandwich and his drink over and sat down. Ben asked, “What are you in for?”
“Therapy.” Mason wiggled the fingers of his right hand. “Gym floor jumped up and got me. —Dekker’s still bad, huh? He say anything?”
“Thinks he’s in the fuckin’ Belt most of the time.” Ben took a bite of cheese sandwich, thought about that shuttle leaving at mainday end, and how there wasn’t another til next week, wondered if there was a shortcut to the memory Graff wanted, and said, “Keeps asking for Bird and Cory Salazar. What in hell happened to him? Anybody know?”
Mason pulled a long face. “Just they pulled him out of a sim-pod bloody and beat all to hell. But we’d lay odds—” Mason looked at him about chest-high and stopped talking in mid-sentence. Mason filled his mouth with sandwich instead.
“—lay odds, what?”
Mason looked at him narrowly while he took time to chew the bite and wash it down with soft drink. “Nothing.”
“What, nothing? What’s that look mean?”
“You here as a friend of Dekker’s? Or officially?
“Look, I’m a programmer, not a psych. I was minding my own business on Sol One. FSO hauled my ass out here because Dekker named me next-of-kin. Lt. Graff hands me his personals, doesn’t tell me shit else, asks me find out what happened to him, and that’s where I am, trying to find out why he’s lying there seeing ET’s and angels, so I can get back to Sol One before my posting’s gone. What’s that look mean?”
Mason said slowly, “You’re not here on Tanzer’s orders.”
“I don’t know Tanzer. The FSO jerked me over on a hush-up and hurry. Humanitarian leave, on account of Dekker wanted me. What’s the UDC got to do with it?”
“Uniform you’re wearing isn’t exactly popular in some quarters.”
“So what are we? Union spies? Not that I heard.”
“Say Dekker wouldn’t be lying in that bed except for the UDC CO here.”
Ben took a look at the door. Nobody around. Nobody listening, unless they routinely bugged the vending machines. “Mason. This is Ben Pollard. Ben who was Morrie Bird’s partner. Ben whose ass your ship saved once upon a while. You seriously mind to tell me what the hell’s going on and why Dekker rates all this shiz?”
Mason swallowed a bit of sandwich and sat there looking at him and thinking about it. “Say it’s a real pressured environment.”
“Yeah?”
“The UDC doesn’t like Belters. You must be the exception.”
Belters who might be old, exiled rab, Ben thought, Shepherds who looked like Mason—that haircut wouldn’t get a security clearance from the UDC, but he didn’t say so. He said, carefully, “There’s some feeling, yeah, but I never ran into it. Went into Tl, computer stuff—in no pain until they snatched me here. What’s this about Dekker and the CO?”
“Tanzer’s run the R&D for the UDC insystem stuff since Adam was an Earther, he’s got his System, and his friends in high places, til the Fleet signed us in to fly for them. The UDC wanted to do the test and documentation through their facility—all right, they had the set-up and the sims and the knowledge of the suppliers and the technical resources; which is how R&D’s got their hands on the ships and put their guys in the seats, because the U friggin’ DC is trying to get the Fleet demoted to a UDC command.”
“I’ve heard that. Mazian’s all over the news trying to get funds. The opposition wants it with strings.”
“You’ve seen the big ships. But the secondary stuff the Fleet’s building—top secret stuff, fast. UDC’s never flown anything this hot. Design screw-ups, spec screw-ups, materials failures. They cut the budget which means they go to the drawing-board again and make changes—no mind it costs another 150 million for a study and an 80 mil legislative session that could’ve made up the difference—no, that’s fine, that’s going in the damn senators’ pockets and feeding die contractors. We had one glitch-up with a pump that wasn’t up to specs, we got another because security’s so damn tight the company making a mate-up device can’t talk to the company writing the software, you figure that?”
“Must be the programmer that did the EC security system.”
“Listen.” Mason’s finger stabbed the water-ringed table-top. “Right now they’re six months behind schedule and talking about one damn more redesign on the controls. The UDC bitched and bitched about sim time, said Tanzer’s ‘boys’ were the ones to do the test runs because they had the hours and the experience—you want to talk to me about hours? Shit, I’m twenty-seven, that’s twenty fuckin’ years I’ve lived on the Hamilton, and they give me 200 hours at nav? 200 fuckin* hours, you believe that? They won’t log anything you ran up before you were licensable at your post. I was nav monkey when I was seven, I was running calc when I was ten, I was sitting relief on the edge of the
Well when I was twelve, and then they say they’re counting only a quarter of the time our ships logged us—as a compromise because it was civilian hours? Ninety days a tun, thirty heavy, and on call 24 fuckin’ hours a day in Jupiter’s lap for longer than these sim-jockeys would hold up, and they give me 200 hours? I was 2000 plus on my last run out from R2!” “That’s crazy.”
“Yeah, but mat’s UDC rules. You only get hours for the time you’re logged on. Who logs on? Who ever logs on? You do your fuckin’ job, you’re too busy to log on, with a load coming and the watch rousting you out of your bunk at 2100 to check you’re where you think you are, because
. somebody thinks we got a positional problem, shit if I’m going to log on as officer of record and get my fuckin’ hours for the UDC. Same shit they’re pulling on the merchanters. You know why they don’t count real hours on us? Because the UDC’s got four pilots can claim real hours on a par with us, and last week they had five.” “The guy with Dekker’s crew?” “Wilhelmsen.” Mason leaned closer, said, “Listen, —”
‘ And stopped as a nurse came in and carded a soft drink. The nurse left. Mason said, “We’ve got a lot of pressure. You
‘ got maybe four, five hours at a run. Virtual space display. Neural net Assist. Real sensory overload. Hyperfbcus, non-Stop. And you don’t sub in some stranger in the last twelve ” hours before a run, you don’t have bad feeling between the pilot and the techs, you don’t plug in a guy with a whole different visualization system. You want to figure how much pressure Wilhelmsen was under to perform? Shit, he missed a target. He could’ve let it go. But he was too hot for that. He flipped back to get it, schitzed on where he was, and took three good guys with him. You know why Dekker’s in
I here? Dekker—Dekker told Wilhelmsen’s crew to their laces that he could have done it.”
ft- “Shit.”
“No kidding. Wilhelmsen’s navigator took severe exception, there were words—”
“Before or after they sent Dekker to hospital?”
“Let me tell you about that, too. Yeah, Dekker was in shock. He was watching it in mission control. But he didn’t need any hospital. They wanted him quiet. They wanted him not to say a thing in front of the senators and the VIPs they had swarming around the observation area.”
“They.”
“The UDC. Tanzer. They doped him down and let him out after they got the last of the VIPs on the shuttle out of here. And twelve hours later they haul Dekker out of the sim that’s been running for six—”
Evans walked in. Stood there a moment, then said, “Lt. Pollard. Getting the local news?”
Ben remembered to breathe. And shoved back from the table. “We knew each other, back when. Old news. —Nice seeing you, Mason.”
“Nice seeing you,” Mason muttered, and got up himself, Ben didn’t wait to see for what. He chucked his plastics in the bin and walked out, with a touch of the pulse rate and the cold sweats he’d used to feel in the Belt, when the Company cops were breathing damned close to them.
Infighting with the UDC? A major Reel project going down the chute and the blue-sky UDC fighting to get its boys in the pilot seat and the Earth Company militia under its command?
He wished he were in Stockholm.
“Lt. GraftY* Bonner said, and Graff got up from beside Demas, walked quietly to the table and swore to tell the truth.
“State your name, rank, citizenship, service and age,” the clerk said.
under Captain Keu, currently Helm Two on the ECS8, uncommissioned, age thirty-eight.” Heads perusing documents, drowsing on hands, came up
•nd looked at him with dawning close attention.
Gen. Bonner said, “Will you state your approximate actual age, for the record, lieutenant?”
Son of a bitch, Graff thought. “Actually, sir, I haven’t calculated it since I was fifteen. But I was bom in 2286, Common Reckoning, and the first EC president in my memory was Padriac Melton.”
“Would you agree you’re approximately early twenties, lieutenant, in terms of actual years?”
“I’ve no access to those records, sir. And it’s not relevant to my experience.”
“What is your logged experience?”
“Since I was posted to Helm—ten years, six hours a Shift….”
“Logged hours, lieutenant.”
**—conservatively, 18000 hours, since posting. Not counting apprenticeship. Not counting working during dock, which is “never logged.”
Bonner’s face was a study in red. “Logged records,
•i lieutenant. Answer the question as asked or be held in contempt.”
“As far as I know, there are documents behind those hours, sir. The Polly d’Or is likely somewhere between »Viking and Pell at the moment, and she maintains meticulous log records. Victoria’s whereabouts the Fleet commander could provide, if you’d care to query—”
“I doubt mis committee has the patience, lieutenant. And
.let’s state for the committee that your logged hours on Sol
” Two records are substantially less. Can we at least agree that
^you’re not a senior officer, and you were in physical control
ef the carrier during the test run?”
“General.” Salto’s quiet voice from behind him, mild registered on the faces of the panel. “Una Saito,
Com One, protocol officer on Victoria. —Lieutenant, as a matter of perspective, where were you born?”
Bonner said, “Ms. Saito, whatever your rank may be, you’re in contempt of this committee. Be seated before I have you ejected.”
Graff said, looking at all those frowning blue-sky faces, “Actually, sir, if it’s relevant, I was born on the sublighter Gloriana, on its last deep-space run.”
There was a murmur and a sudden quiet in the room. Graff sat there with his hands folded, not provoking a thing, no, and Bonner, give him credit, gave not a flicker.
“So you would maintain on that basis your experience is adequate to have managed the carrier on a critical test run.”
“I would maintain, sir, that I am qualified to take a starship through jump, an infinitely riskier operation.”
“You’re qualified. Have you done it?”
“Yes, sir. I have. Once on initiation, eighteen times on hand-off on system entry.”
“Yourself. Alone.”
“Helm on Victoria is backed by 49 working stations, counting only those reporting in chain of command to Helm.”
“I’ll reserve further questions. Senator Eriksson?”
“Thank you.” This from the Joint Legislative Committee rep. “Lt. Graff, Eriksson from the JLC technical division. Medical experts maintain that hyperfocus is not sustainable over the required hours of operation.”
“It’s routine for us. If—”
“Let me finish my statement, please. Medical experts have stated that the ERP Index indicates mental confusion— stress was taking its toll. As a starship pilot you have systems which defend against impacts. You have an AI-asslsted system of hand-offs. You have a computer interlock on systems to prevent accidents. Based on those facts, do you not think that similar systems are necessary on these ships?”
“Senator, all of those interlocks you describe do exist on
the rider, but let me say first that a starship’s autopilot override is at a 2-second pilot crisis query in combat conditions, the rider’s was set at 1 for the test, and that while the carrier does have effect shields, the size of the rider makes it possible to pass through fire zones in which the carrier’s huge size makes such passage far riskier. The armscomp override isn’t necessary, of course, because a rider’s available acceleration isn’t sufficient to overtake its own ordnance, but it does have a template of prohibited fire to prevent its ordnance hitting the carrier or passing through a habitation zone. The Al-driven autopilot did cut on when it detected a crisis condition in the pilot, which, as I said, was set at 1 second for this test. The AI queried the pilot—mat’s a painful, attention-getting jolt. It waited a human response—long, in the AI’s terms, again, 1 second before it seized control. It was already tracking the situation on all its systems. It knew the moves that had caused the tumble. It knew the existence of the next target. It knew it was off course, but it had lost its navigation lock and was trying to reestablish that. The buoy’s existence was masked for the test, but the AI realized it couldn’t save the test: it entered another order to penetrate the virtual reality of the test to sample the real environment, accessed information concealed from the pilot and reckoned the position of the target buoy as potentially a concern, and correctly assigned it as a hazard of equal value but secondary imminence to the threat of the ship’s high-v tumble. It reasoned that elimination of the target required the arms function, while evasion of the target required the engines, and that the motion exceeded critical demands of the targeting system. A subfunction was, from the instant the AI had engaged, already firing engines to reduce the tumble, and tracking other firepaths. It was doing all (hat, and attempting to locate itself and its own potential ordnance tracks relative to interdicted fire vectors—realspace friendly targets. Fire against me target was not set for its first sufficient window: the condensed telemetry of its calculations is a massive print-
out. The AI was still waiting for the window when its position and the target’s became identical.”
Took a moment for the senator to Figure what that meant. Then an angry ftown. “So you’re blaming an AI breakdown?”
“No, sir. Everything from the AI’s viewpoint was coming optimal. A human with a clear head couldn’t have outraced the AI in targeting calculations or in bringing the ship stable enough to get a window. A human might have skipped the math and discharged the chaff gun and the missiles in hope of destroying the object by sheer blind luck, but the AI had an absolute interdiction against certain vectors. It didn’t even consider that it could violate that— that range safety could have taken care of the problem if it arose. Somebody decided that option shouldn’t be in its memory, and this being a densely populated system maybe it shouldn’t have been. But that ship was effectively lost from the moment the pilot reacted to his crew’s apprehension. That communications problem was the direct cause of the accident—”
Bonner said, “Excuse me, senator. The lieutenant is speculating, now, far outside his expertise. May I remind him to confine himself to what he was in a position to witness or to obtain from records?”
He didn’t look at Bonner. “A communications problem set up by a last-minute substitution of pilots.”
The committee hadn’t heard mat. No. Not all of them had, at least. And from Shepherds he knew were back there in the room, there was not a breath, not an outcry, just a general muttering, and he couldn’t turn his head to see expressions.
The senator said: “What substitution, lieutenant?”
“The crew trained as a team. The Fleet pilot was replaced at the last moment by a UDC backup pilot the colonel lifted out of his own crew and subbed in on Fleet personnel. The Fleet captain in command objected in an immediate memo to Col. Tanzer’s office—”
Bonner said, “Lieutenant, you’re out of line. Confine yourself to factual answers.”
“Sir. That is a fact upheld by ECS8 log records,”
Somebody yelled from the back, “Do they show the Fleet laid those targets and set that random ordnance interval?” Several voices seconded, and somebody else yelled, “You’re full of it, Jennings, you don’t break an ops team! You never sub personnel! Tanzer killed those guys sure as a shot to the head!”
The gavel came down.
Somebody shouted, over the banging, “The Fleet set up the course. Check the records! The Fleet had orders to set the targets closer together to screw the test!”
And from nearer the front, as the MP’s and Fleet Security moved in, “Wilhelmsen screwed the test—those targets were all right! He lost it, that’s all!”
Bonner was on his feet shouting, “Clear the room. Clear the room. Sergeant!”
Institution green. Ben had seen green. Had eaten real lettuce, drunk lime (orange juice was better) and had real margaritas the way they could make them on Sol One, but he still wasn’t sure why inner system liked that color that mimicked old Tttnidad’s shower paneling, whether that shade was what Earth really favored. He sincerely hoped not. He honestly hoped not. But if Earth was that color wall to wall he’d take it over B Dock hospital corridors and vending machine suppers.
Dekker was still hyperbolic—swung on an intern, threatened the nurses, called the CO a psychopathic control junkie—
“How many fingers?” the intern had asked, holding up two, and Dekker had held up his own, singular—which was Dekker, all right, but it hadn’t won him points. The intern had checked his pulse, said it was elevated—
Damned right it was elevated. “You’re being a fool,” Ben said, while they were waiting for the orderly with the trank. He grabbed Dekker by the arm and shook him, but
Dekker wasn’t resisting. “You know that, Dek-boy? Use your head. Shit, get us out of this place!”
“Sorry,” Dekker said listlessly, “sorry.” And stared off into space until Ben shook him again and said, “You want to spend your life in here? You want a permanent home here?”
Dekker looked at him. But the orderly came in and gave him the shot. Dekker didn’t fight it. And after the orderly went away Dekker just lay there and stared past him.
*’Dek,” Ben said, “count their fingers. Walk their damn line. Remember how you got in that damn sim. Maybe the lieutenant can get you out of here. Just play their game, that’s all.”
And Dekker said, while Dekker’s eyes were glazing, “What’s the use, Ben? What’s the use anymore?”
That wasn’t like Dekker. Wasn’t like him at all. But Dekker was out men, or so far under as made no difference. They said people drugged out could hear you, and that under some kinds of trank maybe you didn’t have the same resistance to suggestion: Ben squeezed Dekker’s arm hard and whispered, right in his ear, “You’re going to do what they say and get yourself out of here. Hear it?”
Dekker didn’t give any sign he did. So it was out to the hall again, 1805h, and no likelihood Dekker was going to come around again this evening.
He might lie to the doctors, Ben thought, he might tell them Dekker had remembered, make something up—prime Dekker with it and hope Dekker had enough of his pieces screwed together to remember it. If he could figure out what they wanted to hear. Say it was Wilhelmsen’s crew that attacked him, that was the signal he was picking up. That was what the Fleet wanted.
But not what the UDC wanted. And what the Fleet wanted wasn’t any ticket to Stockholm, no.
Damn, damn, and damn.
Meanwhile Dekker got crazier, no knowing what drug they were filling him full of or what it was doing, and if he
could get hold of Graff he’d tell him check the damn medication for side effects, it wasn’t helping, it was making Dekker worse; he’d stopped trusting Higgins, and Evans hadn’t been available since yesterday—
He’d seen this before, damn if he hadn’t when an organization got ready to throw a man out with the garbage—some skuz in power had taken a position and bet his ass on it, and now the skuz in power had stopped wanting the truth, since it didn’t agree with the positions he’d taken—
So you trashed the guy who knew what was going on; you pinned the blame on him as far as you could; you shunted out anybody who might be sympathetic—Evans’ departure from the scene—and from where Ben Pollard was standing it didn’t look as if Graff or the Fleet had any serious influence left in the hospital—not enough at least for Graff to get his ass in here and ask Dekker himself, which signal he should have picked up from the beginning if he’d had any antennae up.
Not enough to do a thing about the stuff they were shooting into Dekker, who, if the Fleet knew it, wasn’t outstandingly sane to start with.
Triple damn.
“Good night,” some nurse said to him. “G’night,” Ben muttered, half looking around. Good night was what Earthers said to each other. Good night was where this guy had come from. The place of green and snow and rain. Tides and beaches.
He’d seen growing plants. Been into the herbarium on Sol One. Amazing sight. Guided tours, once a week. Keep to the walkway, don’t pick the leaves. But the Guides demonstrated how some of them smelled. Flowers would take your head off. Leaves smelled strange. He wasn’t sure he liked it. Grease and cold metal smelled one way, and that was home. This hadn’t been, hadn’t smelled quite edible, not quite offensive, not at all smell like anything he’d known. The ocean was what he wanted, not any damn woods full of
stinking plants: snow that was water freezing, not methane, or the scary stuff you got when a seal was chancy.
Snow was the result of weather, which was the result of Coriolis forces, which he understood, and atmospheric rollover, which he theoretically understood—he thought about that, pushing the button for another damned cheese sandwich, he thought about a city that was like helldeck without an overhead, with the tides coming and going against its edges and snow happening—that was what he thought about for company on the walk home.
Didn’t think about Dekker lying trank-dead in bed, or Dekker saying, What’s the use, Ben? What’s the use anymore—
When Dekker had hung on to life harder than any son of a bitch of his acquaintance. And when other sons of bitches were playing games with a defense system they called important—dammit, the services played games, with a war on? And the whole human race could find itself in a war zone if the Fleet didn’t keep the mess out past the Oort Cloud?
The Earth Company was playing damn games again, that was what, in another of its corporate limbs, the friggin’ Company and the UDC and the Fleet, that couldn’t find his luggage, was politicking away as usual and throwing out a guy like Dekker who was sincerely crazy enough to want to fly a ship like that into combat.
He’d fought fools in administration before. And they were beatable, except there was such a supply of them.
He’d fought Systems before, and they were beatable, if you knew the numbers, or you could get at them. But damn, he’d tried to stay clean. Even with that EIDAT system, that begged for a finger or two in its works. Use the numbers he had to get to Graff?
Graff couldn’t do anything or Graff would have done it. Possible even that Graff had screwed him from the start of this.
Get to Keu’s office? Not damned easy. And no guarantee the Fleet even at that level could do anything.
Go to the UDC CO and screw Dekker by blowing his own service’s hope of getting him back?
Walking the corridor to his so-called hospice quarters, he thought how if going to Tanzer would get him a pass out of here on the next shuttle, damned if it wasn’t starting to look like a good idea. Screw Dekker? Dekker was already screwed. So what was one more, given he couldn’t help the guy?
He held sandwich, chips, and drink in one arm, fished his card out of his pocket with his right hand and shoved it into the key slot.
The message tight was blinking on the phone, bright red in the dark. He elbowed the button on the room lights, shut the door the same way, and went to the nightstand to set his supper down—
Found his luggage, maybe. He couldn’t think of a call else he had in, unless Dekker’d taken a spell of something.
Couldn’t be he’d broken anybody’s neck. They had him too far out for that. Please God.
He plugged in his personal reader—never use a TI card in an unsecure device—and keyed up playback.
TECH/2 Benjamin J. Pollard
CTVSS/UDC 28 DAT 2
CURRENTLOC: UDC SOL2B-HOS28
1719JUN20/24 SN P-235-9876/MLR 1923JUN20/24
TRANSFER TO: ACTIVE DUTY: UDC SYSTEMS TESTING
RANK: TECH2/UDC SOL2D-OPS/SCAN G-5: PILOT RATING C-3 WITH 200 EXPERIENCE HOURS LOGGED.
REPORT TO: 2-DECK 229, BARRACKS C: JUN21/24/ 0600h: ref/ CLASSIFIED: OUTSIDE COMMUNICATION SPECIFICALLY DENIED.
He sat down. He had that much presence of mind. He punched playback again with his thumb, and the same damned thing rolled past.
Transfer? Systems Testing? Pilot rating?
Shit!
The committee wanted another go. Immediately. The shuttle was two days on its way from Sol One, due in at maindawn, and, informed it wouldn’t be held, senatorial demands notwithstanding, the committee decided to keep going through maindark, if that was what it took. You didn’t snag a senator for a five-day to Sol Two—no famous restaurants, no cocktail lounges, no ‘faculties1 the way they legendarily existed downworld: the senators had important business to do, the senators wanted out and back to Sol One and down to Earth and their perks and their privileges, and they’d talk with the company reps over gin and tonic the whole way back.
Graff had hoped, for a while, after things went to hell, that some few members of the committee might want to ask him questions over gin and tonic, if they had the clout to ask him in for a go-over; or rec-hall coffee, if they had the clout just to get past Bonner. He’d kept his phone free. He’d hoped until he got the notification of the resumption of the sessions—the committee wanted a chance to review testimony and wanted certain individuals to ‘stand by’ a call.
Demas and Saito weren’t on the list. Much and Jamil certainly weren’t. No audience. No guarantee mere would be any questions Bonner didn’t set up. Graff sat there tapping a stylus on the desk and thinking about a fast call to Sol One via FleetCom; but that was still no use—if the captain hadn’t noticed a shuttle-load of senators, contractor executives, and UDC brass headed to Sol Two’s B Dock, there was no hope for them; and if the captain hadn’t known something about the character and leanings of said senators and contractors and Gen. Patrick Bonner, Fleet Security was off its game. So the lieutenant was still left out of the lock without a line, and the lieutenant had to get his butt out
there right now and give the senators what they asked as best he could.
So the lieutenant in question put his jacket on, straightened his collar, and opened the door.
“Mr. Graff.”
Face to face with Tanzer.
“I’d like a word,” Tanzer said as he stepped into the hall.
“About my testimony?” He didn’t have an Optex, didn’t own one and it wasn’t legal for a private conversation; but he hoped Tanzer would worry.
Tanzer said, “Just a word of sanity.”
A trap? A smear, if Tanzer was carrying a hidden Optex. He could refuse to talk; he could tell Tanzer go to hell; but he had to face Tanzer after the committee was long gone. “Yes, colonel?”
Tanzer said, quietly, “You could screw mis whole project. You’re a junior, you don’t know what you’re walking into. And you could lose the war—right here, right in this hearing. I’m advising you to answer the questions without comment—no, I’m not supposed to be talking to you, and no, I can’t advise you about your testimony. By the book, I can’t. But forget that business in the office. We both want that ship. We don’t want it canceled. Do we? —Can we have a word inside your office?”
No, was his first thought. There were aides milling about down the hall. There were potential witnesses. But not knowing what Tanzer wanted to tell him could be a mistake too. Bugs, there weren’t, inside. Not unless the UDC was technologically one up, and he didn’t think so. He opened the door again, let Tanzer in and let the door shut.
Tanzer said, directly, “The companies aren’t going to
support finding a basic design flaw; that’s money out of
their pockets, do you understand me? That’s not what we’re
‘r- going to push for.”
», Tanzer and a 4-star? Politicking with a Fleet j-g? What in
hell was going on at Sol One? “I wasn’t under the impression that was seriously at issue.”
“You don’t understand me. Those companies don’t want the blame. They’re perfectly willing to put the accident off on the service. To call it mishandling—”
Oh-ho.
“A control redesign, existing technology—that, they’ll go for. As long as it’s our design change, out of our budget. You listen to me. This is critical. We’ve got some Peace-nows kicking up a fuss—they want to grab that appropriation for their own programs. They’re talking negotiation with Union. Partition of the trade zones. They’ve got some tame social scientists down in Bonn and Moscow talking isolation again.”
They’d talked it off and on for two hundred years. But Union was very interested in Earth’s biology. Very interested.
“They won’t get it.”
“They can dither this program into another five-year redesign with political deals. The Earth Company can end up deadlocked with the UN. We need the AI on top to let us get some successes with this ship—make it do-able, so we can go public as soon as possible. The thing can have another model, for God’s sake, build the old design and lose ships to your heart’s content, after we’ve got the first thirty out of the shipyards and trained pilots who know its characteristics. Prove your point and have your funerals, it’ll be out of our hands, but let’s get this ship online.”
“The effect will be training your pilots to pull it short—to worry when they’re taking a necessary chance. Combat pilots can’t have that mindset; and you can’t train with that thing breathing down your neck.”
“You’re not a psychiatrist, lieutenant.”
“I’m not an engineer, either, but I know the AI you’ve got won’t accommodate it, you’re talking about a very complicated software, a bigger black box, and that panel’s already crowding armscomp, besides the psychological factors—”
“Cut one seat. One fewer tech. The tetralogic’s worth it.”
“That’s ten fewer objects longscan can track, and that’s one damned more contractor with an unproved software and another unproved interface to train to.”
“That’s nothing getting tracked if the ship doesn’t get built, lieutenant, come down to the point. You’re not going to get everything you want.”
“If you want to cut a deal, you need to talk to the captain, I’m under his orders.”
“What are his orders?”
“To keep that ship as is.”
“Or lose it? You listen to me. You don’t have to agree. Just don’t raise objections.”
“Talk to my captain. I can’t change his orders.”
Tanzer was red in the face. Keeping his voice very quiet. “We can’t reach your captain.”
“Why?”
“We don’t know why. We think he’s in committee meetings.”
“Go to Mazian’s office, colonel, I can’t authorize a thing.”
“We’ve been trying to reach him, lieutenant, and we’ve got your whole damned program about to destruct on us, out there—you’d better believe you’re in a hot spot, and I wouldn’t take you into confidence, you or your recruits, but we can’t afford another shouting match for the committee. We’re trying to save this program, we’re not arguing the value of human hands-on at the controls: you know and I know there’s no way Union’s tape-trained clones are any match for real human beings—”
“They’re not that easy a mark. Azi still aren’t an AI with an interdict.”
“They’ll crack. They’ll crack the same as anybody else. Their program’s going to have the same limitations.”
to what they’re doing, that’s what they’re created for, for God’s sake—”
“You listen to me, lieutenant. I was in charge of the program that put your Victoria out there and I don’t need to be told by any wet-behind-the-ears what a human pilot is worth, but, dammit! you automate when you have to. You don’t hold on to an idea til it kills you—which this is going to do if you screw up in there. You can lose the whole damned war in that hearing room, does that get through to you?”
“Colonel, in all respect to your experience—”
“You go on listening. Yes, we had to have a show, yes, I subbed Wilhelmsen. Your boy Dekker’s got problems. Serious problems.” Tanzer pulled a datacard from his breast pocket.
“What’s that?”
“A copy of Dekker’s personnel file. It’s damned interesting reading.”
Damn, he thought. And hoped he kept anxiety off his face. It couldn’t be Reel records—unless mere was a two-legged leak in the records system.
“Reckless proceeding and wrongful death.” Tanzer pocketed the card again. “You want the reason I subbed him? There’s a grieving mother out there that’s been trying to get justice out of that boy of yours. Rape and murder—”
“Neither of which is true.”
“I had, if you want to know, lieutenant, specific orders to pull Dekker off that demo, because Dekker’s legal troubles were going to surface again the minute his name hit the downworld media—and it would have.”
“On a classified test. He lost a partner out in the Belt. The incident isn’t a secret in the Company. Far from it. Don’t tell me you didn’t know that, if you’ve got that record.”
“The name was going to surface, take my word for it. He’s politically hot, too damned hot to represent this program— that’s why I pulled him from that demo, lieutenant, and you
had to ignore my warning. Stick to issues you’re prepared to answer and leave Dekker the hell out of mis. Cory Salazar. Does the name mean anything to you?”
“ASTEX politics murdered Salazar.”
“Tell that to the mother. Tell that to the mama of the underage kid Dekker seduced out there.”
“That wasn’t the way it happened, colonel.”
“You want to tell Salazar’s mother that, —lieutenant? You want to tell that to a woman who’s on the MarsCorp board? I couldn’t put him in front of the media. I had to pull him off that team. You understand me? I’m trusting you
• right now, lieutenant, with a critical confidence, because, dammit, you’ve raised the issue in there and you’d better have the good sense to back off that point, waffle your way out of it and come into line if you want to keep your boy , inside these walls. If he gets to be a media issue, he’s dead. You understand that?”
“I understand Wilhelmsen died, I understand a whole ciew died for a damned politicking decision—”
“You mink I don’t care, Lieutenant? Your boy Dekker’s got a political problem and a mouth. And we’ve got a ship that kills crews and somebody’s mother breathing down our necks, wanting your boy’s head on a platter. You hear me? I didn’t screw Dekker. Your captain put him in that position, I didn’t. Damned right I pulled him from what was scheduled to go public, and damned right I shut him up before he got ‘• to the VIPs we had onstation.”
“By shoving him into a pod unconscious?” “No, damn you. I didn’t.”
Not lying, if he could rely on anything Tanzer said. Which he was far from sure of. “You told him why you ^pulled him?”
“Trust that mouth? No. And don’t you. Hear me? He got 7 fato that pod on his own. Leave it at that. Attempted
-|” suicide. Who knows? I won’t contest that finding. But you ;*htit it down with that. I know he’s popular with your emits. I know you’ve got a problem. But let’s use our
heads on this and you quieten matters down and get off that issue.”
Damn and damn. Call the captain, was what he needed to do. But they weren’t sure the UDC wasn’t eavesdropping. And if Keu was currently caught up in committee at Sol—
Ask Tanzer if FleetCom was secure? Hell if.
“We’d better get in there,” Tanzer said and opened the door and walked out.
Son of a bitch, Graff thought, what do I do? Demas is on board, Saito’s on her way up there….
He walked out, shut the door. Tanzer was down at the corner of the hall with Bonner, the two of them talking. He looked at his watch. One minute from late, the committee was about to convene. He could no-show, he could send Bonner word he was going to be late.
They could say any damned thing without hindrance then, finish the meeting without him in the time it would take to get FleetCom, let alone confer with the captain.
He’d faced fire with steadier nerves. He’d made jumpspeed decisions easier with a ship at stake. There was no assurance Tanzer had told him the truth, or even half of it. There was no assurance they had ever tried to get Keu, or Mazian, mere was no assurance it was anything but a maneuver to silence him and ram something through, and there was not even absolute assurance they’d told the truth about political influence stalking Dekker, but if it was, God, somebody had found a damned sensitive button to push. If the Fleet didn’t back Dekker, if the Fleet let Dekker take a grenade—the likes of Mitch and Jamil wouldn’t stand still for it, there’d be bloodshed, no exaggeration at all, the Belters would take the UDC facilities apart first and work their way over to Fleet HQ. Betray them—and there was no trusting them, no relying on them, no guarantee the metal and the materials were going to go on arriving out of the Belt, and damned sure no crews to handle the ships.
Now he didn’t know what Bonner was going to do in that hearing room. Or Tanzer. And he wasn’t in a position to
object—he felt he was heading into a trap, going in there at all, but he followed them in and sat down in a decimated ;ring.
Not a friendly face in the room. Not a one.
Bonner called the session to order, Bonner talked about high feelings over the tragic accident, Bonner talked about the stress of a job that called on men to risk their lives, talked about God and country.
Blue-sky language. Blue-sky thinking. Up to an Earther didn’t refer to phase fields, war was two districts on a plane surface in a dispute over territory, and the United Nations was a faction-ridden single-star-system organization trying to tell merchanter Families what their borders were: explain borders to them, first.
You had to see a planet through optics and think flat surface to imagine how ground looked. He hadn’t laid eyes on a planet til he was half-grown. He never had figured out the emotional context, except to compare it to ship or station, but there was something about being fixed hi place next to permanent neighbors that sounded desperately unnatural. Which he supposed was prejudice on his side. Bonner talked about a righteous war. And he thought about ports and ships run by Cyteen’s tape-trained humanity, with mindsets more alien than Earth’s.
Bonner talked about human stress and interactive systems, while he thought about the Cluster off Cyteen, where startides warped space, and a ghosty malfunction on the boards you hoped to God was an artifact of that space, while a Union spotter was close to picking up your presence.
Bonner got Helmond Weiss on the mike to read the medical report. Telemetry again. More thorough than the post-mortem on the ship. Less printout. Four human beings hadn’t output as much in their last minutes as that struggling AI had. Depressing thought.
Then the psych lads took the mike. “Were Wilhelmsen’s last decisions rational?” the committee asked point-blank. And the psychs said, hauling up more charts and graphs,
“Increasing indecision,” and talked about hyped senses, maintained that Wilhelmsen had gone on hyperfocus overload and lost track of actual time-flow—
… making decisions at such speed in such duration, it was pure misapprehension of the rate at which tilings were happening. No, you couldn’t characterize it as panic….
“… evidence of physiological distress, shortness of breath, increase in REM and pulse rate activated a medical crisis warning with the AI—”
“The carrier’s AI didn’t have time to reach the rider?” a senator asked.
“And get the override query engaged and answered, no, there wasn’t time.”
Playback of the final moments on the tape. The co-pilot, Pete Fowler, the last words on the tape Fowler’s, saying, “Hold it, hold it~”
That overlay the whole reorientation and firing incident, at those speeds. The panel had trouble grasping that. They spent five minutes arguing it, and maybe, Graff thought, still didn’t realize the sequence of events, or that it was Fowler protesting the original reorientation.
You didn’t have time to talk. Couldn’t get a word out in some sequences, and not this one. Fowler shouldn’t have spoken. Part of it was his fault. Shouldn’t have spoken to a strange pilot, who didn’t know his contexts, who very well knew they didn’t altogether trust him.
The mike went to Tanzer. A few final questions, the committee said. And a senator asked the question:
“What was the name of the original pilot?”
“Dekker. Paul Dekker. TVainee.”
“What was the reason for removing him from the mission?”
“Seniority. He was showing a little stress. Wilhelmsen was the more experienced.”
Like hell.
“And the crew?”
“Senator, a crew should be capable of working with any officer. It was capable. There were no medical grounds
there. The flaw is in the subordination of the neural net interface. It should be constant override with concurrent input from the pilot. The craft’s small cross-section, its minimum profile, the enormous power it has to carry in its engines to achieve docking at highest v—all add up to sensitive controls and a very powerful response….”
More minutiae. Keep my mouth shut or not? Graff asked himself. Trust Tanzer? Or follow orders?
Another senator: “Did the sims run the same duration as the actual mission?”
Not lately, Graff thought darkly, while Tanzer said, blithely, “Yes.”
Then a senator said: “May I interject a question to Lt. Graff.”
Bonner didn’t like that. Bonner frowned, and said, “Lt. Graff, I remind you you’re still under oath.”
“Yes, sir.”
The senator said, “Lt. Graff. You were at the controls of the carrier at the time of the accident. You were getting telemetry from the rider.”
“Yes, sir.”
“The medical officer on your bridge was recorded as saying Query out.”
“That’s correct.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means she’d just asked the co-pilot to assess the pilot* s»condition and act. But the accident was already inevitable. Just not enough time.”
Blinks from the senator, attempt to think through the math, maybe. “Was the carrier too far back for safety?”
“It was in a correct position for operations. No, sir.”
“Was the target interval set too close? Was it an impossible shot?”
“No. It was a judgment shot. The armscomper doesn’t
physically fire all the ordnance, understand. He sets the
priorities at the start of the run and adjusts them as the
situation changes. A computer does the firing, with the pilot
following the sequence provided by his co-pilot and the longscanner and armseomper. Hie pilot can violate the aimscomper’s priorities. He might have to. There are unplotteds out there, rocks, for instance. Or mines.”
“Did Wilhelmsen violate the priorities?”
“Technically, yes. But he had that choice.”
“Choice. At those speeds.”
“Yes, sir. He was in control until that point. He knew it was wrong, he glitched, and he was out. Cold.”
“Are you a psychiatrist, lieutenant?”
“No, sir, but I suggest you ask the medical officer. There was no panic until he heard his crew’s alarm. That spooked him. Their telemetry reads alarm—first, sir. His move startled them and he dropped out of hype.”
“The lieutenant is speculating,” Bonnersaid. “Lt. Graff, kindly keep to observed fact.”
“As a pilot, sir, I observed these plain facts in the medical testimony.”
“You’re out of order, lieutenant.”
“One more question,” the senator said. “You’re saying, lieutenant, that the tetralogic has faults. Would it have made this mistake?”
“No, but it has other flaws.”
“Specifically?”
“Even a tetralogic is recognizable, to similar systems. Machine can counter machine. Human beings can make decisions these systems don’t expect. Longscan works entirely on that principle.”
“Are you a computer tech?”
“I know the systems. I personally would not go into combat with a computer totally in charge.”
The senator leaned back, frowning. “Thank you, lieutenant.”
“May I make an observation?” Tanzer asked, and got an indulgence and a nod from Bonner.
Tanzer said: “Let me say this is an example of the kind of mystical nonsense I’ve heard ^all too much of from this
service. Whatever your religious preferences, divine intervention didn’t happen here, Wilhelmsen didn’t stay conscious long enough to apply the human advantage. Human beings can’t defy physics; and the lieutenant sitting behind bis carrier’s effect shields can maintain that spacers are somehow evolved beyond earthly limitations and make their decisions by mysterious instincts that let them outperform a tetralogic, but in my studied and not unexpert opinion, mere’s been altogether too much emphasis in recruitment based on entry-level skills and certain kinds of experience— meaning a practical exclusion of anyone but Belters. The lieutenant talks about some mysterious unquantifiable mentality that can work at these velocities. But I’d like to say, and Dr. Weiss will back me on this, that there’s more than button-pushing ability and reflexes that make a reliable military. There is, very importantly, attitude. There’s been no background check into volunteers on this project…”
