All right. But we’re not putting our only copy in, are we?
You couldn’t copy a personal datacard. Copying was supposed to screw it. EIDAT said. Writing outside your personal memo area was supposed to screw it.
But EIDAT said a lot of things about security to its customers that didn’t apply to its programmers: a few alterations to the 00 and the card would copy—if you had the Programming OS on the card, which wasn’t supposed to fit in the THEM area. But if you got creative with the allocations it would. Not that be didn’t trust the integrity of the UDC command here, not as if they just might have a watch on a Priority 10 right now that might notice him going out to the Exchange and buying a card with his remaining vending chits. But he could certainly sacrifice the chess gamecard—even in the paperless and police-controlled Belt, Customs had never quite apprehended gamecards and vidcards as write-capable media.
Yeah.
Quick sand-down of the gamecard edge on the nailfile he carried, a little application of clear nailpolish, available locally, at certain contact points—and you could write to it quite nicely. The cheerful, bright commercial label said it was a patented gamecard, a lot of worn-at-the-edges cards were out there that did show the critical contacts. EIDAT certainly didn’t want to advertise the procedure even to the police, because people with access to EIDAT systems code didn’t ever pirate gamecards. No. Of course not.
He stuck the datacard in the second drive and had his datacard copy in a nice secure place in quarters before he went out to the wall phone in the barracks main hall. He stuck his datacard into the slot. The write-function clicked. The new readout said CAP, MKT and MSFUNC. PRIORITY MS was blinking.
He keyed MS and the hash mark. It said, Report to Lt. Graff s office, 0900h.
And funny to say, when he tried to call over to Graff s office on a level 10, his level 10 authorization wouldn’t work. Son of a bitch, he thought, smug, amused, and furious. He had to do it on a lowly level 3. They had fried his accesses. And he was illegal as hell now, with that other card as a holdout. Question was—which service had pulled his security clearance.
So Graff wanted to talk to him. And it was 0848 right now. He had about time to get his ass over to Graff’s office, and find out such facts as Graff was willing to tell him about his transfer—
Which he was about to do when he caught sight of the two females lugging duffles into the barracks main hall— one dark-skinned, one light, one with a headful of metal-capped braids and one with a shave-strip of bright red curls.
My God...
He hung up. He had the presence of mind to take his card out of the slot. He stood there while two of the most unlikely recruits in the solar system came down the center aisle to the catcalls of the bystanders, saw them look right past him as if he was part of the landscape.
“Sal!” he called out. “Meg!” and saw two pairs of eyes fix on him, do a re-take of him and the uniform. Baggage hit the floor. The two best-looking women he’d ever slept with ran up, grabbed him, both, and kissed him breathless, one and the other.
Couldn’t hurt a man’s reputation. Whistles and howls from the gallery. He caught his breath, besieged with questions like what was he doing here, what was this about Dek, and how was he?
Questions without an easy answer. “What are you two doing here?” he asked, and got a stereo account: they’d gotten the word Dekker was in some kind of accident, they’d gotten word they were shipping a carrier out—
“God, that thing moves—” Sal said.
“So we rode it in and transferred over on the shuttle,” Meg said. “And these damn MPs have got to stall us up with questions, shit! of-fi-cers and VIP’s all over the place. —How’s Dek, for God’s sake, he got all his pieces?”
“Everything you’d be interested in. —You enlisted?” That didn’t fit his expectations, didn’t fit what he’d been reading in Dekker’s letter file.
“They hail us down,” Sal said, “in Jupiter’s own lap, a carrier pulls up and says, Have you got Kady? And wants to talk to us. Wants to talk to Meg. And Meg talks to the Man, and we get this news Dek’s in hospital—some kind of crack-up, they’re saying, and they’d kindly give us a ride insystem—”
Shepherds began to ooze over. One said, “Well, well, look what pulled in. Hiya.”
Meg looked. Sal did. Ben didn’t know the face, but Sal struck an attitude and said, “Well, well, look at familiar faces—they let you in, Fly-by?”
Laughter from all about. Not a nickname Fly-by seemed to favor. “God, how’d you get past?” Belter accent, Shepherd flash. “I thought they had criteria.”
“You skuz,” Sal said, but it didn’t have the edge of trouble. Sal put a hand on the skuz’s shoulder, gave his arm a squeeze. “Jamil’s a sumbitch, but he’s an all right sumbitch. This is Ben Pollard.”
“Got the whole team, but Morrie,” another said. “Damn on!”
“Ben, where d’ we sleep?” Meg asked. There were immediately other offers. “Take you up later,” Meg said. “I got a date at the hospital, if I can get the pass they said I had—”
“Get you to the room,” Ben said, and, catching two elbows, hauled them along to 10-A. Good-natured protest followed from the rear, but it died, and a couple of guys, Jamil included, overtook them at the door, set down the baggage and made themselves absent. “Thanks,” he said; discretion was not dead here. “Thanks,” Meg called back, while he was opening the door. He put a hand on Sal’s back, got Meg’s arm and got them inside, into privacy.
“What’ve we got?” Sal said. “Is my radar working, or what?”
“It’s working,” he said. “We got a sumbitch in charge, same damn sumbitch switched Dekker out and some guy in on a test run and cracked up Dekker’s crew, Dek-baby minks he’s in the fuckin’ Belt looking for Cory, and / got a meeting with Fleet Lieutenant J. Graff right on the hour.” He had a sudden idea, fished his temp hospital card out of his uniform pocket, and held it up in front of Meg. “This is a pass. You’re me, just put it in the slot at the main desk, won’t trigger an alarm and in the remote chance they should ask, tell ‘em Graff sent you. Dekker’s hi room 114. They pulled him out of a simulator beat to hell and concussed and there’s some chance he didn’t climb in there on his own, by what I can guess. Tell him straighten up. Tell him where he is, tell him I said so, tell him I’m going to break his neck next time I see him—I’ve got five minutes to make the lieutenant’s office....”
“Somebody did it to him?” Meg asked.
“Hey. You know Dek. There’s got to be a waiting list.” He recalled the atmosphere outside, and said, “We got to talk. Fast. Sit. The lieutenant can wait five.”
The sounds came and went. 2324. 2324. Dekker tried to remember. He said it to himself to remember. And maybe he was losing track of time, but it seemed to him breakfast had come and gone and Ben hadn’t come this morning. That upset him. Ben kept saying he couldn’t stay, and maybe he’d just gone wherever Ben had to go to. He didn’t even want to know where that was. He just wanted to go back into the dark if they’d let him alone, if there wasn’t anybody going to come but doctors with tests and interns and if there was nothing to do but lie here and listen to the halls outside.
“Dek?” Female voice. “Dek?”
Voice he knew. Voice that shouldn’t be here. So he was losing it. But if he was starting to hallucinate again maybe Ben wasn’t gone. He came up out of the dark to see.
She was scarily real, Meg was, leaning over him. “How you doing?” she asked, and he said, “Dunno,” because he didn’t. She smelled real, she looked real, she sounded real. She asked him, “Anything wrong with the jaw?”
“No,” he said, wondering why she asked, and Meg leaned down and kissed him the way she’d kissed him goodbye once, which caught him short of breath and half-smothered and no little dizzy as it went on, but if this was going to turn into one of those dreams, he didn’t mind, he’d go out cold this way.
He got a breath, finally, he had Meg up close
to his face, running a finger down his cheek, saying, “You been through some severely bad business, Dek. But it won’t happen again. I’m here. Sal’s here. Ben’s here. We won’t let the bastards get to you.”
Good news. He really wanted to believe it. But he didn’t let himself sink into the fantasy all the way. He only flirted with the idea, asking warily, “How’d you get here?”
She settled her hand on his, gave his fingers a squeeze. “They sent to me in the Belt, said, You got a friend in trouble, you want to come, and I said, Sure. Why not? I could do with a change.”
So she wasn’t leveling with him. That could only mean his subconscious couldn’t think of an answer. Second question: “What about Sal?”
“Sal said she couldn’t trust me on my own, said she’d keep me honest.”
Her fingers on his felt warm and solid. She was in Shepherd civvies, she had this fondness for big earrings and he didn’t remember the ones she was wearing. He wasn’t artistic, he couldn’t make up ones he didn’t know, spiral and gold with some kind of anodized bar down the middle. He couldn’t make up the blue eyeshadow and the pink. He wouldn’t put those colors together with red hair. But it looked good. She did. And her really, truly being here was crazier than his thinking she was.
Third question. “Where’s Ben this morning?”
“Ben’s in the lieutenant’s office. Ben’s real pissed. Something about his security clearance and him supposed to be in Stockholm—didn’t altogether make sense, but he was going to go complain. —What’s this about you arguing with a simulator?”
Panic hit him. But he didn’t know why he should be afraid of Meg. Or Ben. Or why mere was a gap around his recollection of the sim room. Sounds. Mag hum and sudden motion. Ominous. Something had happened under that sound.
“There’s been a hearing,” Meg said, “senators all over the place. They’re leaving. Ben asks if you’d like to tell them anything. Says if you could tell them how you got banged up it might be a good idea.”
Senators. Mission control. Rows of instruments. Instruments on the sim panel, just the same.
“Shit,” he breathed, feeling a cold sweat come on him. But it was all right, the memory was gone again. He willed his heart to slow down, stop fluttering like that: they filled him full of drugs if they caught his pulse up, and if they caught Meg here, Meg could be in trouble—Meg might not come back. People went out the door and you didn’t know if the Company’d let them back.
No. Not the Company. Tanzer. The UDC, that ran this place.... “Ben explained a skosh,” Meg said, rab-speak, long time back, it seemed now. The Inner System had changed so, even in the few years he’d been to the Belt and back. “You don’t got seriously to say: I know about the accident. But you got to get out of here, Dek, you got to get yourself straight. Ben said I should ask you the date.”
“2324,” he said, and found it suddenly worth a laugh, with what breath he could find. “2324.” Meg didn’t know why that message from Ben should be funny and he couldn’t explain, he hadn’t the coherency to explain, he kept seeing the readouts in the spex in front of him, green and red and gold, and, dammit, he could make it, he could’ve made it, but when he tried to imagine past that point the controls wouldn’t work, weren’t going to work again until he could get his hands on them and change those numbers....
Meg shook his shoulder. “Heads up, Dek. First thing you got to do, you got to get straight. Ben said you didn’t get into that pod on your own. That you should remember for him. He really needs that, Dek.”
Sim room. Noise. And the memory just stopped. Got his pulse rate up again. “Can’t. Can’t get hold of it, Meg. Meg, —”
She leaned close and whispered in his ear, “You want to go back to barracks and you and me do a little rec-time? Mmmn?”
Offer like that—from Meg—could raise a corpse. Meg’s touch on his cheek could. He thought about the barracks, had a sudden cold jolt, thinking of Meg there, and Ben and Sal; and not the faces he remembered. A whole puzzle-piece of his life just lifted out, gone, and another one clicked in, not the same shape, there were still dark spots—there’d been another puzzle-piece before that; but it was close, it was damned close. Pete and Elly and Falcone, they wouldn’t have understood Meg. Wouldn’t have gotten on with her, not easy. Might not get on with Sal or Ben. Cory either. He looked Meg in the eyes and remembered his blood pressure, realized he wasn’t wearing the sensor.
Several things clicked into place. Where he was. How he hadn’t gotten his shot this morning, either. How he was clearer-headed now than he’d been since—
More panels. Instruments red-lighting. Alarms screaming. Inner ear going crazy.
“You all right, Dek?” Finger along his cheek. “You’re white. You want me to call a doctor? Dek?”
He shook his head, suddenly sure of that. He sucked in a breath and got an elbow up under him, to see if his head was going to spin. Weak, God. Meg was trying to help him, saying he should lie down. But he didn’t think so, he had a bad feeling about lying down and letting Meg call a doctor, they’d give him shots again and he’d go to sleep and go on sleeping—
He shoved up onto his hands, swung his feet over tile edge. The room was tilting, felt like the pod, but he kept his eyes on the line where the wall met the floor. He sat there getting his breath and making the room stay steady.
“You sure you better not get back in that bed?”
He moved his arm. That shoulder had hurt. Didn’t now, as much. He kept his eyes on that line and said, “Want to get up, Meg. Just give me a hand.”
She did that. He didn’t need it to lean on. He just needed it steady. Second reference point. He made it to his feet, risked a blink, then shut his eyes and stood there a moment. He opened them and took a step, with Meg’s help. “Shot to hell,” he muttered. “Too much zero g.”
“Does that to you,” Meg agreed. “Going back to it?”
“Inner ear’s playing me tricks.” Another step. A third. He took a breath, let go her hand and took a fourth.
“They ought to have had you walking. Especially a spacer. Especially you. What’re the doctors worth in this place?”
A moment of vertigo. He got it back again. “Meg, how in hell’d you get here?” Months to get in from the Belt. They’d told her he was in trouble? Time threatened to unravel again. Except—
“Just caught a passing carrier. You got people real worried about you, Dek. Important people.”
Carrier could make that passage in a handful of days. Better than that, the rumor was. And a carrier pulled Meg out of the Belt? Out of a berth she’d risked her neck to get? “Meg, make ‘em send you back, don’t get mixed up in this, I don’t want you, I don’t want you here—”
“Hell if, boy-doll. Anyway, I signed the papers. Going to make me an officer—”
“Oh, shit. Shit, Meg!” The room went spinning. He just stared at Meg’s face for a reference point and kept his feet and knees from moving. “You were where you wanted.”
“Yeah, well. It’s not all al-tru-istic. —You want to sit down, Dek?”
“No.” A shake of his head that risked his balance. “No. I’m all right. I need to stand up. They won’t let me stand up. Have I got any clothes in that locker?”
Meg looked. He didn’t dare track on her. She said, “No.”
“Meg, I want you to go to the lieutenant....”
“Graff?”
“Graff. I want you to go to him—” The place could be bugged. But there was nothing else to do. “I want you to tell him I need help. I don’t trust what they’re giving me. I want out of here.”
“This then or now, Dek? Who’s doing this?”
He tried a step and another one. His heart was pounding. Sounds came distant and strange. He walked as far as the door, opened it, and gambled his stability on a look at Meg. “You remember your way out of here?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll walk you to the door. Five on ten I don’t get that far. But you’ll know, then,
won’t you?”
“Shit, Dek.”
“Yeah.” He took her arm. She grabbed his hand. “Let’s walk, huh?”
‘ ‘ ‘
“Aboujib,” Graff said, and put out his hand for a non-reg handshake. Dark-skinned, exotic as they came to Inner System eyes, and by Ben Pollard’s recommendation and the enlistment records, a Company-educated disciplinary washout who’d gotten another kind of rep among the Shepherds. Jamil had been by to give him a quick word. Pollard had shown up for his appointment with Aboujib in tow—one Meg Kady was ‘visiting Dekker’ on Pollard’s pass (”It’ll work in the lock,” Pollard had said, with airy disregard of UDC security, but Pollard was not unconcerned, Pollard had just smiled, put a thoroughly stripped personal card on his desk and said, “I’m screwed, sir. Do you think you could just possibly get somebody to do something about this? They just put me in your command, sir, I’m UDC, and I’m mortally worried the colonel’s going to want to talk to me,”)
Hell in a handbasket. As the Earthers said. And here was file rest of Dekker’s former crew, in on the Sol One shuttle without a word of explanation, warning, or advice what to do with them?
He wasn’t highly pleased with the captain right now. Not pleased with Tanzer, not pleased with the situation, and not pleased to know one of the pair was loose in hospital on somebody else’s Fleet pass.
But Jamil had been damned cheerful, saying, “We got us a couple of recruits, lieutenant. —Mitch is going to the.”
It could give a man the feeling something was passing by him. And that things were careening out of control. “Welcome in, Aboujib. Scan-tech, is it?”
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