Fact was, skuz as this whole place was, somehow the echo and the racket and the coming and going in the barracks fit him like an old sock—fact was, he liked the racket and the activity and the accent he’d grown up with echoing off the bulkheads. Pressure here was from fools higher-up, different than TVs carpeted, high-voltage corridors, where competition was cutthroat and constant.
But this wasn’t any damn mining run this group was prepping for. At TI your highest chance of fatal injury was sticking your finger in a power socket or ODing on caffeine. Here—
God, they weren’t even sure the damn ship would work. Rumor out in the hall was that they were going max v with the program and they still hadn’t proved any crew could run it once—let alone fly it in combat.
That was crazy. And he wasn’t—even if insanity got the rest of them.
Sal—go out there and turn herself into a missile? Sal and Meg end up in a fireball? Hell if, if he could stop it. But he didn’t know how to; couldn’t stop Meg, damn the woman, if Dekker couldn’t. And if Meg went, Sal went, and if Sal went—
Oh, hell, he was not a fool. There were women in Stockholm. There’d be a way to get down there, even through Fleet Command—if he just got Aptituded into strategic technical.
Stockholm women wouldn’t ask stupid questions like What’s the Belt? They’d have university degrees and stand and watch the tide come in and the snow fall and... think it was all damned ordinary.
Hell. Bloody hell with women. Dekker was saner. At least Dekker knew what he wanted.
CHAPTER 10
INSERT card please,” the neutral voice said. The phone clicked. Dekker held the receiver and waited. And waited. Meg and Ben and Sal were in Testing. His day didn’t start until 1015, when he had an appointment with Evaluations. Which meant he could go to the gym to try to settle his breakfast and his nerves; or try a phone call, see if he could get a personal call through to Sol One, on FleetCom, in spite of the security crackdown.
“Ens. Dekker.” Human voice this time. “Is this an official call?”
“I’m trying to call my mother.” He hated to sound like a strayed six-year-old. Mother always felt strange to him. Mama he’d long outgrown, though it came naturally to Belter ears. “It’s a next-of. There was something on the news. —Look, can you put me through to Lt. Graff? He knows the situation.”
“—I’m not being obstructionist, Ens. Dekker. I’m aware of your situation, but I am required to get an authorization for personal calls.”
God, everyone in the solar system knew his business. “Yeah, well, can you do anything, FleetCom? The lieutenant’s not outstanding easy to find this morning.”
“I’ll page him.”
“Everybody’s paged him,” Dekker muttered. “I’ll card in every little bit, I’m going down to gym 3A.”
“I’m sorry. The gym is now off limits to Fleet personnel. Use the one on 3-deck, section 2.”
“How do I get my clothes out of the locker in 1A?”
“Check with the office on 3-deck.”
Everything was on its ear. “Thanks,” he said glumly, and went four sections and took a lift in—it was about as much exercise as he wanted, just walking it. But one thing he’d learned in his tour in the Belt, if you could crawl to the gym, you crawled there and worked out; and if you got the spooks or the nerves—you went there and burned the chill off, you didn’t let your mind go in loops—never let that start, not when you worked in cold, dark places, with things that went bang all too commonly.
The office there had his gym clothes, everything in sacks with old locker numbers. They had his name on the gym records. They had lockers already assigned to him and his crew....
He hadn’t had a run of things that worked in weeks. It gave him a moment of ridiculous cheerfulness. He had the whole gym to himself for the hour, everybody else being in sims or in special briefings—he wasn’t fondly looking forward to his own session with the meds upcoming. Warm up the sore spots and go in there with the adrenaline burned out of him, was the plan—lunch on carbohydrates and go into Evaluation at 1300 warmed-up and hyped, and blow hell out of their damn tests... he could do it. The doctors had kept him flat on his back too long, he’d dropped five kilos on the hospital food, and Custard Charlie Tyson had gotten a couple of good hits in, but he could do it if he could get the chill out of his bones.
Light workout with the hand weights raised a sweat.
Coordination was shot. That wasn’t good. He leaned on his knees a moment, trying to get his wind back and the rubbery feeling out of his arms, getting madder and madder at the meds, at the UDC, at the Fleet that had busted Graff over to a desk job and put in a bastard with an Attitude—
Temper wasn’t helpful. Demas would say that. Calm down, Dekker. Use your head. Adrenaline’s for speed, not stomach acid.
Yeah. But it didn’t help when the knees wanted to cave in, when you had serious worries about three fools who’d gotten themselves into a Situation for his sake, and had a CO who’d flat warned him he didn’t give a damn for their survival—
Stomach acid, hell, he wanted to beat the shit out of Porey, that was why he was shivering. And if he did that, with all the esoteric consequences of people he knew and didn’t know, it wouldn’t stop bastards from being bastards, and wouldn’t get Porey out of here, he’d only make it worse.
He didn’t want to be in this situation. He didn’t want to be anybody anyone else relied on for anything: he was schitz as hell. He was crazy. Ben knew it. He didn’t see why Beet Command couldn’t see it. He didn’t know why he’d ever been made an issue, or put where they’d put him, except the Shepherds had needed somebody crazier than they were to press their differences with the insystemers— and people who wouldn’t have given a damn about him back in the Belt, found a use for him here. He wasn’t Paul Dekker to them: he was this to one group and that to another and nobody really knew shit about him....
Hi, Dek, good to see you, Dek, how you doing? He couldn’t stand it any more—because Ben was right, they didn’t know him, didn’t know he was a screw-up, a damn dumb pusher-jock who didn’t think before he opened his mouth. Only value he had to anyone, the fact that his nerves jumped faster than average. Only thing he was good at, that ship—that was all that had mattered to him; Pete and Elly and Falcone had had themselves, and they’d gone together— the Fleet had thrown them together, they’d tested high, that was all. And they were good and they’d worked together, but he was burned out this morning, he didn’t even know whether he’d ever felt anything with them but comfort, and that was cheap—
He didn’t know why Ben had decided to take the damn test this morning. Ben had skuzzed out on him. If Ben had held out, Ben might have persuaded Sal and Sal might have reasoned with Meg—
Like hell. He hadn’t seduced Meg out here. At least Meg and Sal weren’t his fault. The ship had done that. Some lying bastard in the Fleet had done that, who’d told Meg they’d give her a chance—
Yeah. A chance. Thanks.
Drug made you seriously spaced. You had sensor spots patched all over you, in places that made a body most emphatically wonder if it was procedure or the femme tech having a few loose circuits of her own—
“Do it where?” she remembered asking. But the examiner, that was a guy, nice-looking greyheaded man, asked her to match up all these shapes and holes—God, she hadn’t done this one in years. “I’m not good at this,” she said. “I don’t fly little cubes.”
Neither did he, he said. At least he had a sense of humor. So she ran the test and she tracked on discrimination stuff that flashed on screens, they moved her to another station and belted her in and the computer spun her around and around—easy piece, nothing hard at all. Til the floor dropped out from under her and then the thing went through its paces.
Wanted you to draw a straight line? Right.
Wanted you to get up and walk one?
Yeah. Maybe.
Sit in the spin chair again. Wait for the light and press the
button while the chair spins?
Siren blast. Right before the light flash.
Dirty trick, sumbitch. Dirty trick. Flash again. Flash, flash. Pause. Flash.
Hold the yoke and the toggles, make the VR lines meet? This was a good one. Hadn’t done this one before....
Weight escaped his balance and bounced. Dekker ended up on one knee, caught a breath and waited for the room to stop spinning before he went to pick it up and rack it and lock it in. Good show he was going to make for the meds in an hour. He drew long breaths, sat down and felt after the towel to mop his face.
Stars came out of a vast dark. Lights on the panel glowed with information....
It was in his head, the same as, in the Belt, you got to seeing rocks in your sleep, not rocks as they existed in the deep dark, but the way they were in the charts, the courses they ran, falling sunward, faster and faster, and then more and more slowly outward—
He wiped the sweat that stung his eyes. He heard somebody come in, challenged at the office for numbers and names. “Yeah,” he heard someone say, far away and a door shut...
Echo. Door opening and closing. He’d seen a shape. He’d talked to someone. But he couldn’t remember to whom. He chased the memory. But the voice that came back lacked all tone:
Just checking. Do what you were doing....
Who in hell would he take that answer from?
Piece of nonsense. He could screw this test. They wanted him to discriminate a damn lot of advancing lines and dots? Easier if the sensors didn’t itch.
He muttered, “Quick way to solve this. Who programmed this?”
Examiner said, “Don’t talk.”
“This is a piece of shit, major. Begging pardon.” Zap. “Damn arcade game.”
“Watch that one.”
“This is fuckin’ armscomp! I’m not testing for this—”
Zap.
“You’re not damn bad, lieutenant... But you’re not real modest, either.”
“I’m damned good. But I’m not killing things.”
“You have a moral objection?”
He put hands and eyes on autopilot and left them to search for screen-generated threats. At definable intervals. Random number generator in the virtuals, for God’s sake. “I got a moral objection. I got a moral objection to getting shot at.”
“Exactly what we’re looking for.”
He thought about that reasoning. He thought about screwing the test, while he was zapping stupid dots. Faster now. “Screw it, you severely got a pattern in here.”
“I’ve been telling them that.”
“Tell you something.” Zap. “I’m supposed to be in Stockholm. Somebody skuzzed my records.” Zap. “Matched me up with the lunatic.” Zap. Zap-zap-zap. “Oh, hell.”
“See? Not all a pattern. You missed that one. Getting cocky, were you?”
Faster now. “Son of a bitch,” he said.
“You have two hands, two keysets. Brain can do both operations. Hands can. How good are you?”
“Damned moonbeam partner of mine,” he muttered. “You give me programming. I’m telling you—anywhere else is a waste—” Zap. “I don’t want combat. —I know what this mother’s doing—”
Zap/zap/zap—
Hand on the other pad. Interrupt to Command level and invoke the chaos o/i off the internal generators. Obsolete as a security device, but certainly an improvement on this antique.
Resume. Let them figure that one. Let their techs come in and patch it if they didn’t like it.
“Where did you get that code?”
“Telepathy,” he said. “Sir. I told you. I belong in Stockholm.”
Watch the lights, track the dot, do you have any blurring of vision, Mr. Dekker?
Have you had any headaches?
Stand here, stand there, look at the light, bend over, Mr. Dekker...
He escaped with a grudging Release on his card and an admonition to take his mineral supplements, got to a phone outside the med station and put the card in to check the readout for messages. Lunch, he thought, might bring people to check then- messages. Might get a phone call, however muzzy, from Meg, telling him how she was doing.
None from Graff; none from Meg or Ben or Sal. No authorizations. Just a reminder of his appointment in Evaluations.
And a note from the gym that he hadn’t carded in his preferred time slot and was he interested in team volleyball?
Hell.
Marine guards at every intersection. Corridors everywhere had a decided chill. God, there were even guards in the messhall....
He started in, saw Mitch and Pauli and the guys at the tables and they saw him.
Upset him. He couldn’t say why. He walked by for politeness’ sake—”Sit down,” they said, offering him a chair. But he couldn’t face lunch of a sudden, in this place—too many faces in the room, too many people trying to be friendly who didn’t know all that was going on with him, and the guards and the UDC watching him from the other end of the room. He muttered, “No, I’m on medicals right now, just time for a soft drink, thanks.”
“Got anything back on the tests?”
Wasn’t a thing stirred in C-barracks but what everybody was in it. “No. Not yet.” He patted the back of Mitch’s chair and made his escape to the rec-area foyer, where he could card a soft drink and a granola bar that tasted like cardboard and hit his stomach like lead.
They probably were talking about him back mere. And he couldn’t talk to them, couldn’t deal with them until he knew what he was, whether he was going to clear the tests himself, whether his partners were passing theirs—he wasn’t anyone, until he knew who he was working with, what he was, where he’d be, what they’d assign him to—
Fly again, yeah. Porey would see to that. Front of the line-up. Or the bottom—at Porey’s discretion. He’d opened his damned mouth, he’d forgotten for a critical second he had partners who could be in danger from what he did or promised—
Couple of UDC guys came over and carded a candy bar. Names were Price and McCain. Techs. They hardly even looked at him, but he was sweating. He kept thinking, If I’d kept my mouth shut, if I’d done what the colonel wanted, if I’d only once ducked my head and played the game—
Tray banged somewhere. The room felt cold. His mother had said, Paul, what is it with you? Why do you always end up in the middle of it?
He wished to God he knew that. He wished to God he could go over there with the other guys and sit down and be what they wanted him to be, but he couldn’t even tell them what he’d done or what he was waiting to find out—
Please God, they’d Aptitude somewhere down the list, somewhere out of immediate usefulness, and he could go maybe to Chad’s crew, patch things up with them, he couldn’t think of a match-up else he could make that might have a chance. He should have offered that to Porey, Porey wasn’t crazy—he didn’t want to lose another ship, for God’s sake: Porey probably would have called it a good idea— good for morale, pull the program together. UDC and Fleet.
He should still propose that to Porey—talk to Chad’s guys himself in advance, if he could get them to talk to him...
God, why couldn’t he think about people? He was all right with machines, all right with anything that reacted in just one way when you touched it—-he could understand that. He just—
couldn’t figure how to stop himself before he said things. When he opened his mouth it was wrong, when he didn’t say anything it was wrong, he never got it figured out, some people just understood him and most didn’t, and the ones that did were always in trouble because of the ones that didn’t. Sum of his life, that. Evaluations said he was smart. So why couldn’t he get that right? Like go in there and apologize to Porey and take what he had coming?
Because when he walked up against a guy like that something went snap inside, he went hyper and he couldn’t think, that was the whole damn problem—
So calm down, don’t do that?
It was why the Fleet had recruited him, it was what
they trained him to do, split-second, hyped and half crazy, and they wouldn’t understand he didn’t come with an off switch...
Except maybe Graff understood. But Graff wasn’t answering pages today...
Damn him.
A little hyped. They said, You can relax now. But there wasn’t any sleep. Just the boards, alive with lights. Hands knew where to go and went there. Hell of a way to teach. But they said, “This is a sim tape. Familiarization. It won’t prioritize for you. Just give you the handedness of the boards....”
“Got it, yeah. No trouble.”
“Don’t fight the sims, Kady. You want to bring that pulse down.”
“Yeah. I’m not fighting it.” Happy as hell. God. I want this thing, don’t want to screw it up—God, I don’t want to screw it—
“Calm.”
“Yeah, yeah.” So don’t get excited, Kady, don’t go after it, ride with it, just float and enjoy it—
“Lot better, lot better, Kady. How’re you doing?”
She laughed. Laughed like an idiot.
“You all right there? You know what you’re doing?”
Her hands were reaching. She wasn’t doing it. But she didn’t object. The sequence made complete sense. “Jawohl, mate, piece of easy, there.”
Clumsy direction, then. Her hand shook. “Shit!”
Boards went dark. Direction stopped. She grabbed for the B-panel and the fuse conditions, and the examiner said, “Abort, abort, it’s all right.”
“What did I do?” Her heart was going half light. The drug made her light-headed and she hated the sensation.
“Tape error. Not yours. Relax.”
Made her mad. They had no right to screw up. But you didn’t get mad while you were at the boards, you paid attention. All attention. Save mad for later.
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