Страница 152 из 162
“Shit!”
Whole list of hits. It had felt too good all the way through, and Dekker shook his head, looking at the outcome, all of them gathered around the table, getting the same news. Objective achieved, path cleared, flock of surprises locked and taken out...
“Too soft,” Ben muttered. “Too soft, this thing. I don’t like it. It’s not supposed to fall down like this...”
Dekker rocked his chair on its hinge, propped a knee against the table and surveyed his crew, the chart-table with its windowed displays—not the stuff they’d worked with in the station, not the hard plastic chairs and the scrub-boards and the antique display system: anything they wanted, Porey said, and for himself he still had crises of disbelief.
And moments of slipping reality—like this one, that showed him faces he knew with reactions that just weren’t wrong... Pete and Elly and Falcone riding in the cockpit with them an hour ago, if he wanted to be spooked about it; but that wasn’t really what had happened: the carrier had that tape lab down the corridor, the way the carrier had a lot else it hadn’t let out, and his crew spent hours there, but they didn’t drug deep anymore, they didn’t need to, that was the story from the tape-techs. Done was done and their sessions were simply reaffirming the synched reactions, making sure—Meg said—they didn’t pick up any bad habits in live practice....
Live practice. Hell of a way to word it, considering.
They ran the sims in the prototype itself up to four hours a day, its V-HUD and instruments linked realtime to the carrier boards and the sims library, thanks to what Ben called the effin’ difference between the UDC’s EIDAT and the Fleet Staatentek. Ben seemed personally vindicated in that—what it all meant, he wasn’t sure, but it ran.
And they did, not the first time, damned sure, the screw-up had been what Meg called egregious and Sal called words he’d never heard. Until, this sim-run ...
This run, he looked at the result and the fact Ben had psyched that relocated target right and laid the probability fan right over the son of a bitch, dead center—that was a fluke, but Ben swore he’d had a good hunch—which was what Elly had used to say. Same words. That was a spook-out, too; but it was another fluke. The cockpit wasn’t haunted and his crew didn’t see spooks in the mirror. He slept with Meg with no illusions it was Pete Fowler, hell if, Meg would say. You didn’t confuse one with the other...
And that still wasn’t what worried him. It was what Ben said, it wasn’t supposed to fall down this easy. They were out here on no other reason than keeping him away from the media, he told himself that once a day and he managed to relax and worry about Mitch and Almarshad, who were the ones in jeopardy—still catching glitches; and the crew who was dogging it and trying to come up from scratch and a couple of total disasters pulled a hundred percenter?
He’d thought he knew the answers, he’d eased off, kicked back, taken it for granted he was just going to steer while everything was going to go to hell and they started handing him stuff that fit together.
Adrenaline had come up, hold-it-steady had become tracking-on, this last run; he was still hyped and on his edge and he hadn’t been this alive down to the nerve-ends since—
Since he’d screwed the sim. You knew all along something was wrong with our set-up, Ben kept insisting. And by comparison, now it wasn’t wrong, and he couldn’t sit still and couldn’t help remembering how it felt to be a hundred percent On, and right...
With a crew he cared about, dammit, more than he’d ever cared about human beings in his life, and too damn many deaths and too many lost partners, with a chance to make runs they’d plotted, the way the UDC hadn’t let them do it, and that perfect run lying on the table saying... Can’t do it twice. Complete fluke. Can’t pull it off again... System can’t be that perfect. Something’s wrong.
His gut was in knots and his suspicion began to be, in two blinks of an eye and the work of an overhyped brain, that it could be working because his team had come in with miner-experience, something the lofty Shepherd types with their fancy tech hadn’t had, or—
Or the tape off his dead partners worked, and Porey hadn’t given up when they’d had to downgrade the crew to basics—it wasn’t basics anymore. They’d either pushed the sim to the limit—or it had lied to them. And he didn’t put that past Porey, he didn’t put anything political past Porey, if he wanted to prove something to some committee in charge of finance ...
They were on the damned list, that was what, they always had been, that son of a bitch had jerked him sideways and just kept going with his crew. What was it, a confidence-building exercise? Another damned psych-out for more damn political reasons? He felt sick at his stomach.
“You all right, Dek?”
He looked at Meg, realized everybody was looking at him.
“Dek,” Ben said, “you aren’t spooking on us, are you?”
He shook his head solemnly. “It’s August eighth, Ben.”
“Huh?” Sal said. Meg frowned. But Ben said;
“It better be, Moonbeam. It had effin1 better be.”
“Yes, sir,” Graff said, at the table, hands folded, looking straight at two very anxious senators and a busy background of senatorial aides. There was a committee, inevitably if there was a glitch, there was a committee, thank God currently meeting at Sol One, in the comfort of class 1 accommodations: it wanted answers and this was the foreru
“Why is a junior lieutenant left in command of this base? What in hell does your base commander think he’s doing taking that carrier out? We give you the authority you ask for, and immediately the program goes to hell in a handbasket, while the officer in charge removes a carrier and declares he’s going to test, without notifying the UDC or the Joint Committee, with a highly controversial figure aboard, conveniently unavailable to an ongoing investigation, while a distorted version of the whole damned training program leaks to the media? What kind of circus are you ru
His stomach was in knots. He missed certain of the references. Demas and Saito had advised him certain things to say, certain points to make, the direction he should go with these men. But Demas and Saito didn’t know one truth he knew. Neither did Porey and neither did the captain.
“Sir,” he began on that track, “with all respect, I deny that the breach was in our Security.”
“Are you suggesting the UDC leaked it? What about Dekker’s phone call to Sol One? What about other phone calls from other Fleet perso
He hoped to hell there wasn’t a recorder going. “Let me explain, sir. Fleet perso
On which they had evidence, except a member of a Fleet unit also had accesses he wasn’t supposed to have... that Fleet Command didn’t know about... which, if he confessed it now, was damning to him, to the Fleet, to Dekker’s crew at minimum, to the Fleet’s credibility and their support from the legislative committee, at worst.