Devil to the Belt

  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 understand why Porey expected him to follow UDC rules; he didn’t want the say, just fly the ship, that was all, and he’d 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 starships, 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 that 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’ that 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 timeflo
w—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. “I 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, I 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.

  And all that showed on theirs was Dekker’s stricken face, Dekker saying, dazedly, “They lied to her. They lied to her all the way...”

  “It’s playing,” Demas said, leaning against the counter, “it’s playing over and over again, around the planet, as the world wakes up. Dekker’s a handsome kid, doesn’t at all hurt his case. Or ours.”

  Graff wanted to break something—Demas’ and Saito’s necks, if he didn’t recognize in Demas’ glum expression an equal disgust. He looked at the vid, seeing Ingrid Dekker’s bewildered distress, her son’s—”Let her alone!” Over and over again.

  As a weapon, Ingrid Dekker had turned in the hands of Her wielders, and bit to the bone. Dekker was no longer the faceless Belter exile, he was the pilot who’d pulled a spectacular success with the Hellburner, he was a kid with a human grievance and a mother held prisoner by causes and politicians, and the demonstration organizer who had shoved Ingrid Dekker away from the reporters was under heavy condemnation and refusing questions.

  Demas was right: it didn’t hurt that Dekker had the face of a vid star and sincerity that came through the body language. The crew hadn’t played badly either the rumored split in the UDG Fleet ranks, Ben Pollard with his UDC insignia on his flightsuit, Kady and Aboujib in flash and high tech, all of them profoundly concerned and angry at a human issue.... While on the evening and morning news around the world, Alyce Salazar was doing damage control, covering her partisans, claiming that the Fleet had manipulated the media (truth) and that, quote, the important issues were being ignored in a rush to sympathy for a lying scoundrel who’d conned her daughter...

  Dekker might be seeing it—he’d ordered open media access for appearances’ sake while reporters were here, if no other reason; and had no argument from Porey. The vid was going out over all the station, their local authority doing no screening whatsoever.

  “J-G,” Demas said, “honestly, 7 didn’t know until they ordered me to take charge of Security, right when the test started. They did query Saito, early on, for an assessment of Dekker’s personnel record, his cultural makeup—”

  “They. Did the captain know?”

  “I don’t know what there is to know. My guess is, Mazian sent Porey in here to figure the odds. If it was good enough, go, shove the best team in the ship and make the run; and if it turned out to be Dekker, meet the political chaff head-on, no hiding it, aim him straight for the cameras and damn all Salazar could do.”

  “Pardon me, Nav, but the hell the timing was random! High noon in Europe, in Bonn? Mazian’s there. He knows the schedule. He knew it would draw instant fire!”

  “I don’t think he planned the scene with Dekker’s mother.”

  “I don’t put it past him.”

  “I think you give him too much credit. Some things just drop into your lap. But Mazian did want the protests— according to Saito. He wanted to solidify the issue, Saito says, so that it has substance, and men shoot that substance to hell. Make the peacers take a specific position and prove them wrong.”

  “Dekker’s mother.”

  “Dekker’s mother is a side issue. An opportunity I’m sure they’ll take advantage of. Not mentioning Salazar. The EC wants Salazar stopped, in such a way it won’t break Mars out of the union... and we have the Kent business with MarsCorp’s fingerprints all over it.”

  “And daren’t use it, dammit, we daren’t even arrest Kent and Booten, we don’t know—”

  A stray thought crossed his mind.

  “What?” Demas asked in his silence. “Don’t know what?”

  He leaned back in his chair and looked at the vid, where another instant opinion poll was playing. A radical shift in the numbers in the last 5 hours, plus or minus 3 points of accuracy. People believed the things they’d seen. 45% believed Paul Dekker was innocent and 46% now believed there was a significant threat of the war reaching Earth.

  He said to Demas, apropos of nothing previous, “I want a statement prepared, a public relations version of Dekker’s life. In case. I don’t like unanticipateds, Nav.”

  “You’ve got it. But the Company will black-hole it. Salazar is too sensiti
ve an issue. And far too powerful. She’s using the issues, she’s not the grieving mother, she’s a politician. Kent...has got to be a professional. And if we’ve got him, there’ll be others—inside the Earth Company offices, for all we know.”

  “All the same,” he said.

  He offered Demas a thin smile, and Demas took himself and his securitied briefcase back to the carrier, to Saito, to whatever lines of communication they were using to reach the captain with or without Mazian’s knowledge.

  They knew now what had killed Wilhelmsen: Ben Pollard had put them onto it and Porey’s question to Dekker had shown it plain as plain. Wilhelmsen had been UDC command track. Pete Fowler had been the shadow behind Dekker’s status, the real decision-maker—and the UDC had put them into the same cockpit. But they couldn’t put that story in the release to the media—they dared not confuse the issue. Dekker was the point man, the—what had Saito said—the face the public knew? Dekker was the command officer of record in both crews; and that was the way the story was going to Earth.

  Himself, he put on his jacket and went to evening rec, where there was a general liberty in force, with most of the reporters packed in with the senators on the shuttle, about six hours distant from the crews, thank God.