Devil to the Belt
He couldn’t turn it loose. When he was away from the ship, he could think reasonably about it, and know that it was a cold way to be, and that if he could be something different and he could be back in the Belt with people he cared about, doing nothing but mining, he could be happy— he’d been happy there; he could have been again, in the right company...
But when he got up here in nuIl-#, in the rider loft, with the four Hellburner locks staring him in the face, and the ship out there, behind number1, then everything was different, every value and priority was revised. The ship was different, every value and priority was revised. The ship was a presence here. Was waiting to be alive; and he was, in a way he wasn’t in the whole rest of his life. He was scared down in the gravitied quarters, scared out of his reason, and be realized he’d gotten everyone who cared about him in one hell of a mess; but up here—
Up here he knew at least why he’d made the choices he bad, right or wrong, he knew why he’d kept going, and why the pods made him afraid—just that nowhere else was this. Nowhere else had the feel this did. It didn’t altogether cure being scared, but it put the fear behind him.
This was where he would have been on that day, dammit, except for Tanzer, except for Wilhelmsen being put in the wrong place, at the wrong time... it felt as if his whole life had gone off-line since then, and he was just now picking up again where it should have been, with the people he should have had: time that had frozen on him, was running again, the mission was in his pocket, and right now the only thing he was honestly afraid of up here was being pulled from the mission again—
But nobody in command would mess with him—not now. It wasn’t Tanzer in command. He was too valuable. He was somebody, finally, that people couldn’t shove aside, when all through his life people had been trying, and they couldn’t do that again. If he did this—if he lived through it—
If he made good on everything he’d promised.
“Dekker.”
Percy’s voice, echoing over the speaker, making his heart jump.
“Sir?”
“Mission dump has gone to your files. We have incoming.”
Cold hit his gut, raw panic negated every reasoning. It couldn’t happen. It wouldn’t happen, it wasn’t true...
“I said incoming, Dekker. Get your ass into library! Fast!”
He grabbed a new grip on the zipline for the lift and hit the inner lift wall, damn the drilled reaction, he didn’t believe it, damn, he didn’t believe it. “We’re not betraying position,” the voice from the speakers said. “We’re allowing forty minutes, that’s all we can allow, for library access, plot, and confirm. Get with it.”
“You’re lying! Sir! This is a test run, this is the damn test, you don’t have to pull this on us!”
Silence from the lift speaker. Lift crashed into the frame, jolted him and the whole compartment around to plus 1 g, and he caught a grip on the rail.
“Damn you!” he yelled at the incommunicative com. “Damn you to hell, commander, —sir! Where’s this incoming?”
But nothing answered him.
“I swear to you it wasn’t our guys,” Villy said on the way to the officers’ conference room, to a meeting Graff would as soon have skipped. “That’s official from the colonel. He didn’t leak it, nobody on staff did that he can trace. That’s what he wants me to say.”
“What do you say?” Graff asked.
“He’s not lying.” Villy didn’t sound offended by the question. Villy’s eyes, crinkled around the edges with a lot of realtime years, were honest and clear as they always had been. You wanted to believe in Alexandra Villanueva the way you wanted to believe in sanity and reason in the universe. But Villy quoted Tanzer at him and it was suddenly Villanueva’s own self Graff began to worry about, now, about the man who, over recent weeks, he’d worked with as closely and as cooperatively as he worked with his own staff—sorting out the tempers, the egos, the simple differences in protocols: they’d mixed the staff and crews in briefings and in analysis sessions, they’d given alcohol permissions in rec on one occasion, holding the marine guards in reserve—and nobody’d been shot, nobody’d been taken to the brig, and no chairs had left the floor. More than that, they had a remarkable sight ahead of them in the hall, that was Rios and Wojcak in UDC fatigues and Pauli in Fleet casuals and station-boots, engaged in conversation that involved a clipboard waved violently about.
No combat. Sanity. Cooperation, if a thin one. There was a secret, highly illegal betting pool going among the crews, odds on which crew was going to draw the test run, and a sizable pot, from what Fleet Police said, the UDC crews leaning heavily toward solid, by-the-book Almarshad and the Fleet tending to split between Mitchell and Almarshad and no few still betting on Dekker as the long shot. He hadn’t taken the action on that pool that regulations demanded; Villy hadn’t; more remarkable, Tanzer hadn’t, if Tanzer knew, which he personally doubted—Tanzer didn’t know everything that was going on these days, Villy directly admitted there were topics he didn’t bring up with Tanzer, and it was too much to hope that Tanzer had learned anything about dealing with the Shepherds or changed his style of command. It was Villy’s discretion he leaned to—had been leaning to it maybe more than he should have. Maybe he’d only been naive, looking too much for what he hoped and too little for the long years Tanzer had built up a network: in this place.
Fact was, same as he’d told the committee, there were too many chances for leaks, too many contractors, too many technicians, too many station maintenance personnel with relatives in Sol One or, God knew, in Buenos Aires or Paris. It was worth their jobs to talk, the workers knew that, they’d signed the employment agreements, but they were human beings and they had personal opinions, not always discreetly.
Shuttle was coming in—approaching dock. They might be rid of the senators, but they had reporters incoming, FleetCom had broken the news of the impending test. The senators had no wish to get caught here, they were packing to leave, had their last interviews with the Lendler personnel today (God hope they didn’t give anything away) and the shuttle would be at least six hours in maintenance and loading, latest report.
None too soon to be rid of the lot, in his book.
“We have any new data on the hearings at One?” Villanueva asked him. “Anything from the JLC or the technical wing?”
“Nothing. Not a thing yet.”
Steps behind them in the hall, rapid, as they reached the briefing room. Late arrival, Graff interpreted it, turned to glance and met an out-of-breath Trev, out of FleetCom. Evans handed him a printed note.
It said: Reporters are on the shuttle. All outbound system traffic on hold. Test is imminent.
Hell, he thought. And: Why didn’t the captain warn us? FSO has to have known, FSO has to have signed the press passes...
“Reply, sir?”
“None I want in writing. Tell Com One I said so and what in hell. Those words. Stat.”
“Yessir,” Trev said, and cleared the area at max speed.
Which left Villy’s frown and lifted eyebrow.
“Reporters, on the inbound shuttle,” he told Villy. “The test’s been announced, I don’t know by whom... System traffic is stopped. We’re stuck with the shuttle, the senators, and the reporters.”
Villy’s look couldn’t be a lie. “They’ve been inbound for three damned days! This isn’t a leak, this is a damned publicity set-up! What kind of game are you guys running over at FSO?”
“That’s what I’m asking FleetCom. Bloody hell, what are they doing to us?”
“Damn mess,” Meg muttered, in the ready room, looking at the lighted plot-screen—Dek was a bundle of nerves, holding to the hand-grip beside her and memorizing that chart with the only drug-training he’d ever had, the bit that helped you focus down and retain like crazy. Ben was swearing because he hadn’t got his specific numbers out of carrier Nav yet, Sal was talking to the ordnance clerk; and Meg muttered her own numbers to voice-comp, while suit-up techs tugged and pulled
at her in intimate places. You didn’t even do that basic thing for yourself, you just memmed charts fast as you could and talked to the systems chiefs and techs who you hoped to God had done their job.
The helmet came down over her head, and other hands twisted the seal. 360° real-HUD came active, voice-link did. She evoked her entry macro, that prepped her boards long-distance, dumped her touch, her patterns, her them-marks on the plot-screen fire-path to the Hellburner systems.
Mitch’s crew and Almarshad’s were in flight control, two beats of argument between them whether it could possibly be real, whether they might actually have a realspace system entry launched at high v from far out; or whether intelligence reports foretold something about the drop in—the consensus was test, set-up, but they couldn’t take it as a test run, didn’t dare believe the ordnance that would come at them was anything but real. The sketchy fire-track was running right past Earth’s moon, not the kind of thing Sol System traffic control was going to like, and that meant a wide-open track with a shot at Earth that if they didn’t get a fast intercept on that incoming ship—the doomsday scenario: they could lose the whole motherwell in less than ten minutes, that was what shaped up on their data. Billions of people. All life on earth. The enemy wouldn’t do that. They were human beings. ..
But life in the Belt and the gossip from Fleet instructors argued there were minds out there more different than you ever wanted to meet. And you could never, ever bet on them doing the logical—
Siren went off, the board and take-hold. “Hell!” Ben cried, because they were going, there was no more time, the carrier was going to hit the mains and the next input they got was going to be off carrier ops, the carrier’s longscan / com team that was their data-supply and their situation monitor, them and the back-up teams doing her job for the sixty-minus seconds it was going to take them to board and belt.
She grabbed the dismount line behind Dek, in crew-entry order, hindmost, and hung on as the door slammed wide and the line meshed with the gears, hell of a jerk on the arm. You held on, was all, as the singing line aimed you for the mounting bars at the hatch, one, two, three, four, tech lines ringing empty, the Hellburner’s tech hatch open, but receiving no one. Carrier technical crew shouted good wishes at them as they shot past and one after the other hit the stop, pile-up of hand-grips—inertia carried them in—she hit the cushions last, heard the hatches shut when she flipped the toggle, both ports, confirm on the seal by on-panel telltales as she was snapping the only manual belt; second toggle and they went ops-com, linked with the carrier, sending and receiving a blitz of electronic information. “We’re go,” Dek said, and instantaneously the carrier mains cut in with a solidity that shoved them harder than the pods ever had, 10+ in a brutal, backs-downward acceleration.
Carrier was outputting now, making EM noise in a wavefront an enemy would eventually intercept in increasing Doppler effect, and to confuse their longscan they were going to pull a pulse, half-up to FTL and abort the bubble, on a heading for the intercept zone—that was the scary part. That was the time, all sims aside, that the theoretical high became real, light, true hellride, with herself for the com-node that integrated the whole picture.
They tranked you down for jump. They didn’t for this move. They told you what it was going to be, they pulled disorientations and sensory assaults, and learned the them-techniques from the starship crew, and hoped you could get the threads back when you came out—but meanwhile you just kept talking to the computer and the carrier and moving your markers with the joystick, laying the strike and the strategy as if you were seeing it tamely on the light-table instead of on monitors, with numbers and grids floating in glowing colors. Reality became hyper-extended vision, into mathematical futures, chaos of nature, two intersecting presence-cones of human action that had to narrow at a proximity to Luna that was truly harrowing.
Hard to breathe. The flight-suit squeezed the ribs in efficient pulses, oxygen flowed—damned sure not the pod this time. This was real—this was—
Moment that the brain skipped. . . moment that they weren’t—anywhere, and all the data left the brain void. A voice said, like God, Stand by sep, Hellburner; she recalled that procedure, scanned her crew’s LS, TAG and STAT data glowing gold at the upper periphery of her midrange vision and said, mechanically as any machine, “Sep go, that’s go, go...”
Bang!
“We have absolutely identical interests,” Villy said to the gathered reporters, while Graff folded his arms and leaned against the wall by the door. Captain Villy rested elbows against the podium and said in that voice that had to be believed: “Let me explain where the UDC stands. Yes, there’ve been problems in the past. As a test crew, in this facility, we’ve seen ideas that worked and we’ve seen ideas that didn’t—we’ve worked with a lot of bright-eyed young pilots and techs that came in here all impatient to be trained in equipment we ran when it didn’t have all the buttons they put on it—who never gave a damn about what we knew so long as the buttons worked. That’s the truth. And I’ll tell you, having the future operational crews shoved in here to be part of the testing procedures—that’s been a hell of an adjustment for us—but the Fleet did call this one right. The physiological demands of this equipment are hell; and the crews that can fly this baby are going to be so scarce in the general population they’re probably going to give some of us a chance to be honest working crew.”
Tidbit of real News. Graff pricked up his ears, saw Optex record lights like so many blinking eyes among the reporters.
“They say the other guys have to grow ‘em in vats, and eighteen years from now we’re going to see their hand-raised clone pilots in the cockpit. That eighteen years is the lead we have, because they tell us the merchanters that won’t take our side, won’t take the Union side either. Union doesn’t have the insystem crews we do—they’re a lot more mechanized, their mining equipment’s state of the art, a lot of robots. Their miners sit on big ore-collectors, they don’t have our antique equipment and consequently they never developed the pool of experienced insystem crews like we drew in from our asteroid belt—”
“What about this tape?” a reporter asked, out of turn. “What about this Union mind-tape?”
“It’s not Union,” Graff said from near the door, and drew an immediate concentration of steady red lights. “It’s ours, and it works only on the reflexes, a glance left or right at the panels, mathematical formulae and routines, nothing as organized thought or attitudes... It covers the same kind of memorizations you do in school—” He trusted they did such things in schools. These reporters were Earth’s equivalent of com and he doubted they had any experience in common. He wanted Saito down here, but Saito was on the carrier, where FleetCom with a test proceeding mandated she be; Demas was God knew where—Demas had taken refuge in Ops, he was willing to lay bets...
Com said in his ear: “Mission is go-for with Dekker. Rider is sepped. We’re coming up in station systems.”
“I copy,” he told the bone-mike. “I’m on my way to mission control.”
Reporters were still looking at him. Optex lenses were all turned his way, and Villy was watching him from the podium.
“Mission’s away,” he said, removed the uncomfortable security com from his ear, and added, with a certain suicidal satisfaction, “Team leader is Dekker,” and watched all chaos erupt.
“All right?” Ben sounded finally satisfied with the numbers and Dekker gave a little breath of relief—a relief that Ben probably wouldn’t understand. Smug, that was Ben when he relaxed; but Ben wasn’t smug now, he was On and anxious, all the way.
“We just keep running quiet a while, Dek-boy. A real hold-steady here, minimum profile, just keep us out of their acquisition long as we can—carrier’s gone up ahead, going to fire a decoy and brake hard.”
The carrier’s vane-config showed clear, that was the immediate worry on this maneuver—the carrier was going to pull an axis roll: a thing the size of some space stations was going to do a to
tal reverse, pass them again at close range, rotate a second time and tail them at a distance ...
“This is a set-up,” Meg complained, “we got too many numbers on this, Ben. It’s got to be a set-up...”
“Dekker a murderer?” Graff said, tracking past the spex windows of mission control to the profile screens and the working teams and his own trainees at the boards. They’d established the reporters in the viewing area, gotten the senators a secure spot in a VIP observation point, and on the displays in mission control a situation was unfolding neither party yet comprehended. “No. He happens to be the survivor of three documented attempts on his life, two of which put him in hospital, one of which killed Cory Salazar.”
Not the loudest voice, but the one he chose to hear: “That contradicts what Councillor Salazar charges—”
Probability fans were changing color on the screens, rapidly narrowing. “It is, nevertheless, the truth. The evidence against Paul Dekker was fabricated by the identical agencies responsible for covering up a strike-breaking police action that took seventeen other lives documented in 2304 sworn affidavits and complaints.”
“From Belters?” Bias dripped from the question, and sharpened focus and temper for a split-second.
“From civilian and military eyewitnesses and victims living and dead in Earth Company records. There are no grounds for the charges against Paul Dekker—they’re old history, investigated and officially dismissed when the agencies that made the charges were dissolved by legal action for corruption, wrongful death, and labor abuses. As for the culpable parties, they were relieved of command and stripped of their licenses, but unfortunately that was the only action taken. I suggest you ask Ms. Salazar why she’s never named them in her pending suit.”
“Why didn’t she?”
“I couldn’t speculate on her motives.”
Ten and twenty questions at once. Riot, as reporters a moment ago drifting along the spex wall suddenly elbowed each other to get Optex pickups to the fore. Let the Company raise hell, let the Reel ship him to the battle zone— please God, ship him to the zone, away from reporters, cameras, Edmund Porey, and self-serving senators demanding dinner in the VIP observation area.