Or the tape off his dead partners worked, and Porey hadn’t given up when they’d had to downgrade the crew to basics—it wasn’t basics anymore. They’d either pushed the sim to the limit—or it had lied to them. And he didn’t put that past Porey, he didn’t put anything political past Porey, if he wanted to prove something to some committee in charge of finance ...
They were on the damned list, that was what, they always had been, that son of a bitch had jerked him sideways and just kept going with his crew. What was it, a confidence-building exercise? Another damned psych-out for more damn political reasons? He felt sick at his stomach.
“You all right, Dek?”
He looked at Meg, realized everybody was looking at him.
“Dek,” Ben said, “you aren’t spooking on us, are you?”
He shook his head solemnly. “It’s August eighth, Ben.”
“Huh?” Sal said. Meg frowned. But Ben said;
“It better be, Moonbeam. It had effin1 better be.”
“Yes, sir,” Graff said, at the table, hands folded, looking straight at two very anxious senators and a busy background of senatorial aides. There was a committee, inevitably if there was a glitch, there was a committee, thank God currently meeting at Sol One, in the comfort of class 1 accommodations: it wanted answers and this was the forerunner, the shockwave.
“Why is a junior lieutenant left in command of this base? What in hell does your base commander think he’s doing taking that carrier out? We give you the authority you ask for, and immediately the program goes to hell in a handbasket, while the officer in charge removes a carrier and declares he’s going to test, without notifying the UDC or the Joint Committee, with a highly controversial figure aboard, conveniently unavailable to an ongoing investigation, while a distorted version of the whole damned training program leaks to the media? What kind of circus are you running here?”
His stomach was in knots. He missed certain of the references. Demas and Saito had advised him certain things to say, certain points to make, the direction he should go with these men. But Demas and Saito didn’t know one truth he knew. Neither did Porey and neither did the captain.
“Sir,” he began on that track, “with all respect, I deny that the breach was in our Security.”
“Are you suggesting the UDC leaked it? What about Dekker’s phone call to Sol One? What about other phone calls from other Fleet personnel?”
He hoped to hell there wasn’t a recorder going. “Let me explain, sir. Fleet personnel are contained in a security cocoon within the former administrative apparatus. Our personnel are issued cards which do not work with civilian accesses, which can’t access BaseCom or the internal phone system without going through FleetCom, which is physically aboard the carriers, if there were anyone outside this facility for them to call, nearer the Belt. The one exception was Dekker, who—” They began to interrupt and he kept going. “—who made his only call to his mother in my office, on my authorization, and I recorded the call in its entirety in case any question arose about that contact. The UDC system is run through BaseCom, which is linked by other means to station central. Those are the principal routes information can take. There is the shuttle, and there is contact between human beings who can walk from one place to another If information flowed from this facility, it took one of those routes.”
On which they had evidence, except a member of a Fleet unit also had accesses he wasn’t supposed to have... that Fleet Command didn’t know about... which, if he confessed it now, was damning to him, to the Fleet, to Dekker’s crew at minimum, to the Fleet’s credibility and their support from the legislative committee, at worst.
While at least at some level the UDC and potentially the legislature knew about Pollard’s security clearance—and might possibly know he’d somehow retained system access— if Pollard himself weren’t under higher orders.
God, he should never have held his information source secret from Porey. Never.
“I suggest you use the channels you have to find out what’s going on, lieutenant. Somebody in your command with real authority had better get his ass into this station, find out where the leak is and get this program off the evening news. You’re public as hell, reporters are demanding to come over here in herds, we’ve got a very fragile coalition that worked hard to give you what you asked for, and let me tell you very bluntly, lieutenant, if anything goes wrong with this rumored upcoming test you’ve lost the farm. You cannot disavow another failure, your captains can’t pass the buck to junior officers. Do you understand that? Am I talking to anyone who remotely understands the political realities of this situation?”
“Yes, sir, I do understand.” No temper. “I am thirty-eight unapparent years of age, sir, and older than that as you count time. I was in command of this base during the last hearings, I was lately the director of personnel in this program, I am currently in charge of this facility and the testing program, and of the investigation, and we do have an answer, at least to what happened to Jamil Hasseini and his crew.” He reached in his pocket and held up a yellow plastic washer. “This caused the so-called accident.”
He had their attention. At least.
“How?”
“Operations records showed a hangup in an attitude control. This plastic washer turned up to block the free operation of the yoke. In a null-# facility, you may know, maintenance has to be extremely careful to log and list and check every part, down to the smallest screws and washers, that they take into the facility. These are experienced null-g workers. We don’t know by those records how long this little part has been there—whether it was there from the time the pod was assembled and it by total accident floated over a course of years undetected into the absolutely most critical position it could take in the control system—or whether it was placed there recently.”
“Sabotage, in other words.”
“We view it as more than suspicious. Paul Dekker was assigned to that pod.”
“So we’ve heard.”
“How much have you heard?”
“Maybe you’d damn well better tell us what there is to hear. We hear Dekker was assigned there and pulled at the last minute. Again. Why? How?”
“By my order, as chief of personnel. I made a routine final check on the crew stats: they were coming out of a period of orientation and lab sims. I felt we might be rushing it, in terms of fatigue levels. A stand-down under those circumstances is routine. Routine—except that this was the time his replacement crew was going into sims with him. Except that the same individuals we suspect of sabotage had access to that area. Civilian employees: Dekker’s given a positive ID on one of them as guilty of assault in the last so-called accident. We’re talking about deliberate sabotage and premeditated murder committed on Dekker—”
“With what motive?”
“I doubt it was personal. We’ve two employees of Lendler Corp under surveillance. We don’t know all their contacts, yet. But they had access on both occasions.”
Frowns. “Can you prove anything?”
“We’re developing a case. But you see the problem we’ve been working against.”
“Your security is supposed to be on top of things. People come and go where they like here, is that the way it works?”
“People with security clearances, yes, sir—in this case clearances granted by the UDC, interviewing people on Earth, where we have no screening apparatus. We’re reviewing the systems, and the clearances, but there are 11338 civilians on B Dock, hired by the UDC and overseen by various offices. We’re naturally giving Lendler Corp a higher priority in our review, but that doesn’t mean information can’t go out of here through another route.”
“Meanwhile Dekker is unavailable.”
“He is unavailable.”
“And you have no proof of this sabotage.”
“Their access. Dekker’s testimony. The washer. Circumstantial evidence placing them in the area.”
“You know what that’s worth.”