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.