Devil to the Belt

  “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.”

  “I’m 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, I 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.”

  Wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear. He said, “I’m not taking any damn pill. I’m already right. Righter than any guy this halfass staff has got, I’ll tell you. You let them muck with your head?”

  “Just for the boards,” Dekker said, and cut the lights as they left. “Just to set the reactions. ‘Direct Neural Input,’ they call it. You do the polish in sims, and you do that awake—at least you’re supposed to...”

  Two years he’d known the guy and he realized he’d never actually heard Dekker’s sense of humor. He decided that was a joke. A damned bad one.

  Meg asked, “So what if it sets a bias that’s not right, once upon some time?”

  “You aren’t the only one to worry about that. Yeah. It’s a question.”

  “So what are they doing? Set us up to jump on the average we’re right?”

  “That’s part of what they call ‘documentation’—meaning there’s nobody who’s flown the ship.”

  “Nobody?” Sal asked; and Ben nearly managed unison.

  “Docking trials, yeah. They got that part. Straight runs. Milk and cookies. Rotate and reorient. Do it in your sleep. But not with armscomp working. You got enough problem with system junk.”

  “Like a damn beam-push through the Belt.”

  “You got it. At that v it’s a lot like that. Only where we’re going—there aren’t any two-hundred-year-old system charts. You get stuff off the system buoy when you drop into a known system, where there’s regular traffic, but out at the jump points, there’s chaff you just don’t know’s there. And maybe stuff somebody meant to dump—ship-killers, scan-invisible stuff, you don’t know.”

  “Shit.” Cold chill went down Ben’s back. “These guys ever made a run with Mama shoving you?”

  “A lot of these guys have done it—if you mean the combat jocks. Yeah. That’s what it’s like. And we just run ahead and blow the sumbitches they dump out of the carrier’s path.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “That’s what she does.”

  “That’s the damn stupidest thing I ever heard!”

  “That’s why they like us Belter types. Shipkillers and rocks—no difference. Same gut feeling for how rocks move— same thing that makes a good numbers man or keeps a Shepherd out of the Well, that’s what they want.”

  “Hell if, Dekker, hell if. Not this Belt miner!”

  “You a good miner?” Dekker had the nerve to ask.

  “A live one! On account of I never let MamBitch boost us like a missile—except once. In which you figured, you son of a —”

  Meg said, “Hell, Ben, they give you guns....”

  “Yeah, and it won’t work—that’s what they’re doing in there, they’re brainwashing those poor sods, they brainwashed him, for God’s sake, blow rocks out of the way, hell! They got that on those tapes?”

  “Not yet,” Dekker said, just as quiet and sober as if he was sane. “But they’d like to. Get the reactions right on one run, so they can bottle it and feed it into the techs— word is, that’s what they want to do, ultimately. Get one crew that can do it. And they’ll teach the others. Hundreds of others.”

  “God,” Sal said, and hooked a thumb back at the human factory. “Like that!”’

  Dekker shrugged. “That’s what they think.”

  “That’s what they think,” Ben muttered. The human race was shooting at each other. Dekker said Union was building riderships, too—

  “I thought the other side was where they wired you to a machine and taught you to like getting blown to hell. Not here. Not on this side, no way, Dek-boy. What the hell are we fighting for? That’s Union stuff in there!”

  “They developed it, what I hear.”

  “God.”

  “ ‘Not yet,’ “ Meg quipped.

  “Damn funny, Meg.”

  Ben looked at Dekker, looked at Meg and at Sal, with this sudden sinking feeling—this moment of dislocation, that said he was surrounded by crazies, including the woman he went to bed with; including every hotshot Shepherd tight-ass in this whole establishment, and the CO
, and the lieutenant.

  “What’s it do to your reflexes?” Meg said.

  Dekker said, “Screws ‘em to hell. Scares shit out of you. Like I said at breakfast. Hands move, you don’t know why, you threw a switch, you don’t know why. Moves are right. But you got to convince yourself they are. You can’t doubt.”

  “Any chance it came around on this Wilhelmsen?”

  Dekker didn’t answer that for a second or so. Ben wasn’t sure about keeping his breakfast. “Yeah,” Dekker said. “But that’s the one thing you never better think. You never mink about it. Not in the sims. Especially in the real thing—”

  Dekker’s voice wandered off. He stood there with his band on a door switch and looked off somewhere, just stood there a breath or two—then drew a larger breath and said, “Worst enemy you’ve got—asking whether your moves are right. You just can’t doubt—”

  “Yeah,” Ben said, with the sudden intense feeling they had to get him out of this hallway before a guard saw him or something. “Yeah, right. Why don’t we go tour somewhere else? Like what there is to do on this station?”

  Dekker looked at him like he’d never thought of such a thing. “Don’t know that there is. This isn’t One.”

  “What I’ve seen, it isn’t even R2. What do you do for life in this can? Play the vending machines?”

  “Not much time for social life,” Dekker said faintly. Which reminded him there hadn’t been outstanding much in TI, either. Even attached to Sol One, where there was plenty.

  “Not much where we’ve been,” Meg said. “Either.”

  They walked down the hall in this place full of labs where human beings learned to twitch like rats, to guide ships that moved too fast to think about, and you couldn’t help thinking that helldeck on R2, for all R2’s faults, had been the good old days....

  “So what do you want to do, Dek-boy? I mean, granted we all get our wants, —what’s yours?”

  Scariest question he’d ever asked Dekker. And Dekker took a while thinking about it, he guessed, Meg sort of leaning up against Dekker, one visible hand on his arm— where the other one was might have something to do with his concentration....

  But Dekker said, real quiet, “I want to be the one cuts that tape. I want to be the one that does it, Ben.”

  He wished he hadn’t asked. Sincerely wished he hadn’t asked. Sincerely wished Meg would put her hand somewhere to disrupt the boy’s concentration and shake him out of his spook notions.

  “There a chance?” Meg asked, quiet too; and he thought. God, it’s in the water, they got to put it in the water—

  Dekker didn’t answer that one right off. “If they let me back in the sims, there is...” And a few beats later. “But I’m not doing it with you, Meg. I can’t do it with you.”

  Silence from Meg. Then: “Yeah.”

  “I don’t mean that.” Dekker stopped cold, took Meg by the shoulders and made her look at him. “I mean I don’t want to. I can’t work with you....”

  Meg didn’t look real happy. Meg was about as white and as tight-lipped as he’d ever seen her. Meg shoved his hands off. “You got a problem, mister? You got a problem with me not being good enough, that’s one thing, you got a problem about setting me on any damn shelf to look at— that’s another. You say I’m shit at the boards, that’s all right, that’s your damned opinion, let’s see how the Aptitudes come out. I’ll find a team and I’ll fly with somebody, we’ll sleep together sometimes, fine. Or I’ll wash out of here. But you don’t set me on any damn shelf!”

  After which Meg walked off alone down the hall, sound of boots on the decking, head down. Not happy. Hell, Ben thought, with a view of Dekker’s back, Dekker just standing there. Sal was with him—he wondered that Sal didn’t go with Meg; he was still wondering when Dekker lit out after Meg, walking fast and wobbling a little.

  “You make sense out of either one of ‘em?” he asked Sal.

  “Yeah,” Sal said. “Both.”

  Surprised him. Most things came down to Belter and Inner-systemer. So maybe this was something he just wasn’t tracking. He asked, for his own self-preservation: “Yeah? I know why he’s following. I don’t know why she’s pissed.”

  Sal said, “Told you last night.”

  “He didn’t say she couldn’t fly. He said—”

  “He said not with him. Not on his ship. She’ll beat his ass. That’s what he’s asking for.”

  Talking was going on down the hall, near the exit. Looked hot and heavy.

  Sal said, “She’ll pass those Aptitudes. You never seen Meg mad.”

  He thought he had. Maybe not, on the other hand. Meg was still lighting into Dekker—boy was a day out of hospital, shaky on his feet, and he didn’t look as if he was holding his own down there.

  Then Dekker must’ve said something, because Meg eased off a little.

  Probably it was Yes. Probably. Meg was still standing there. Meg and Dekker walked off together toward the security door, so he figured they’d better catch up.

  The other side of the door, Meg said, “We got it worked out.”

  Ben said, “Not fair, man’s not up to this.”

  Dekker looked as if he wanted holding on his feet, as was. But Dekker said, “Going to try for that tape, Ben. You want to test in?”

  He threw a shocked look back at the doors, where roomfuls of walking dead were flying nonexistent ships. “To that? No way in hell. Non-com-ba-tant, do you read? No way the UDC is risking my talent in a damn missile. I’ll test for data entry before I do that—”

  “What’s Stockholm got?” Sal asked. “They say Pell’s got a helldeck puts Sol to shame. Got eetees and everything.”

  “Yeah?” He was unmoved. “I’ve seen pictures. Can’t be that good in bed.”

  “Got real biostuffs, just like Earth. There’s Pell, there’s Mariner Station—”

  “Yeah, there’s Cyteen going to blow us to hell or turn us into robots. Don’t need to go to Cyteen—our own service is trying to do it to us...”

  Seriously gave him the willies, that did. Get into his mind and teach him which keys to push, would it?

  A programmer didn’t need any damned help like that.

  No answer, no answer, and no answer. Graff was beyond worrying. He was getting damned mad. And there was no place to trust but the carrier’s bridge, with the security systems engaged—but workmen had been everywhere, the UDC had very adept personnel as capable of screwing up a system as their own techs were of unscrewing it—and it was always a question, even here, who was one up on whom. “I know the captain knows about Dekker,” he said to Saito and Demas and Thieu—age-marked faces all; and the only reassurance he had. “Pollard, Aboujib, Kady all shipped in here—you’d think if he is moving them, they’d be couriering something, a message, two words from the captain—”

  “Possibly,” Saito said, over the rim of her coffee cup, “he feared some shift of loyalty. Dekker is the key point. None of them have met in over a year. Friends and lovers fall out. And Pollard is UDC.”

  “They came. Dekker’s leavetaking with Kady was— passionate to say the least. Pollard joined him here. Protocol says none of this is significant?”

  “They’re not merchanter. That’s not what’s forming here.”

  Puzzles, at the depth of things. Silence from the captain, when a word would have come profoundly welcome. He looked at Demas, he looked at Armsmaster Thieu, he looked at Saito. Com One. If Victoria spoke officially, it was Saito’s voice. If the Fleet spoke to Union or to blue-skyers, it was Saito, who made a study of words, and customs, and foreign exactitudes—and psychologies and expectations.

  “What is forming?”

  Saito shrugged. “That’s the question, isn’t it? I only point out—you can’t take our social structure as the end point of their evolution. Blue-skyers and Belters alike— their loyalties are immensely complex. Ship and Family don’t occur here. Only the basis for them. Difficult to say what they’d become.”

  “Prehistory,”
Demas murmured.

  “Prejudice?” Saito asked softly.

  “Not prejudice: just there’s no bridge between the cultures. The change was total. Their institutions are seminal to ours. But they don’t need kinships, they don’t need to function in that context. Their ancestors did. We’ve pulled our resource out of the cultural matrix—”

  “Matrices. Wallingsfordian matrices.”

  God, they were off on one of their arguments, splitting theoretical hairs. Demas was a hobbyist, and the carrier’s bulletin board had a growing collection of Demas’ and Saito’s observations on insystem cultures. He hadn’t come shipside for Wallingsfordians versus Kiimer or Emory.

  “Saito. Is the captain setting up something you know about?”

  A very opaque stare. “I’d tell you.”

  “Unless you had other orders. Has the captain been in contact with you? Am I being set up?”

  A moment more that Saito looked at him and never a flinch. “Of course not.”

  CHAPTER 8

  HARD day?” Villanueva asked, at the dessert bar, “Could say.” The one claim you could make for Earth’s vicinity was more varieties of sweet and spice than a man could run through in a year. And Graff personally intended to try during his tenure here—a tenure in which combat was beginning to look preferable. “What’s this one?” he asked of the line worker, but Villy said, “Raisin cake. Allspice, cinnamon, sugar, nutmeg—” “You have it down,” Graff was fencing. He was sure Villy wasn’t here entirely for the dessert. He didn’t want the lecture. He didn’t want the inquiry. He was, however, amazed at Villy’s culinary expertise.

  Villy shrugged. “You guys always ask. —How’s Dekker doing?”

  “All right till the colonel clipped him.” He weighed asking. He couldn’t stand the suspense. “Did he send you?”

  Hesitation. “Could say that.”

  “What’s he after?”

  “He’s saying put the boy back into lower levels. Use Mitchell’s crew, use me and mine. He says he takes your point, no command substitutions, no crew subs until we get this thing operating.”