Hellburner (51 page)

“I’m sure he knows,” Saito said.

Damn! he thought, but he kept it off his face, he hoped, at least. He stood very still for a moment, heard Caldwell saying, inside, “... a tribute to the skill and dedication of Earth’s industry and innovation—“

AINS cut in, hard, and Dekker gave himself up to TV 16 ‘force’ Just breathed the way one had to and twisted, figuring at this point if the carrier hit a IV
 
Vock and took them to hell, he wasn’t afraid any more, he just stared at the blank, black VR in front of him, sensory deprivation... they were planning to fix that, arguing about what a crew wanted, coming off hype, whether they wanted anything at all but a VR off the carrier’s boards, but Dekker personally voted just for the vid of the carrier surface, that was the only thing he wanted to see, he was convinced of it now, only thing a rider crew was going to want was constant reassurance that they were snugged up against the frame and locked, and that the clanks that rang through the hull were the auto-service connections and the ordnance servos, ready to shove ordnance up into the racks if there were a need to launch the prototype a second time immediately, which, thank God, there wasn’t, and the servos didn’t. Tired, now, just tired. The carrier pulsed down to system speeds, and announced a reposition on a new vector. Slow as humans lived, now, Dekker supposed, but things were moving faster than he could track or understand—

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.”

“Dunno. But the sun’s starboard by 15 and high by 5.”

“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 under-
  
; stand why Porey expected him to follow UDC rules; he didn’t want the say, just fly the ship, that was all, and he’d
  
i 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 running down his face. He didn’t know why. He just listened to carrier ops, com chatter between base ops and here, and traffic control; and Meg was right, they were routed in.

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 planned to do, and he didn’t know what was left but to be free to do it. Didn’t even have to teach how. Tape would do that. He just had to get it together for the next time they let him fly....

“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 stars hips, 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 running commentary, but, damn! he’d scored a point.

On the viewscreens and the monitors, images of Bonn and Paris and London, demonstrations by the Federation of Man and the leading peace groups, claiming Earth itself had been at risk, never mind high-v ordnance was aimed the other way: that same fear of near-c in system that discouraged the trade they might have had—people were frightened, stunned by the rapid approach, reporters already asking (personal applications always chased a new idea) why they languished three days on a shuttle ride mat the carrier could cover in thirty minutes...

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’ mat 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....

“Good job,” he said. “Good job, all of you.”

“Thank you, sir,” Dekker breathed, and looked past him where—he turned his head—the vids showed riot in Bonn and Paris, just wide-tracking, lost.

“Ens. Dekker,” the reporters shouted, “Ens. Dekker, how do you feel right now?”

Dekker turned his head to look at the reporter, honestly trying and failing, Graff read it, to accept one more slow-moving attention track. “I—“ he began.

A reporter said, “Ens. Dekker. Ens. Dekker. There’s a news crew standing by with a link to Bonn. Your mother’s with the crew. Are you willing to speak to her, tell her how you feel at this moment?”

Damn! Graff thought, and shot another glance at the vids, where placards and banners called for peace, where a blond woman with a look as lost as Dekker’s gazed into the lenses and then to the side, probably toward a monitor.

“Talk to her,” the reporter said, “you can talk, she’ll hear you—do you hear us, Ms. Dekker?”

“Yes,” Ingrid Dekker said. “Yes, I hear you....”

“I hear you,” Dekker said faintly, and the whole area shushed each other to quiet.

“Paul? Paul? Is that you?”

“Yes.” God, he was going to fracture—Graff saw the tears well up, saw the tremor. “Are you all right, mother? Are they treating you all right?”

Ingrid Dekker bit back tears. “/ wanted to return your

call.”

“I wanted to call again. They said the lawyers wouldn’t—“

Somebody shoved between Ingrid Dekker and the interviewer, said, “That’s enough.”

“Let her alone!” Dekker cried. “Damn you, take your hands off her—“

The picture jolted, the broad shadow of peacer security for a moment, Ingrid Dekker’s voice crying, “Paul, —Paul, 1 want to go home!”

Kady got hold of Dekker. Aboujib did; and Pollard said, on Optex, “Those sons of bitches.”

“We’ll see if we can get Ms. Dekker back on,” the interviewer was saying; and addressed his counterpart in Bonn. “Can you get to Ms. Dekker to ask—?”

Dekker was in shock, reporters shoving Optex pickups toward him, marines under strict orders not to shove back. That face was magnified on monitors all around the area, pale and lost, then Senator Caldwell’s face was on the screens, reporters asking him his reaction.

Caldwell said, gravely: ‘ ‘It’s clear Ms. Dekker had something more to say, and the Federation leadership didn’t ‘want her to say it. I see enough to raise serious questions about how free Ms. Dekker is, at the moment...”

Serious questions, Graff thought, choking on his own outrage. Serious questions whether Porey’s timing for noon in Bonn, when Mazian was there, with the peace demonstrators, was anything like coincidence.

God, run the test right past Luna in a move the peacers were bound to protest, have the reporters set up, the questions primed—

Then send Dekker and a crowd of excited crews head-on into the media for a reaction, when Porey damned well knew he was spaced?

He couldn’t pull Dekker out directly, couldn’t order Security to oust the reporters, daren’t look like censorship on this side of the issue. He went in, took Dekker’s arm with Optexes on high gain all around him. “Someone will do something.” Which rang in his own ears as one more damned promise he didn’t know how he was going to keep.

Dekker gave him a bleak, blank stare. “I don’t want to leave, sir. If they can get her back I want to talk to her.”

The mikes got that, too. Kady said, out of turn, “They don’t want her loose. That’s clear.”

But all that showed on the Bonn monitors was a shut wooden door, and a reporter outside it, with no sound going out, talking, while demonstrators elbowed and shoved.