“We could offer to give evidence.”
“We don’t know what we’re swearing to. We don’t know what happened.”
“We could look in that log.”
“Sure, a skimmer’s going to log his moves. What’s he going to write? ‘1025 and we just blew a chip off a 1 k rock’? If we touch that panel over there we’ll leave a record of that access, and maybe that’s not a good idea. Do I spell it out? Don’t be a fool.”
“I can fix that log. I think I can bypass that access record if you really want to know.”
“Don’t depend on it. ‘Think’ isn’t good enough. No. We don’t run that risk. Best claim we’ve got is that we haven’t seen those records and we don’t know a thing. We don’t have a problem if we just keep clean. No shady stuff. Nothing. Clean, Ben.”
“Knock that guy in the head,” Ben muttered. “Be sure there’s no questions. Then there’s no problem.”
God, he thought. Is that what they teach this generation?
The ship jolted.
Dekker yelled aloud, struggling to get free. Someone—a familiar voice now—shouted at him to shut up.
Another, gentler, said, “That was just getting in position, Dekker. Take it easy.”
He had another blank spot then, woke up with the nightmare feeling of increasing g, not knowing where it was going to stop, or what had started it. Something pressed into his back and he thought, God, we’re spinning—
“Cory!” he yelled.
“Shut up, dammit!”
“Dekker.” This came gently then, with a touch at his shoulder. A smell of something cooked. Freefall. He blinked and looked at the gray-haired man, who let a foil packet of something drift near his face.
“We’ve done our position,” the man said to him, he couldn’t remember the name, and then did. Bird. Bird was the good one. Bird was the one who didn’t want to kill him. “We’re going to catch our beam tomorrow and we’re going home. Seems Mama thinks we’re in no hurry or something, damn her. I’ll let you loose if you can keep awake.” Another pat on the shoulder. “You know you’ve been off your head a little.”
“What time is it?”
“Shush,” Bird said, “don’t go asking that.”
“I want to know—”
Bird put a hand on his mouth. “Don’t do that,” Bird said, looking him in the eyes. “Don’t do that, son. You don’t need to know. You really don’t need to know. Your partner’s just lost, that’s all. A long time ago. There’s nothing anybody can do for her.”
He didn’t want to believe that. He didn’t want to wake up again, but Bird caught the packet drifting in front of his face and held the tube to his mouth, insisting.
He took a little. It was warm, it was soup, it was salty as hell. He turned his head away, and Bird let it go, leaving a tiny planetesimal of soup cooling in the air, drifting away with the current. Bird brushed at it, caught it in his hand, wiped it on his sleeve.
Blood everywhere, shining dark drops…
Everything was stable. Clean and quiet. Nothing had ever gone wrong here. Nothing had ever been wrong. He kept his eyes open for fear of the dark behind them and tried another sip of what Bird was offering him, while the first was hitting his stomach with an effect he was not yet sure of.
Why am I here? he asked himself. What is this place? This isn’t my ship. What am I doing here?
Maybe he asked out loud. He didn’t keep track of things. “To Refinery Two,” Bird told him.
He shook his head. He got a breath and thought, Cory’s still in the ship, they’ve left Cory back in the ship—
He reminded himself, he could do it now with only a cold, strange calm: No, Cory’s dead—Not that he could remember. He kept telling himself that over and over, but he could not remember. She was still there. She was wondering what had happened to him. She was trusting him to do the right thing, the smart thing. She was waiting for him to pick her up…
The dark-headed one, the young one, Ben, rose into his vision, carrying a length of thin cable and a davies clip. Ben hung in front of his face and reached behind his neck with the cable.
“Hell!” he yelled, and used a knee, but Ben grabbed a handful of his coveralls and it missed its target.
Oh, shit, he thought then, looking Ben in the face. He thought Ben would kill him.
Bird said, from the other side, “Easy, son. It’s temporary. Hold still.”
He had thought Bird was all right. But Bird held him still and Ben got the cable around his neck. The clip clicked.
“There,” Ben said. “You can reach the necessaries… reach anything in this ship but the buttons. And you don’t really want those, do you?”
He stared eye to eye at Ben and wondered if Ben was waiting to kill him while Bird was asleep. He remembered hearing them talk. He wondered whether Ben was going to hit him right now.
“You understand me?” Ben asked.
He nodded, scared, and likewise clear-headed in a tight-focused, adrenaline-edged way. He stayed very still while Ben started untaping his left wrist from the pipe. He didn’t think either ahead or backward. It was just himself and Ben, and the old man saying, holding tightly to his shoulder, “I apologize. I sincerely apologize about this, son. But we can’t have you wandering around off your head. Ben’s not a bad guy. He really isn’t.”
He remembered what he’d overheard. He had thought Bird wanted to keep him alive, and now he wasn’t sure either one of them was sane.
Ben freed his left arm. Bird untied the right. Moving both at once hurt his chest, hurt his back, hurt everything so much his eyes teared.
Ben went away forward. Bird stayed behind, put a hand on his shoulder. “No difference between our config and yours, the standard rig, by what I saw. Anything you can reach, you can use. Wouldn’t use the spinner with that cable attached, understand, but you got g while you were tumbling, God knows probably more than enough. Your stimsuit’s clean, but you’d as glad be free of it a day or so, wouldn’t you? You’re probably sore as hell.—Right? Just don’t try to use the shower, cable won’t let it seal, we’ll have water everywhere. Anything else you got free run of. Copy that?”
“Yeah.”
Bird gathered up the trailing cable, put it in his hand, closed his fist on it. “When you’re moving about the cabin, do kind of keep a grip on that. We don’t want you hurt. Hear? Don’t want that cable to pull you up short. We’re not going to do a burn without we warn you, but all the same, you keep a hand to that. Hold on to it.”
Just too many things had happened to him. He could not figure what his situation was or what they wanted. He shoved off, drifted away from the bulkhead to get the packet of soup that had come adrift. Braking with his arm against a pipe was almost more than he could do. He let go the cable, confused, and banged his head.
Someone caught his foot and pulled, gently. It turned him as he came down and he saw Bird with a packet of soup in his own hands.
“There’s solid food,” Bird said, “when you can handle it. Use anything from the galley you need. You got pretty dehydrated.”
He hated all this past tense, implying a major piece of time he didn’t remember. From moment to moment he told himself Cory was gone, and every time he did that he felt a sense of panic. He brushed a touchpad with his foot, stopped, drank a sip and watched Bird sip from his own packet. He kept thinking, They’re lying to me, they’re not taking me home…
Finally he asked Bird, “What ’driver is it out there?”
“What about a ’driver?”
“You were talking about a ’driver. What ’driver were you talking about?”
Ben yelled up from below, “Don’t tell him a damn thing, Bird. He hasn’t earned it.”