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“Nothing,” Pauli said. “Except a serious concern for the program. And Dekker.”
Belters rarely said ‘friend.’ You didn’t say, I care, I love, I give a damn. They wouldn’t do that. But they came asking. Even that skuz Mitch. Made her think halfway better of Mitch, and that gave her another cause to worry.
“Yeah,” she said. “Thanks. If I hear anything, either.”
The door opened. Graff said, stone-faced, “The commander wants to see you.”
“Yessir,” Dekker said.
No questions. Graff was negotiating with an unreasoning, unreasonable son of a bitch and didn’t need trouble from another source. He got up and walked in, saluted, and Porey said, all too quietly, “You may have had a problem, mister. This whole damn program may have a problem. So I want an answer, I want a single, completely straight answer If you were second-guessing the Aptitudes, where would you have expected Pollard and Aboujib to fit in the crew profile?”
“Ens. Pollard’s a computer tech, theory stuff.” He had one sudden chance, maybe, to do something for Ben, which would drop the lot of them down the list, break Meg’s heart and save all their skins. He debated a split second, then: “UDC Technical Institute. I’d have thought he’d be handling the computers. —To be honest, sir, I’d have thought he’d go somewhere up in Fleet Ops—they were, going to send him to Stockholm. He’s got—”
Porey snarled, “We’ve got enough UDC hands in this operation right now. What about Aboujib? Co-pilot?”
He didn’t know what all this was about. Not enough to maneuver with. “Ben taught her numbers. I’d expect she’s good. Longscan or armscomp. She’s—” He flashed on Sal’s frustration with the scan assignment. “I don’t know— don’t know. What she wants—is the Fire button.” His mind was on what Porey had said about Ben. He thought he might have done Ben harm, bringing in the Stockholm business. He made a desperate, uninvited counter. “Sir, I haven’t got any doubts about Ben Pollard. He went UDC because they had his program, but he’s Belter. He wouldn’t do anything but a hundred percent for his partners.”
Porey left a cold, cold silence. He didn’t know what he was arguing for or against, or who was on trial. Porey just stared. “If,” Porey began, and the phone beeped. Porey grabbed up the handset, snarled, “This is a conference, damn you—” and the face went expressionless while Dekker had time to think, Something’s happened...
Graff was paying the same kind of attention. Porey said, “Procedures. Stat. —Estimate,” and looked grim as he hung up and stood up. “Pod’s hung.”
“God.” Dekker thought Porey wanted the door—grabbed for the switch.
“Dekker!”
“I can help, sir,...”
“No!” Porey said. And there was no argument.
Meg hauled clothes on, still wet—damn sweater hung on an earring. She finessed it loose the painful way and got her head through—
Mitch, the skuz, was standing in the locker room door.
She jerked the sweater down. “Getting your thrills, Mitch?”
“Serious talk, Kady. Question. Couple of touchy questions.”
Private, the man wanted. Hell of a way to get it; and time was, Mitch didn’t get two seconds, but Mitch didn’t look like trouble, Mitch looked like business, and curiosity was killing her. “So? Give.”
“What is their damn hurry with Dek, do you get any feel?”
She bit her lip. Shook her head. “Neg. No. What are you asking?”
“Is Ben on our side?”
“Absolute. No question, and Sal and I fly with him.”
Mitch ducked his head, looked up with the straightest eye contact she’d ever had out of him. “Ben made a phone call last night. Dek got pulled this morning. You know about that?”
“Yeah. Ben could have slipped it to the lieutenant—about two jumps ahead of me, you want the truth.”
“That schedule of his. Did he set it? Is it his choice? Or is Porey doing it?”
“Much as I know it’s his schedule.” It was sensitive territory. She wasn’t sure she wanted to discuss any crew business with Mitch, who was Dek’s competition in this place. But Dek had her scared to hell, that was what she had said to Sal and that was what made her confess now. “I can believe Ben might have stopped him. I just hope it didn’t land either of them in trouble.”
“Second touchy question. You apparently aren’t too damn bad. How much of it do you think is tape?”
“I was good before I came here, mister.”
Mitch held up a hand. “No offense. Straight q & a—they’re talking about shoving it on the rest of us, I want to know from the ones that know—does that damn thing really work?”
Sounded like an honest question. “Different way to learn, same way you guys learn, what I hear, this Neural Input stuff. I don’t know what’s the difference, except we trank deeper—by what I hear. How could I tell? I don’t get the other kind.”
“Rumor is they’re ru
Made her nervous when he put it that way.
“You know anything about Pete Fowler, you ever have any—weird feelings off that stuff?”
“I’m not being him, Mitch, I’m not any damn dead guy. That’s not what’s going on....”
“He was twenty-nine, he was a good, fast thinker, he was regular for Elly Sanders—she was the longsca
“I’m telling you I don’t know anything about Pete Fowler. I damn sure haven’t got a fix on Sal and I always was a stickler for doing—”
“Mitch!” somebody yelled, out in the sims. “They got a pod hung!”
“Oh, shit,” Mitch said, and he was ru
“What’s the status?” Porey asked, leaning over a tech— Security ops had eight monitors and four of them were black, except for green letters showing CORE-21, that was the sims area, anybody who worked up there knew that section, and Dekker knew it, made a guess what those black monitors showed before Porey got his answer.
“They cut the power, sir,” the ops tech said, “Chief Jackson got the spin shut down. Cameras are working, they’re on another generator, but all the pods are full crewed and frozen out there til they get power back on.”
The core was totally dark, even the access areas—requests for perso
“Do we have a recovery team out there?” Porey asked, and the tech answered that they were still trying to organize that—only way they had to haul you back if a pod had to totally crash was suit up and go out there; the construction workers that formed the rescue squad were coming in from their off hours and from work around the carrier—
“Too damned long,” he said, he didn’t care if he was out of turn: “I know the systems, sir, I’m used to a suit—”
“You’re not going out there,” Porey said, and adjusted the com in his ear, scowling, eyes showing the least anxiety while he listened to something elsewhere. “—You have one?” he asked someone invisible. “Suiting now?”
They’d found somebody closer. Dekker drew a controlled breath, then, still wanting to do something; but rescue was evidently getting into motion. Black monitors. No emergency lights—the fool engineers had put the viewport shutters on the main power. Power was cut, completely, complete black in the chamber, no ventilation in the pod, no heat, no filtration for anybody out there. God hope the mags weren’t all crashed.