Devil to the Belt (v1.1) (80 page)

Dekker made a move for his wrist, not fast, just brushing him off. He let Dekker have his way, stood back and let Dekker sit up with his head down against his knees a moment, to wipe the embarrassment off his face.

“You know,” he said, pressing that advantage, “you do got a serious problem, Dek. You busted Meg who’s trying to help you, the meds are bitching you’re pushing it too damned hard—you seriously got to get your head working Dek-boy, and we got to have a talk. Meg, Sal, you want to leave him with me a minute?”

Dekker looked away, at the wall. Sal shoved Meg out of the room and Dekker didn’t look happy with the arrangement, didn’t look at him when the door shut, just sat in bed and stared elsewhere.

Towel on a chair. Ben got it and wrapped it around himself—wasn’t freezing his ass off, wasn’t matching physique with pretty-boy, either—wouldn’t effin’ be here arguing with him, except he was supposed to go back into pod-sims with a guy who couldn’t figure out what time it was.

“Just drop it,” Dekker said.

“Drop it, huh? Drop it? Wake me up in the Middle Of, and I should drop it? We’re getting back in that pod at 0900, I’m not seriously inclined to drop it!”

Dekker leapt up off the bed and shoved him. “Just fuck off! Fuck off, Ben, all right? —I’m resigning.”

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 funny, Ben. It’s not damn funny. Let me the hell alone, all right?”

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. “Dunno, Sal, I dunno. I’ve done everything I know. Meg should screw him silly, if he wasn’t so skuzzed.”

“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...”

“Ben. What are you up to?”

“Surviving this damn thing.” A long, shaky breath. Going against military regs wasn’t at all like scamming the Company. But it did start coming together, now that he was thinking about the pieces. “Because I want the damn com p. Because, screw ‘em, it’s what I do. Because I think that ET sumbitch in there effin’ knows we’re in the wrong spots and it doesn’t feel right to him and it’s killing him. I don’t know this crew that died, but I can bet you, one of them was the number one in this unit, no matter who they had listed. That guy died and they bring us in and put Dekker in charge? No way.”

“What’s that make me, mister know-all? Why in hell did they Aptitude me longscan and you the guns?”

He’d spent a lot of time thinking on that. He reached up and laced his fingers with Sal’s. “Because you want ‘em too much, because you enjoy blowing things up. —Because that’s not what the tests want on that board.”

She let go. “Where’d you get that shit?”

“Hey. Hetldeck psych. Cred a kilo. And I know what the profiles are. I’m from TI. TI writes these tests. They got this Command Profiles manual, lays out exactly what qualifications they want in fire-positions and everything else. Enjoying it’d scare them shitless. We’re not inner system. You got to lie to the tests, Sal, you got to psych what they want us to be and you got to be that on those tests—only way you get along.”

“Meg—Meg is doing all right with this stuff. Tape doesn’t bother her.”

“Meg’s an inner systemer, isn’t she? She knows how to tell them exactly what they want to hear. Meg’s doing what she wants. We’re not.”

“So what do we do? Is Aptitudes going to listen, when they made the rules?”

“Lieutenant might.” If Graff could do anything. If it wasn’t too late. He was scared even thinking about what occurred to him. But running into a rock was scarier than that. And that was likely. A lot of scary things were likely. Like a crack-up tomorrow morning. Stiff neck for a week after Dekker’s twitch at the controls.

“Should we go talk to him?”

“No. Not direct.” He eased Sal off his lap, went and got a bent wire out of a crack in the desk drawer.

“What—?” Sal started to ask, and shut up fast. She watched in silence as he bent down and fished his spare card out of a joint in the paneling.

He put it in the reader, typed an access, typed a message, and said, “ ‘Scuse, Sal. Taking a walk.”

Sal didn’t say a thing. He opened the door, went out through Dekker’s and Meg’s blanketed, dark privacy—towel and all.

“Ben?” Dekker asked.

“ ‘S all right,” he said, “forgot something.”

He slipped out to the corridor, around to the main room of the barracks, and around to the phones.

Linked in. Accessed the station’s EIDAT on system level. With a card with a very illegal bit of nailpolish on its edge.

“What in hell?” Dekker asked when he came through again.

“Hey,” Meg said. “Easy.”

He got through the door and Sal didn’t ask a single question, not while he folded up, not while he put the card away in its hiding spot behind the panel joint. You grew up in ASTEX territory, you learned about bugs and you developed a fairly sure sense when you might be a target for special monitoring. He didn’t honestly think so. But he took precautions and hoped to hell the bugs, if they existed, weren’t optics.

Most of all he hoped the lieutenant was one of the good guys, because the lieutenant was no fool: (he lieutenant knew enough to figure who around here could get into the system and drop an unsigned message in his file. They didn’t have TI techs above a 7A in this place. He’d checked that, already.

SHOUTING in Percy’s office again. Dekker sat on the bench outside, between a couple of marine guards, and stared at the opposite wall, acutely aware of the traffic in the main corridor, people stealing glances hi this direction—you got a feeling for notoriety, and disaster, and you knew when you’d achieved it. Wake up to a stand-down and a see-me from Graff, who had nothing to tell him, except that somehow the Aptitudes in his unit were skewed, that they wanted to see Ben and Sal back in Testing, and Graff was due in a meeting with Porey, immediately. Which left him here, in the hall, listening to war going on in the office, and he hoped it didn’t aim at Graff. Mutiny in the Shepherd ranks, if that was the case—Graff was the only point of reason in their lives since the disaster of the last test; and personally, he wanted to kill Porey. They told him he was supposed to go fight rebels from a planet clear to hell and gone away from Earth and right now the targets he most wanted were Comdr. Edmund Porey and whoever had screwed up Ben and Sal, if that was what had happened.

Something crashed, inside the office. He tried not to twitch, found his hands locked, white-knuckled. The guards exchanged looks, dead expressionless.

Marines weren’t anxious to go in there either.