Hellburner (21 page)

“Accesses stuff,” Ben said, sitting down.

“Uh-oh,” Sal said.

Understatement. Serious understatement. Dek hit the phone with his open hand. “Scuze,” Meg said, and went that direction.

Dek snatched out his card, and ricocheted into her path. “What is?” she asked, catching at his arm. “Dek?”

“They clipped me, Tanzer’s fuckin’ clipped me, the son of a bitch.” Dek shoved her and she didn’t know whether to hang on or not—her hand stung as he blazed past her. But that didn’t matter. Dek going for the door like a crazy man—that seriously mattered. Dek knocking into guys inbound—

Mitch, for God’s sake—

Dek got past. Hot on his track she hit the same obstacle, who didn’t give way a second time. Neither did the other guys. “Kady,” Mitch said, not friendly. “I heard they’d gotten desperate.”

‘’I got a seriously upset partner—out of my way, dammit!”

“So what’s with Dekker?”

“Something about getting clipped.”

“Shit!” Mitch said, and: “Pauli,” to the big guy behind him, Shepherd from the hall yesterday. She remembered. “Haul his ass back here. Fast.”

“What’s going on?” Sal asked as she and Ben showed up with a handful of other curious.

“Dekker’s been clipped,” Mitch said. “Just calm down, we’re going to see what the lieutenant says about this.”

Hell if she understood ‘clipped,1 she didn’t know Pauli from trouble, she knew Mitch too damn well, but Mitch’s outrage at least sounded to be on Dek’s side and stopping Dek seemed to be a priority on their side too. Pauli-whoever took out in the direction Dek had gone, and she went with, at a fast walk.

First comer showed an empty hall; but Pauli broke into a jog for a side corridor as if he knew where he was going, she caught up, and spotted Dek, all right, traveling at a fair clip himself.

“Dek!” she called out; and he stopped, took a damn-you stance and stared at them cold as cold.

All right. That was the surly young sumbitch she knew. She panted, “You got friends, chelovek, capish? Slow down. Deal with people.”

Dek looked half poised to walk off. Pauli said, “Is it true? They pulled you?”

“Yeah.” Dek’s mouth didn’t look to be working real well, he clearly didn’t want to talk; but about that time Ben and Sal showed up with some of the other Shepherds from the messhall, Ben with:

“What’s going on? —Dekker, are you being a spook?”

“Ben,” Meg exclaimed. Sal said the same. But Dek made a disgusted wave of his hand and managed to unlock his jaw.

“Nothing’s wrong, nothing’s the hell wrong. Sorry I got you here. Sorry I got you into this.”

A sane woman had to get things off personals. Fast. “Ben, Sal, this is Pauli, friend of Mitch’s; Pauli: Ben Pollard, Sal Aboujib. Say how-do, and somebody answer a straight question, f God’s sake. What’s going on here?”

“The damn UDC,” Dek said, “that’s what’s going on. Tanzer’s just tossed me out of the program.”

“He can’t do that,” Pauli said. “Screw him. He can’t do that.”

Somebody else said, “No way, Dek.” And another one:

“Mitch is on his way to talk to the lieutenant right now. No way that’s going to stick.”

Dek wasn’t highly verbal. He was white, and sweating. Sal said, quietly, with her arm in Dek’s: “You want to go back to the room, Dek?”

Ben said: “Screw it, he’s got a breakfast sitting back there, we all got breakfast back there, if nobody’s grabbed h.”

Leave it to Ben. Sal had a crazy man halfway turned around and stopped from strangling the colonel and Ben wanted his effin’ breakfast. Dek was looking at Ben like he was some eetee dropped by for directions.

“You mind?” Ben asked him impatiently.

“Yeah. All right,” Dek muttered. And went with him.

God, both of them were spooks.

“I’m looking at Dekker’s record,” Tanzer said, tapping a card on his desk, “right here: the medical report and his disciplinary record—including his violent behavior here in hospital, his defiance of regulations in the sims—“

“His behavior, colonel, was thoroughly reasonable, considering the level of drugs in his system. Drugs with possible negative psychological impact considering his history— which is in that file. That from my medical experts. He has grounds for malpractice.”

“This is the accident report.” Tanzer shoved a paper form across the desk at him. “Sign it or don’t, as you please. I’ll spare you the detail. I’m not calling the hospital records into question, I’m not charging him with flagrant violations of security with that tape, I’m not charging him for disregard of safety regulations. I am concluding there was no other person involved in the sims accident but Ens. Dekker.”

He kept every vestige of emotion from his face. “How ate you proposing he got into that pod?”

“I’m supposing he got in there the ordinary way, lieutenant, the same as any fool can climb in there. He just happened to be on trank. These are the records of his admission—he was flying before he got in there.”

“Was put in there.”

“He was in illegal possession of a tape that should have been back in library—“

“He had license to possess that tape, colonel. He’d been in hospital, he’d just been released, in condition your medics knew when they let him out with a prescription drug in his system—“

“Whatever drugs were in his system, he put there, before he decided to go on a sim ride.”

“Pardon me if I don’t rely on those doctors’ word, colonel, or their records.”

“Rely on whatever you like. I’ll tell you one thing: Dekker’s barred from the sims.”

“He’s going in there on my orders, colonel.”

“Check your rules, lieutenant. The sim facility and its accesses are under UDC direction.”

“You restrict one of my people from the sims, colonel, and the case is going clear to the Defense Department.”

“Then you better start the papers moving, lieutenant, because he’s barred. And if you give a damn for your program you won’t fife—that’s my unsolicited advice, because you don’t want him in public. Take my word for it you don’t want him in public. But until I get cooperation out of your office, you don’t get cooperation out of mine.”

“Do I understand this as blackmail? Is that what you want? My signature, and Dekker’s back in?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way. But let’s say it might signal a salutary change of attitude.”

“No deal. No deal, colonel. And you can stand by for FleetCom to be in use in fifteen minutes.”

“Good. About time you woke up your upper echelons. Tell them they’ve got a problem with Dekker. A serious problem.”

Trays were still sitting. They came into the mess hall and guys stopped and stared in that distant way people had when they were trying to spy on somebody else’s trouble. Talk stopped, mostly, and started again, and Dek didn’t look at anybody, didn’t talk to anybody, just sat down at his place at table and put the straw in his orange juice.

Ben gave her a tight-jawed look. Table was still all theirs. Pauli and the guys had gone off toward the breakfast line, but they hadn’t made it: they’d gotten snagged, talking to guys over by the wall, all Shepherd. There were UDC guys on the fringes—tables were either UDC or they were Shepherd, Meg marked that suddenly: there wasn’t another mixed table in the whole damned hall.

She didn’t like the quiet. Didn’t like the feeling around them. Dek was having his eggs. Ben was having toast. Sal gave her a look that said she was right, everybody else was crazy but them.

Young woman, blond hair in a shave-strip, came up, set her tray down, said, “You mind, Dek?”

Dek shrugged. That one sat down. “Trace,” the interloper said, looking her way, and offered her hand across the tray as a dark-skinned Shepherd kid took the seat next to Sal: “Aimarshad. Friends of friends.”

Pauli sat down, him with no tray, and said, “It’s us Tanzer’s after. —Pollard, you mind to answer whose side you’re on?”

Hell of a question, Meg thought. She watched Ben frown and think, then say, with a cold sweet smile on his face: “Hell, I’m not in Tanzer’s command. I’m Security-cleared. I’m Computer Technical, out of TI. I’m due somewhere else, and if I get there, frying Tanzer’s ass’d be ever so little effort. So why doesn’t somebody get me out of here?”

“Hear you were a good numbers man,” Pauli said.

The frown came back. “Damned good,” Ben said. Ben wasn’t lying. “But I’m not flying with him. I’m not flying with you guys. I’m not friggin’ going near combat...”

“Small chance you’ll have in my company,” Dek said under his breath. “If they get this mess cleared, it’ll just be one more thing they find. Dammit, Pete and Elly—what in hell is it with me that—“

Pauli’s hand came down on Dek’s wrist and shut him up. Thank God, Meg thought. She didn’t know the danger spots here, but her personal radar was getting back severe oncomings.

Hadn’t even gotten back to the office before he had a hail from behind and a “Lieutenant, we’ve got to talk to you—“

No doubt what it was before Mitch and Benavides overtook him. Graff said, “Dekker’s banned from the sims, is that what this is about?”

“Tanzer’s doing?” Mitch asked—and didn’t ask was it his.

“Col. Tanzer,” he reminded them. “In the office, Mitch. Let’s keep it out of the corridors—“

“It’s in the corridors, sir, it’s all over the messhall. The UdamnDC doesn’t care where it drops its—“

“Mitch. In the office.”

“Yessir,” Mitch said meekly; and the delegation trailed him down the corridor and around the corner to his own door. He could hear the phone beeping before he even got the door open. He got to his desk, picked up the handset.

“Graff here.”

Saito’s voice. “J-G, we have a problem. Paul Dekker’s been restricted.”

‘Tm aware, I assure you. Word to the captain. FleetCom. Stat. Code but don’t scramble. Tell the captain we’d urgently like to hear from him.”

“Aye.”

He hung up. He looked at Mitch. “Where is Dekker right now?”

“Messhall,” Mitch said. “Granted Pauli and Kady could catch him.”

“Catch him.”

“He wasn’t damned happy, and he was headed spinward.”

“You catch him. You sit on him if you’ve got any concern about this program.”

Quiet from the other side. Then: “We enlisted. We signed your contract. We’ve got plenty of concern about this program, lieutenant, we’re damned worried about this program, —we’re damned worried about a lot of things.”

“First time I’ve asked this, Mitchell, Follow orders. Blind. Just do it.”

Mitch looked at him a long time. So did the others. Finally Mitch said,

“We’ll follow orders. —But what the hell are they doing, lieutenant? D’ you hear from the captain? Do we know anything? What’s happening at Sol?”

“You want it flat on the table—I don’t know what the situation is, 1 don’t know whether (he captain’s tied up in the hearings or what. I’m asking you, I need you to go back to your labs, follow your orders, show up for sims—get everybody back to routine. Like nothing’s going on. Like nothing’s ever gone on.”

Long silence then. Long silence. And finally Mitch broke contact.

“Yeah,” Mitch said. “You got it. You got it. But Dek’s damned upset.’’

“Tell Dekker my door’s open, I know what happened and I’m on it. May take a bit. But he’s going back in there,”

Opened his mouth on that one. If you made a promise like that to these men, you’d better plan to keep it.

Like dropping into system, he thought; sometimes you had to call one fast. He thought it over two and three times, fee way you didn’t have time to reflect on a high-v decision— bat the fallout from this one was scattered all though the future, and he didn’t know whether he was right to promise a showdown—for one man.

Damned if not, he decided. You could count casualties by the shipload—in an engagement. But if it was your own service taking aim—damned right one man mattered.

Whole roomful of tranked-out fools sitting at consoles, making unison reaches after switches, unison keystrokes, as far as Ben could tell. “Damn spacecases,” he said, with a severe case of the willies. Deepteach, they called it, VR with drugs and specific behaviors involved; and hearing about it wasn’t seeing thirty, forty people all sitting there with patches on their arms and faces and elsewhere and in private places, for all he knew: forty grown people making identical rapid moves like the parts of some factory machine. “Talk about Unionside clones.,..”

“Just basic stuff,” Dekker said. They were in the observation room, looking out through Spex that reflected their disturbed faces—disturbed, in his case, and Meg’s and Sal’s. Dekker, professional space-out, tried to tell them it was just norm.

“Spooky,” was Sal’s word too. “Seriously spooky.”

Ben asked uneasily, “They do computer work that way?”

“Basic functions,” Dekker said. “Basic stuff. For all I know, they do; armscomp, longscan—‘motor skills/ they call it. They teach the boards that way. Some of the sims are like that, when there’s one right answer to a problem. Anything you can set up like that—they can cut a tape. It’s real while you’re seeing it. Damned real. But you move right. You do it over and over till you always jump right.”