The blip was still moving. No question.
Cory argued with him: “It’s the biggest chance we’ll ever have—”
A piece of memory clicked in, quietly, just there of a sudden with that sense of frightened foolishness—he’d realized the danger in the ’driver—and he’d folded the argument, folded the way he’d folded with Sal up there. He’d had the ship completely in his hands—but he’d been afraid to be afraid, he’d let Cory’s college education convince him she was right when his gut was telling him a silent, advancing ’driver the company charts didn’t show wasn’t playing by the rules she understood—
Cory, who knew MarsCorp inside and out, had said, We’re going to call their bluff; they’re in contact with BM every damn minute… and he’d frozen. He couldn’t say, Cory, this scares hell out of me. He’d been too scared of Cory’s education to say, Cory, this is just damned stupid—
She’d say, now, if she were here to say it, Well, I really blew that one, didn’t I?
And he wouldn’t. He couldn’t—couldn’t talk, couldn’t get his words straight when he thought he could sound like a fool—
So he’d protected his damned soft spot. And Cory had died.
He bumped into someone. He mumbled an apology and kept walking, playing that moment over and over in his mind.
They’d been invulnerable—then. Nothing was going to turn out wrong. She’d made a bad choice, but rocks were her department, the ship was his. The company was crooked as hell, but he could call their bluff. He could make that ship listen—
He’d backed a wrong call. He’d known it and he’d done it. That was what he had to look at and look at til it burned its way into his brain.
CHAPTER 16
THEY waited and they waited in the bar—they’d talked Bird, practically manhandled Bird, out of Trinidad and into the idea of a fancy dinner, best clothes, rezzes at the Europa, a bit of bar-hopping afterward—and now Dekker went missing. Ben was mad, Sal was a nervous wreck—Dekker had been acting strange all day, Meg reminded herself glumly, and spent her own money calling the gym he reasonably should have gone to hours ago.
Of course he hadn’t.
Damn.
“So, look,” Bird said when she reported that fact back to the table, “we just leave word with Mike. Mike can give him directions when he shows up. He’ll find us.”
“Leave that guy loose on the ’deck?” Ben groaned—not the way she’d have put it, but it was another worrisome side of it. “Let’s just give it a little while.”
“He’s a big boy,” Bird said. “He’s found his way around the Belt, for God’s sake, he’s not lost. He may not have understood it was a date.”
“He understood,” Meg said, and was about to say she agreed with Ben, they should give it another little while, when Mike at the bar signaled they had a call.
She stood up to take it, but Mike indicated Sal specifically, to her acute disappointment. She slid back into her chair while Sal went to take the call—probably some friend come onto R2, she decided: Dekker might call her if he was in a funk and he might call Bird, but Dekker asking for Sal was hardly likely.
“Probably in some bar,” Ben said. “Probably drinking his way to tomorrow. Or zee’d on pills.—Dammit, Meg, think of another place.”
“Pacific,” Bird said.
“So let’s call there,” Ben said, and something else, but Meg lost it. Sal hung up on her call and flashed her a come-here signal, looking seriously worried.
“Excuse me,” she murmured and got up and met Sal by the phone. Sal said, head ducked and voice low, “That was Mitch. He said meet him out front. Now.”
She felt a little chill. And puzzlement. “Seriously nonreg. He say anything?”
“No. Just that.” Sal looked truly scared. Terrified. “Cover me with Bird. I don’t know how long this may take.”
“God,” Meg said. “Yeah. All right.”
Sal went for the door and she went back to the table.
“What was that?” Ben asked.
“Friend with a problem.”
“Dekker?”
“No.”
“God, this isn’t getting any more organized. We’re all over the damn ’deck!”
“I think we ought to make that call to The Pacific.”
“Do that,” Bird said, so she pulled out her card and went for the phone again.
“No,” The Pacific said. “… Yeah, I know him. No, he hasn’t been here.”
Another try gone nowhere. Sal was off. Dekker was missing. Bird was as apt to go off next. Ben was right. She said to Mike, “Another round.”
“Sal coming back?”
“I wish I knew,” she said. “Skosh nervous day, Mike.”
Mike gave a little shake of his head. “A lot wouldn’t have the patience.”
“Yeah,” she said and went back to the table.
“Well?” Ben asked.
She shook her head.
“God, I don’t know why we’re putting up with this!”
“The lad’s probably sorting out a few things,” Bird said. “I’m not real surprised.”
“Yeah, sorting out a few things… For all we know, the cops have got him.”
“Look,” Bird said. “Let’s just put in a few phone calls. There’s eight more gyms.”
Sal came back, not looking like good news. She came up to the table and leaned against it with her hands. “Trouble,” she said, very low. “They just found Dek’s partner.”
“Alive?” Meg asked.
“Neg. Shepherd found her drifting. At the Well.”
Some things you heard and they just didn’t make any kind of sense. A fool kid got killed in the far interface of the refinery zones, back sometime in March, and turned up a couple of hundred million k away in September, in a Shepherd recovery path?
“No way,” Ben said.
“We have any word yet,” Sal asked, “where Dek is?”
“No,” Meg said, and leaned back as Mike brought the drinks.
“On my tab,” Bird said to Mike, all business, and Mike cleverly made himself absent.
Ben hissed, “What do you mean, drifting at the Well? What in hell’s going on?”
Sal shook her head, glitter and rattle of metal-tipped braids. “They don’t know. Word’s out on their net—code-com, to every Shepherd out there… you didn’t hear that. They don’t know if MamBitch can crack it, she gets mad as hell when they do it—but we got a seriously deviated ’driver out there.”
“Fired a body at the Well?” Ben said. “God, somebody’s stark crazy!”
“Worry what else they might do,” Meg said. “If a general message is going out on the Shepherd net, that ’driver’s going to hear the transmission, going to know the time and the PO, going to have an idea what that message was, even if they can’t crack the code.”
“They’re not going to tell MamBitch anything,” Sal said. Her voice was shaking. “But the question is how long the Shepherds can hold this quiet. This is a seriously bad time for Dek to go missing.”
“If the cops haven’t got him,” Bird said. “Question is—does Mama know what’s in that transmission? They’ll pick him up.”
Sal pulled two datacards from her pocket and laid them on the table. “That’s from a couple of friends. We’re them. They’re real high Access. The word is Find Dek. Get him to the club next to Scorpio’s, and don’t use our cards or his.”
Ben whispered, “Dammit, we got a launch tomorrow!”
“He may not make it.”
We may not make it, Meg thought. The cards lay there—seriously illegal, what the Shepherds were doing and what they were risking. One kid was dead. Good chance there could be another.