“So why are you in this one?” Villanueva asked. “Earth didn’t ask for this—not our business, a plane clear to hell and gone away from us. Earth Company brought us this thing. The old bottom line. They rooked us into it. Rooked you in too? Or what made you enlist?”
Good question. Complicated question. “Our ship’s routes. The ship I was born to. Polly d’Or. Didn’t ask for trouble, but they tried to cut us out, wanted to regulate where we came and went—retaliation for the Earth Company’s visas. Economics on one scale. Our ship on the other.”
Villy still looked confused, still didn’t get it.
“We’d lose everything. The Fleet’s what keeps those routes open. Only thing that does. They can’t enforce their embargo.”
“Hell and away from us.”
“Now. Not forever. Lucky you have us. It’ll come here— eventually it’ll come here.”
“Not everybody believes that.”
“Nobody outside this system doubts it. You’ll deal with Cyteen—on your terms. Or on theirs. Their technology. You want your personality type changed? They can do it. You want your planet re-engineered? They can do that. They are doing it—but we can’t get close enough to find out what. We don’t get into that system anymore.”
“We.”
“The merchanters they don’t own.”
“You ever been down to a planet?”
He shook his head.
“Ever thought about it?”
“No.”
“What are you afraid of?”
The question bothered him. He was in a mood right now. Maybe it was Tanzer. Maybe it was because he’d never really thought about it.
“Maybe all those people. Maybe being at the bottom of the well, knowing I can’t get myself out of it.”
Villanueva frowned, said, finally, “I grew up under blue sky. But if they get me down there I can’t get out either. Trying to retire me to the damn HQ. I want this ship to fly. It’ll be the last one I work on. I want this one to fly. That’s my reason.”
“We got a few slots, Captain Villy.”
A glance, a laugh. “Old guy like me?”
“Time’s slower out there. Remember I’m in my forties.”
Villanueva pushed back from the table, leaned back in the chair. “Damn you, you’re trying to seduce me.”
He felt a tight smile stretch his mouth. “We’re the only game there is. You don’t want to the in the well. Take you out. Captain Villy. Don’t let them send you down....”
“Damn you.”
“Think on it.”
Villy set his elbows on the table. “About the Dekker business—“
He was merchanter—before he was militia, before he was Fleet. And you did try to get it screwed down tight, whenever you talked deal.
“Dekker’s back in the program.”
“Marginally back in the program. Contingent on the medicals.”
“Our medicals.”
“Coffee could use a warm-up. Yours?”
Rec hall, the term was, but it was the same messhall, they just pulled the wall back and opened up the game nook next door dinner started at 1800h, canteen and a bar opened at 2000h if you could keep your eyes open that late, which Dekker didn’t think he could, even if it was one of the rare shifts his duty card wouldn’t show a No Alcohol Allowed. He was walked out, talked out—“Get the man a sandwich and shove him in bed,” was Meg’s advice; and he was in no mind to argue with it.
There were a few empty tables left in the middle. They drew their drinks. “Stake out a table,” Dekker advised them. “Nobody’11 take it if your drinks are sitting.”
Ben was in the lead; Ben stopped and hesitated over the choice of seats in front of them. “They got a rule where you sit or what?” Ben asked, with a motion of his cup forward. Dekker looked, numbly twigged to what was so ordinary a sight it didn’t even register: all UDC at the one end of the hall, from the serving line; all Fleet at the other.
“This end,” he said.
“There some rule?” Ben repeated.
“They just do.” Sounded stupid, once you tried to justify it. “Not much in common.” But you didn’t sit at the other end. Just didn’t.
“Plus §a change, rab.” Sal gave a shake of her metal-capped braids, set down her drink and pulled back a chair. “You sit, Dek. We’ll do. What shall we get? Cheese san? Goulash? Veg-stew?” Fast line or the slow one, was what it amounted to.
“Dunno.” He hadn’t known how sore he was till he felt a chair under him, and now suddenly everything ached. The walking tour of the facility was a long walk, and bones ached, shoulders ached, head ached—he said, “Chips and a chicken salad—automat, if you don’t mind.” Do them credit, the cooks kept the stuff as fresh as you could get on the line; or the rapid turnaround did. Something light sounded good, and come to think of it, sleep began to. He wasn’t up for a long evening. In any sense. He hoped Meg wouldn’t take offense.
They’d done all the check-ins, gotten Meg and Sal scheduled for Aptitudes tomorrow—Ben had outright refused to sign up, declaring they could damned well get his Aptitudes from the UDC, or court-martial him for failure to show for tests: not an outright show of temper with the examiners, no, just a perfectly level insistence they look up his Security clearance, Ben said; turn up his assignment to Stockholm ... Benjamin Pollard wasn’t taking any Fleet Aptitudes until they showed him his old ones or put him in court.
Damned mess, he reflected, sorry for Ben, truly sorry for what had seemed to a pain-hazed mind his only rescue. Ben’s talk about court-martial upset him. Ben’s situation did. And all the lieutenant would say, when he had in fact gotten a phone call through to him, was: We’ll work with that. Let me talk to the examiners, all right?
He ground at his eyes with the heels of his hands, listened to the dull buzz of conversation and rattling plates over the monotone of the vid, and wondered if there was anything unthought of he could do, any pull he personally had left to use, to get Ben back where he belonged—as much as that, if there was anything he could do to send Meg and Sal back home—no matter that Meg really wanted her chance at the program. He’d been on an emotional rollercoaster since this morning, he’d been ready to go back to routine and they’d stopped him; they’d told him the lieutenant was fighting mat, and he’d been ready to come from the bottom again—
til, God, Meg hit him with the business about flying either with him or against him.
He didn’t want her killed, he didn’t want to lose anybody else—he didn’t want to be responsible for any life he cared about. He kept seeing that fireball when he shut his eyes; in the crowd-noise, he kept hearing the static on Cory’s channel, in the tumbling and the dark—because Meg’s threat had made it imminent, and real.
The hall seemed cold this evening. Somebody had been messing with the temperature controls, or the memories brought back the constant chill of the Belt. He sat there rebreathing his own breath behind his hands, knowing (Ben had a blunt, right way of putting it) knowing he was being a spook, knowing he hadn’t any right to shove Meg around, or tell her anything—no more than he’d had any right to take Ben’s name in vain or ask for Meg and Sal to come here—he supposed he must have asked for Meg, too, since they were here, even if he couldn’t figure why the Fleet had gone to that kind of trouble—
Except the captain had wanted him to testify in that hearing Ben had told him about, the one it was too late to testify in, even if he could remember—which he couldn’t.
So he’d let the captain down, he’d let the lieutenant down—in what cause he didn’t know; he only knew he’d disrupted three lives.
So Meg hadn’t been happy where she’d been, so the Hamilton wouldn’t let her right to the top of the pilot’s list: you didn’t get into that chair just walking aboard, Meg had to have known that, Meg must have known what to expect, coming in on a working crew with its own seniorities and its own way of doing things...