Devil to the Belt (v1.1)

by C. J. Cherryh

  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, restrainedly: “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.

  Graff. Fleet Lt. Jurgen Graff. Carrier pilot, junior grade.

  “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 Graff’s 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 hav
en’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 Graff’s 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 this 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.”

  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 Graff’s 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 what’s 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 all 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. “I’ll 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, big-time, interactive logic stuff you ha
d 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. ..