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“You mean I lie.”
“I mean the Joint Legislative Committee’s expert analysts say not. The changing situation over time—read: the commanders of individual ships making decisions without communicating with each other—would make chaos of strategic operations. So it can’t be done. End report. The JLC analysts say it’s not appropriate use of the riders. The legislators don’t like what these ships can do, combined with the—irregular character—of the crews we’ve picked to handle them. These crews are, historically, trouble Earth got rid of. Earth’s strategic pla
“They’ve always known that.”
“The ordinary citizen hasn’t. The average businessman can get a voice link to Mars now. Or the Belt—if he wants one.”
Lag-com was a skill, a schitzy kind of proceeding, talking to a voice that went on down its own train of logic with no regard to your event-lagged self. That was one of the reasons senior Com and psych were virtually synonymous. And Earth hadn’t realized until now you couldn’t talk to a launched rider—or a star carrier? He refused to believe it.
“Lag-com has finally penetrated the civil user market,” Porey said, “since we increased the pace of insystem traffic. Earthers are used to being told the ante
“Mazian’s promised this?”
“The same as they promised us. —Jurgen, you have far too literal a mind. This is a game. They play it with their constituents. The legislature’s technical advisers are under influences—corporate, economic, political... but you’ve met that. They certainly won’t deviate from party line. Where does the funding for their studies come from, anyway?”
Lights flared, green numbers bled past in the dark. Do the run in his sleep, Dekker kept telling himself, piece of easy.
But it didn’t stop the heart from pounding, didn’t stop hands and body from reacting to the situation on-screen—you didn’t brake the reactions, you didn’t ever, just presented the targets to your inert armscomp, accepted Ben was going to miss most of the time and tried not to let that expectation ever click into the relays in your brain.
“Screw that,” he heard Ben mutter, and all of a sudden got input on his aux screens, targets lit, armscomp prioritizing.
Chaff, he determined. Then targets flashed and started disappearing. Longscan was coming from a living hand, not the robot inputs. He heard “Shit!” from Ben and saw the scan image shift, tracking fire. Meg’s gold data-sift to his highside HUD was making sudden marginal sense. Not like Pete.... Not the same.... “Doing all right, doing all right,” he muttered, “just—” Heart jumped. Hands reacted. Sim did—
He stopped the bobble before his vision cleared. Guys weren’t talking, someone had yelped, short and sharp, but the dots that meant conscious were still lit, data was still coming up on the screens, fire was still happening, longscan shaping up. Had three scared guys in the seats. Next four shots were misses. His fault. He’d pulled a panic, lost it—had no time now to be thinking about it—targets— dammittohell!—
“The UDC,” Porey said, rocking back his chair, “believes in a good many myths. We don’t disabuse them. And, yes, this room is secure.”
“What else haven’t we said? What else hasn’t filtered out here? Or is this a longstanding piece of information?”
“The ECS4,” Porey said, “is fully outfitted. Putty outfitted. We’re operational, and we have a com system they can’t penetrate. To our knowledge—they haven’t even detected its operation. Installation on the ECS8—is waiting a shipment. Communications between you and FSO have been, I understand, infrequent. That situation is going to improve.”
“When?”
“Estimate—two months, three.”
“Until then? Edmund, —I want to know. Who pulled Kady and Aboujib out of the Belt? Who opted Pollard in? Where did this damned new system come in?”
“Exact origin of those orders?” Porey asked with a shrug. “I’m sure at some high level.” Meaning Keu or Mazian, which said no more than he knew. “But the reason for pulling them in—plainly, they were Dekker’s crew, we know things now about Hellburner we didn’t know. We’ve adjusted the training tape to reflect that, we’ve chosen a crew with a top pilot to start with a—tragically—clean slate. It’s the best combination we can come up with.”
“Not to rush into schedule. Dekker’s just out of hospital. Look at his psychological record, for God’s sake. You’re putting an outrageous load on this crew.”
“I leave that to the medics. They cleared him. He’s in.”
“Cleared him with how much pressure from command?”
“What are you suggesting?”
“That there’s too damned much rush on this. That Dekker’s not ready to go into schedule.”
Porey leaned back hi the chair, frowning. “You expressed a curiosity about the tape system. Have you ever had deep-tape, Jurgen?”
“No.” Emphatically. It occurred to him at the moment that Porey could order that even in his case. And he didn’t like the thought.
“Ordinary DNI tape isn’t so different from deep teach. Less detailed, in general. But the real difference is the class of drugs. Deepteach trank suppresses certain types of brain activity. Eliminates the tendency to cross-reference with past experience. General knowledge is still an asset. Specific training isn’t. Hostility to the process certainly isn’t. The other trainees have both handicaps. They’ve been trained otherwise and they won’t trust a tape telling them differently. But this crew knows nothing else. They have general knowledge. They’re not afraid of it. So their judgment can override the tape.”
“Theoretically.”
Another shrug. “So the technicians assure us: that with no trained response to overcome—they can do it and not panic. We cut a new tape from what succeeds—and bootstrap the others.”
“You bring this tape business in,” Graff said, “you slip it on a novice crew without an explanation—then you want to shove off Belt miner reactions on Shepherd crews that’ve risked their necks for a year training for these boards? What do I say to these people? What’s the official word? Because the rumor’s out, Edmund, they didn’t take that long to put two and two together.”
Porey looked at him long and coldly from the other side of what had been his desk. “Tanzer’s complaining. You’re complaining. Everybody’s bitching. Nobody in this facility wants to take this program to implementation. I have other orders, Jurgen. If crews the—they’ll the in the suns. We do not lose another ship on display. We haven’t, as happens, another ship we can lose.”
“We haven’t another core crew we can lose, either. Where are you going to get recruits if you kill our best with this damned tape? Draft them out of Earth’s pool? Persuade the Luna-Sol cargo ru
“Maybe you don’t have enough confidence in your recruits.”
“I have every confidence in them. I also know they’ve never been cut free to do what they know—not once. They’re a separate culture from Earth, separate from Mars, separate even from the Belt. The UDC regulated them and played power games with their assignments and their schedules. The JLC changed the specs and cut back the design. These crews thought when the Fleet came in here that somebody was finally on their side. So what do I tell them when they ask about this tape? That we took it off the last spectacular fatalities? That’s going to give them a bell of a lot of confidence.”