Devil to the Belt (v1.1) (82 page)

“Shit...” came over the com; and froze his heart.

“What’s the matter?” the chief asked; but he could see it for himself, the pod’s number decal—number three. The pod they’d been scheduled for.

“That’s Jamil,” he said, to whoever cared, and looked for a chair free. But there wasn’t one. “Jamil and his guys took our slot—said they could use the time...”

Didn’t take much calc to find a lighted, open hatch, and Meg beelined for it, braked and took a shaky bent-kneed impact, another showout miner-trick, with a hand-up catch at the rim of the lock to stop the rebound. She cycled the lock on battery power, breath hissing with shivers—it wasn’t cold coming through the suit, not this fast, it was shock starting to work, in the loneliness of the airlock. Let the rescue crew do the maneuvering with the PRU, the chief had said, they wanted her out of there and that lock shut before they powered up the mags and she agreed, she didn’t know shit about the tow system: it was on now, it was moving, bound for a pod access lock where meds were waiting, and they weren’t going to need her unless the mags were definitively crashed.

Moment of intense claustrophobia then, just the ghostly emergency light, then a door opened into a brightly lit ready-room full of guys willing to help with the suit.

She got the helmet off, drew a breath of icy clean air and got a first welcome bit of news—power-up was proceeding, pods were answering; they for sure weren’t going to need her again out there, and she could unsuit and take the lift out to gravitied levels and the lockers. Good job, they told her, good job, but they were busy and she got herself out of the way, let them tend the suit, unaccustomed luxury for a miner-jock, and boarded the lift out of there.

Slow, slow business in the recovery of the pod, and they could only watch, in 1-dock Security ops. Dekker hung at draffs back and Percy’s, listened to the output from the rescue team on the open speaker.

They were working into dock now, at access 3. “That’s copy,” he heard a voice say, and flashed on cold, on dark, on inertia gone wild—

Enjoy the ride, Dekker....

“That’s him,” he said of a sudden—had everyone’s attention, and he looked to Graff, who understood what he meant, Graff surely understood.

“ID that man,” Graff snapped, “isolate that voice. —Mr. Dekker—” as he headed for the door. “Hold it.”

“Dekker!” Porey said atop Graff’s order, but he’d already stopped and faced them.

“I want you to listen,” Graff said. “I want you to pick out that voice, all the voices that might be involved.”

“Is he meaning the attack on him?” Porey wanted to know, and Graff nodded, leaning over the master com in ops. “Yes, sir, that’s exactly what he means. —Play it back, ensign.”

“That’s copy,” the recording said, among others, and Dekker said with absolute conviction, “Yes. That one.”

“Who’s carded to that area right now?” Porey asked. “Nobody’s leaving that area without carding out, hear me?”

“Yes, sir,” the com tech said; and relayed to Fleet Security.

“Not everybody’s carded in,” Graff said. “They probably let medics and techs in wholesale—anybody with a security badge...”

“Sir,” the tech said, “I think I’ve got it pinned. That output’s on e-com, I’ve got the serial number on the unit.”

“Track it.”

Time to indulge the shakes and the unsteady breathing, alone in the lift. “They’re getting telemetry,” Meg heard, on the com track that was probably going out to every speaker in the mast. “Four heartbeats.” Best news yet. Thank God, she thought, queasy in the steady increase of g against the deep fast dive the car was taking. She clenched her teeth and collected herself, watched the level indicator light plummet until the car came to rest and the door opened on warm air and bright light.

She expected Mitch and a handful of guys; but the room was packed, everybody who could cram themselves hi, all wanting news. “Four heartbeats,” she told them, which they might have heard, she couldn’t tell if the com was feeding through, there was so much racket. She wasn’t prepared to be laid hold of, wasn’t expecting Mitch of all guys to pat her heavily on the shoulder and say how miner-jocks had their use—other guys did the same, and all she could get out was a breathless, desperate: “Jamil. Janul took our sim slot... anybody seen Dek?”

Nobody had. She was shaking, embarrassing herself with that fact, but she couldn’t stop the chill now. A big guy whose name she didn’t even know threw his arm around her shoulders, hugged her against his side, and yelled out to get a blanket, she was soaked with sweat.

I’m all right, she tried to say, but her teeth kept chattering. Seeing that number out there had put a shock reaction into her—she wasn’t used to shaking; wasn’t used to time to think when she was scared, or, worst, to knowing there wasn’t a damned thing she could do personally to help those guys or Dek... .

The blanket came around her. “Tried to kill us,” she said between shivers. “Wasn’t any fucking accident, Dek was supposed to be in that pod. . . That was our slot Jamil took...”

“Sims tech Eldon A. Kent,” Graff said, reading the monitor, “out of Munich, trained in Bonn ...”

“I want a piece of him,” Dekker said. God, he wanted it, wanted to pound the son of a bitch so fine the law wouldn’t have pieces left to work with. “Just let me find him.”

“Certainly answers the questions about access,” Graff murmured, reading over the data on the monitor. “Free access to the pods, a lot of the techs let each other through, never mind the rules. He’s Lendler Corp, he comes and goes—what were you doing up there suited, Dekker? What were you doing with the mission tape?”

Piece suddenly clicked into place. Bad memory. Whole chunk of memory. “Wanted to look at the tape, just wanted to look at it—” The disaster sequence. The maneuver Wilhelmsen had failed to make. “Damned set piece. They wanted it to work, they kept training us for specifics. I told them that, I...”

“They.”

“The UDC. Villy.”

“So you went to the ready room, or up to the access?”

“The ready room. To run it on the machine there. They wouldn’t let me in the labs, I was off-duty. I just wanted to look at the sequence—”

“Where did this Kent come in?” Porey asked.

“While I was running the tape.”

“Alone?”

He shook his head. “Guy was with him. I know the face, I can’t remember the name—”

“And they came in while you were reading the tape. What did they say?”

“They said they were checking out the pods, they were looking for some possible problem in the sims. They wanted me to go up to the chamber and answer some questions...”

Graff asked: “Did you suit to fly? Was that your intention?”

“I—I hadn’t—no. I just had the coveralls. I hadn’t brought a coat.”

“You suited because of the cold, you mean.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You went up there,” Porey said. “What happened?”

“They said put the tape in, I did that, they hit me from the back. Said—said—’Enjoy the ride.’ Sir, I want these guys...”

“Absolutely not,” Porey said. “You don’t go after them. That’s an order, mister.”

“Commander, they’re up there right now with Jamil and his guys, they’ve got their asses to cover—”

“Mr. Dekker.”

“They’re with Jamil!”

“Mr. Dekker, shut up and believe there are reasons more important than your personal opinion. We have a program with problems, a ship with problems, and what happened to you and what happened up there isn’t the only thing at issue. They’re Lendler Corp technicians; and they didn’t take a spontaneous dislike to you, do you read that, Mr. Dekker? Lendler Corp has a multitude of Reel contracts, which has UDC contracts, which leaves us with serious questions, Mr. Dekker, does it penetrate your consciousness that there may be issues that have a much wider scope than your need for vengeance or my personal preferences? If things were otherwise, I’d turn you loose. As is, you keep your mouth shut, you keep it shut on this and let Security handle it. We’ll get them. It may take time, but we’ll get them. We want to know whether there’s a network, we want to know if there’s any damage we don’t know about, we want to know if there is a connection to you personally or if you just have incredible luck, do you understand that, Mr. Dekker?”

“Yessir,” he said, past a choking anger. “Yessir, I understand that.”

“Then you see you keep your mouth totally shut about what you know. You don’t even tell your crew; and believe me I mean that. —Mr. Graff?”

“Sir.”

“Escort Mr. Dekker to my office. I’m not through with him.”

“Walk slowly,” Graff said, on the way out of ops. Porey was back mere on com calling in senior Security, he was well sure: Fleet Police already had the pod 3 access as secured as it could be with medics at work; they had the answer they’d been looking for and the mess only got wider, with tentacles into God knew what, Lendler, any other corporation. You didn’t take a highly educated technical worker and suddenly turn him into a saboteur and hand-to-hand murderer, not overnight, you didn’t; which meant Kent was other than a peaceful citizen, Kent was skilled and malicious, and somebody in Lendler Corp had gotten him credentials and arranged for him either to get here or to stay here, at the time a lot of Lendler Corp had transferred out—Porey was right on this one. They had, as Villy was fond of saying, pulled a string and got a snake. Potential faults in the equipment, faults in the programming, faults in the assignments, and Porey still hadn’t closed on the monumental coincidence of his pulling Dekker from the test today in the first place, why he’d had sudden misgivings on this day of all days...

The message that had turned up in his personal file, with no identifying header or record, damned sure hadn’t been a spontaneous generation of the EIDAT system, and his stomach was increasingly upset, with guilt over the concealment of that security breach, and the conviction exactly who had inserted that message—along with a cluster of Testing Labs files nobody outside highest security clearances should have been able to access at all.

Bias in the tests, Earth-cultural bias in the Aptitudes, consequently in the choices and reactions trained into the UDC and the Shepherd enlistees—a bias that didn’t want aggression on the fire-button or command decisions out of the pilots: he’d only to run an eye down the questions being asked and the weight given certain answers to see what was happening; and before the accident phone calls had already been flying back and forth between Sol One and B Dock: Porey had already invoked military emergency on Intellitron in as fine a shade of a contract clause as a merchanter could manage—demanding access to programs Intellitron had held secret thus far: Pending mission. Medical question. Emergency. Credit Edmund for the nerve of a dockside lawyer... and meanwhile, aside from the possibility of active sabotage, they had to wonder how many other examples of mis-assigned crews they were going to find, they had a clear notion why the UDC crews had had problems, and knew, thanks to Pollard, why the whole program might have a serious problem—which he couldn’t, for Pollard’s sake, confess.

Friendliest Edmund Porey had ever been to him, after he’d broken the news and Porey had absorbed it. And, dammit, he didn’t want Percy’s kind of friendship—he didn’t want Porey deciding he could help Porey look good, and putting in a request for him on staff, God help him, even if it meant a promotion. Not at that price. And it looked that way now, it looked increasingly that way, with no word from his own captain, no evidence Keu was still in charge over at FSO.

Be careful, Demas had told him last night. Don’t succeed too conspicuously.

“Mr. Dekker.”

A breath. “Yessir.”

“Coincidence in this instance is remotely possible.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You don’t believe it.”

“No, sir. I absolutely don’t.”

“You’re probably asking yourself why you were so lucky— why I pulled you from tests.”

Another breath. Maybe Dekker hadn’t gotten that far. Maybe Dekker was still tracking on the past, pulling up damaged memory—maybe Dekker was thinking of revenge, or Porey, or the multitudinous accesses corporate connivance could infiltrate that a Fleet pilot wasn’t educated to suspect...

“The reason I did pull you—we found a bias in the Aptitudes. I’m telling you something that’s classified to the hilt, understand. If it gets to the barracks the wrong way, with no fix, it could affect performance. Fatally. You understand me? We’re on a knife’s edge here, right now. We don’t need loose talk. On any topic.”

A worried glance. “Yessir.”

“I’m telling you this because I suspect one of your crew made the discovery and communicated it to me, secretly, which is also not for general consumption, and when the commander briefs you, don’t let him know you know either—how I heard could bring one of your crew before a court martial, do I make myself absolutely clear on that?”

“Yessir.” Dekker’s voice was all but inaudible.

“The public story has to be that, having experience with this ship, we’re going to be re-evaluating certain crews for reassignment—”

“Break crews? Is that what we’re talking about?”

Damnable question. Touchy question, considering the Wilhelmsen disaster. He paused in the corridor short of the marine guards outside Percy’s office, outside their audio pick-up, he hoped, or their orders to eavesdrop on an officer. “Not by fiat. I’m asking for any crews who might want assignments re-evaluated—in the light of new data. No break-up of existing crews unless there’s a request from inside the crew. We recognize, believe me, we recognize the psychological investments you have.”

“Why in hell—” Dekker caught a breath, asked, in bewildered, betrayed tones: “Why didn’t you catch it before this?”

“Mr. Dekker, when we began this program, in an earlier, naive assumption of welcome here, we trusted the UDC to know Sol mindsets better than we did. We were absolutely wrong. We didn’t understand the prejudice involved, against the people we most needed. And your crew is the most foreign to their criteria. More so than Shepherds. Maybe that explains how it turned up with your group. But what I’ve told you can’t go any further. Hear me?”