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Took a second for that to make sense. Didn’t look as if Dekker was going to shove him twice, didn’t look as if Dekker was anything but serious. Resign from the Fleet? You couldn’t. From the program? Moonbeam had cold feet of a sudden?
Serious problem here, damned serious problem, from a guy who had dragged him into this so deep he couldn’t see out, whose neck he had every moral right to break already; Dekker was piling the reasons higher, except Dekker wasn’t exactly copacetic enough for a fight at the moment, and there were two women in the other room, primarily Meg, but Sal, too, who would take severe exception to his murdering the skuz.
“Resigning,” he echoed Dekker.
Dekker leaned an elbow against the wall, wiped his shave-job mop out of his eyes and muttered, “Before the sim. First thing I can get anybody on mainday.”
“When did this notion take you?”
Dekker’s jaw locked again, visibly. Knot of muscle. Nowhere stare. But you waited and it would unlock, sometimes in ways you didn’t want, but he waited. Dekker took a second swipe at his hair, and stood with his hand on the back of his neck.
“I haven’t got it, Ben, that’s all. I’m schitzing out.”
“Yeah?” He wasn’t eager to climb into that pod with a lunatic, he didn’t know why in hell he had this urge to pull Dekker out of his funk and assure he was going to have to do that—it was instinct kept him here, to hold the seams of the partnership together, maybe, what they had right now being better than the hellish situation they could have. “Schitz I’m used to. You want to explain this new idea?”
“Doesn’t need explaining. I can’t cut it anymore. Can’t do it.”
“Nice of you.”
“Yeah.”
“Dekker, you are the absolute nicest son of a bitch I ever met, God, what do we do to deserve how nice you are? We are stuck in this fool’s outfit, they’re feeding us this damn experimental tape on account of they got it off your crew and you skuz out on us. Do you think they’re going to give up on the investment they got in us? —No, they’re going to put us out on the line with some only skosh saner fool and take stats on how long we take to make a fireball! Thanks, thanks ever-so for the big favor, Dek, and mercy for the vote of confidence, but you got to excuse us if we don’t all break into party, here.”
“I’m sorry.” Dekker turned his back on him, leaned a second against the bathroom door, then went in and shut the door.
“Dekker, —”
Didn’t like that sudden cut-off. Didn’t like that, I’m sorry, out of the son of a bitch. There weren’t locks on the doors. Not in this place. So he hauled the door open.
Dekker was bent over the sink. Mirror-Dekker looked up, white as death, with a haggard expression that scared hell out of him.
“You contemplating anything stupid, Moonbeam?”
“What time is it, Ben? You know what time it is?”
“You know what the hell time it is.”
“Not all the time, Ben, not all the fuckin’ time I don’t know what time it is, all right? I’m losing it!”
“You never knew where it was in the first place.”
“It’s not fu
Hell if. He grabbed Dekker by the elbow and steered him out of the closet of a bathroom, Dekker balked in the doorway and Ben slammed him hard against the doorframe. “Listen, Moonbeam, you don’t need to know where the hell you are, that’s Meg’s department. You don’t need to wonder what’s coming, that’s Sal’s. You don’t need to know a damn thing but where the targets are and get me a window, you hear me? Time doesn’t mean shit to you, it doesn’t ever have to mean shit, you just fuckin’ do your job and leave ours to us, you hear me?”
Door opened. It was the marines or it was Meg to Dekker’s rescue. But Dekker wasn’t fighting the hold he had, Dekker was backed against the bathroom doorframe with a kind of consternation on his face, as if he’d just heard something sane for once.
“Ben, back off him.”
“Yeah, yeah, he’s all yours, I got no designs on him.” He let Dekker go and Dekker just stood there, while Sal grabbed his arm and said, “Benjie, cher, venez, venez douce.”
Hell of a mouse Meg had on her cheek. Meg was wearing a towel around the waist and not a stitch else when she put her arms around Dekker’s neck and said something in his ear, Come to bed, probably—but he wasn’t sure that was what Dekker needed right now, Dekker needed somebody to bounce his head off the wall a couple more times, if it wouldn’t wake the neighbors.
“Cher. Come on.”
Sal tugged at him. He went back to their room, Sal trying to finesse him into bed. Ordinarily nothing could have distracted him from that offer. But he was thinking in too tight a loop, about Dekker, the sim upcoming, and the chance of a screw-up. He sat down on the edge of the bed. Sal massaged his back, then put her arms around his neck, rested against his shoulders.
“Meg’ll handle him,” Sal said.
“Meg should take a good look at him. Sal, we got a problem. Major. He says he’s quitting.”
“Quitting!”
“You want to lay bets they’ll let him? No. Nyet. No way in hell. We got ourselves one schitz pilot. I got nightmares. He’s got ‘em. He’s been pushing himself like a crazy man—”
“Put Meg in?”
“I think we better consider it. I think Meg better consider it—at least on the one tomorrow. I don’t know if they’ll stand for it. But that’s our best current idea, if we’re going to get in there with him.”
Sal gave an unaccustomed shiver. “They give us that damned tape. Hell, I’m used to thinking, Ben. I’m used to making up my own damn mind. I can’t. I don’t know that I am. It’s a screw-up, soldiers no different man the corp-rats, you get the feeling on a screw-up.”
“You’re doing all right.”
“The scores are all right. But I still never know, Ben, I don’t get anything solid about what I’m doing, I don’t ever get that feeling.”
He didn’t either. He hauled Sal around in front of him, held on to her, Sal being warm and the room not.
Sal held on to him. He buried his face in Sal’s braids and tangled his fingers in the metal clips. “Du
“Won’t cure everything, cher.”
“Makes a start, doesn’t it?”
“He’s a partner,” Sal said.
“Yeah. Moonbeam that he is.”
“Soldier-boys aren’t going to listen to him or us.”
“Dek-boy’s on total overload. I’ve seen this guy not at his best and this is it. He’s not stupid. Lot of tracks in that brain—that’s his problem. All he has to do is follow one and he’s in deep space so far you need a line to bring him back. But none of them pay off. His crew’s dead, he’s still hurting, not a damn word out of his mama, Porey’s on his back, we’re in deep shit, and he’s not thinking, he’s just pushing at the only track he’s got. The only one that’ll move. Don’t give this boy time as a dimension. He’s just fine—as long as it’s now.”
“Yeah. Yeah. I copy that. What do they say, hyperfocus and macrofocus?”
“And dammit, you don’t let this boy make executive decisions. Paper rank’s got nothing to do with this. It’s who can. Effin’ same as the merchanters.”
“Meg?”
He hesitated over that. Didn’t have to think, though. “Meg’s Meg. Meg’s the ops macrofocus. The Aptitudes pegged her exactly right. Meg always knows where she is. Knows two jumps ahead. Dek’s the here and now, not sure what’s coming. No. I’m the exec.”
Silence a moment. Maybe he’d made Sal mad. But it was,; the truth.
“So how do we tell them!” Sal asked.
“Sal, —you want to switch seats tomorrow morning?”
She sat back and looked him in the face, shocked. “God,; you’re serious. They’d throw us in the brig.”
“Is that new? No, listen, we can do it: same boards, different buttons. You got eight different pieces of ordnance, that’s the biggest piece of information to track on. I can diagram it for you. Inputs, you got two, one from Meg if you got time to sight-see, one from longscan, which you know what that looks like...”