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Which was the universe at ordinary, Meg would say, if Meg was talking, but none of them seemed to have the energy to talk right now, just trying to ride through the braking and not think, he supposed, all of them coming down off hype, and exhausted.
Second accel. He made the deep sustained breaths and shut his eyes. Black around them and black inside: reality had caught up to him, and Cory was dead. Long time back. Another life. Pace the breaths and count, the way you had to with a shove like that, to keep conscious. Hotdogging from Baudree, far as anybody could do that with a mass like this—
“What in hell’s he doing?” Ben asked plaintively. “Where are we going?”
“Going back to base,” Meg said.
“You got read-out?”
“Nyet. But you feel the direction, rab.”
“Come off the mystic stuff. Nobody ‘feels’ the direction.”
“Hey. There’s ways and ways to feel it, cher, we did it. Where else they got to take us? —And there’s those of us that feel the sun. Those that lived close to her—”
“Hell if, Kady.”
“Nothing mystic. We got magnetics. Science boys say so.”
“That’s shit.”
“Du
“Trez garbage, Kady.”
“Hey. Trez mystique, Pollard.”
“Could get us a comlink,” Sal grumbled. “Bloody damn hurry, they could let us come aboard. I got a serious bet on with Mitch’s guys. And we’re alive to collect...”
“What’d you bet?”—Ben, alarmed.
Familiar voices in the dark. He was safe here. Porey was outside, Porey who wanted him to make decisions, when Ben and Meg were the ones who decided—exactly the way , Graff said about merchanter crews, and he couldn’t understand why Porey expected him to follow UDC rules; he didn’t want the say, just fly the ship, that was all, and he’d done that, hadn’t he? He’d done the part he wanted, and for his part, he didn’t care where they went from here, whether Meg was right or whether they were going to turn up somewhere out in real combat, he wanted to talk to Mitch and the guys, just a real quiet chance at the crews they’d worked with, chance to store it down, debrief—forget the things he’d been through.
But that wasn’t the way it worked. God, that was still to go through, the meds were going to haul them in and go over them with a microscope. And he’d gotten spoiled, he wanted the massage, the stand-down and the beer and somebody else to make up his bunk, the kind of treatment you got on the carrier, that was what, he’d gotten spoiled... But the barracks was where he lived. He looked forward to messhall automat cheese sandwiches... french fries and a hamburger and a shake, one thing Percy’s fancy cooks couldn’t come up with, not with the right degree of grease. You had to have things like that or you didn’t know you were alive, and not in some passing dream...
Eyes were watering, tear tracks ru
Did it, he kept telling himself, the dark was proof of that, the feel of the ship was proof of that. He’d done what he wanted to do, the most outrageous thing he’d ever pla
“We find—” Graff said, to the gathering of Optexes, “when we bring in an integrated crew—the sum of the one is reliably the sum of the rest. People in this profession, given the chance to pick their own partners, sort themselves, I don’t know how otherwise to express it. You don’t work with anybody under your ability, where you know your life is on the line. Yes, they’re all four that good...”
“This crew is tape-taught,” a reporter said. “What does that say about human skill?”
“Let me explain for any of you who’re thinking of tape in the classic sense, the tape we’re referring to is really the neural net record: you go in with what you did before, matched to a performance you want; and the neural assist system shapes itself around you—that’s why we work with just four people at this stage. They’re physically programming the systems.”
“By their feedback.”
“Exactly. The tetralogies won’t do what these people do. They brought instincts and experience no tape can teach. The experts and the computers all have to ask them what the right reaction is—that’s what the tape is, that’s all it’s doing, recording and learning from the humans in control ... storing all the responses as a norm some other human being just may exceed....”
The reporters liked that idea. You could see it in the mass mark-that orders to the Optex loops, the shouted questions, the sudden comprehension on their faces. They wanted a confirmation of themselves, that was what they wanted for their viewers, another human yearning, a sense of synch with the chaos systems around them. “You’re saying there’s something unquantifiable, something about the human factor.”
“The human component governs the computers, that’s the way it is in the starships, that’s the only way this ship is going to do what it was created to do. That’s what the whole design fight has been about and that’s what this crew’s just proved.”
A vid byte they could use. The carrier was in dock.
Presumably the rider crew and the backups were on their way down and the reporters were ready; he was theoretically the sacrifice, stalling and pacifying the reporters with ru
On the viewscreens and the monitors, images of Bo
They had more questions. He saw the lift indicator showing operation, and nodded in that direction. “They’re coming onto station.”
Attention deserted him for the lift area: marines and Fleet Security had an unbreachable line of athletic bodies setting up a clear area, through which Villy, on similar advisement, showed up with Tanzer and the senators in tow, trailed by a still ecstatic crowd of Fleet and UDC crews from mission control—a complete media show-out, Graft thought with an uneasy stomach; and damned Porey to bloody hell for the decision to come straight in—but what else was it all for, after all? Risk Dekker, risk the prototype, risk Eagle with its thousand-member crew, for that matter, not to mention oversetting local regulations and stirring up the peacers with what they thought was a burning issue—
“Lieutenant.” Tanzer arrived on his left hand. “Colonel. We seem to have done it.” Tanzer shot him a look as if he were weighing the courtesy ‘we’ that he hadn’t even considered in saying. The senators were in earshot. He’d delivered Tanzer an unintended, face-saving favor and Tanzer looked as if he were trying to figure what he wanted in exchange.
“We have done it,” Tanzer said, as the lift doors opened.
Dekker and his crew walked out still in their flight gear, all pale and tired-looking, but cheerful till they confronted the shockwave of reporters, questions, and Optexes—nobody, dammit, had even warned them what was waiting: Porey had let them walk into it. Graff dived forward; and the other core crews surged through and grabbed them, slapping backs and creating a small island of riot inside the cordon of security. He hung back a little, let the crews have their moment—saw Dekker both dazed and in good hands, the reporters not getting past the guards, just jostling silently for position with the Optexes as he finally took his turn with the crew, shook hands and congratulated them. There was glaze in their eyes. The four of them were still hyped and lost and not coping with the timeflow—he knew the look, he felt it, he ached to insulate them from this, get them quiet and stability....