“It was a set-up,” Meg said. “Don’t you smell set-up? I never saw a room blow so fast. Just a skosh peculiar, they let Dek out and they run him back in, and MS so seriously important and all? We’re the ones they shagged a carrier to get here. Are they going to forget us? Nyet. Non.”
Sal was still frowning. “Amnesia’s been known. Strikes people in office, most often. I hear they got no vaccine.”
“Faith, Aboujib. Believe in justice.”
Sal snorted. Almost laughed.
“I believe, Kady, I believe we are in un beau de fuck-up here....”
Truth was, she was scared too. But scared didn’t profit you anything when it came to judges and courts, and she’d said it to Sal—the Fleet hadn’t gone to all this trouble to invite them to a messhall brawl.
“I believe in they hauled our asses a long, long way to haul Dek in out of the dark. That is a truly remarkable altruism, Aboujib.”
“Des bugs.”
“Bien certain they would. Bien certain someone’s playing games. Dekker’s mama lost her job. Does this rate news? Does this rate the peace movement lawyers giving interviews in front of the MarsCorp logo? Nyet. But there it was.”
“You think somebody made it up? Faked it?”
“Nyet. Peace movement, Aboujib. Peace movement is involved. Does not the antenna go up? Does not an old rab ask herself why and what if?”
There was a spark of interest in Sal’s dark eye. The one that showed. Sal didn’t say a thing, but: “Rab is. The Corp is. Amen.”
“That chelovek in the suit, that lawyer? That’s a plastic. You mark.”
‘’Why’s he with Dekker’s mama?”
Scary to think on. Truly scary. Sal looked at her. Sal as Belter as they came, and Shepherd; and how did you say the mother-well’s mind in Sal’s terms?
“Think of helldeck. Think of all those preachers, them mat want to save your soul. And they each got a different way.”
Another snort. “Crazies.”
“On Earth they got their right. That’s why they got it still on helldeck. On Earth you got a right to say and do. So they say and do. On Earth you can say a straight-line rock won’t hit you. And maybe it won’t. It might be too heavy. Might fell. You understand?”
A straight-line rock was one thing to a Belter. Fall was a contradiction in terms. You didn’t have rocks on station, where things fell. And fall didn’t go straight-line. Thoughts and puzzlement chased through Sal’s expression, and rated a frown.
“What I said. Crazy.”
“A rock might fall on its own before it hit you. You got to know its size to know.”
‘’Why’d it move?”
“Because some crazy threw it at you. Bare-handed. But it might fall first.”
“So. On station, naturlich.”
“In the motherwell, everything’s like that. Gravity and friction are always in the numbers. Not a lot of blue-skyers can figure those numbers. Things just happen because they happen and sometimes they don’t happen and you don’t know why, so you were lucky or you weren’t. You don’t know. Very few can comp it. Ask a peacer what the answer is. He’ll tell you it’s not war. Ask him how you’ll get no war. He’ll say don’t make one. Half the time it works. You got, however, to convert the other side to this idea. Ask a peacer how to make peace. He’ll say, Don’t fight. Half the time that works too.”
“Guy was going to beat hell out of Dek.”
“Yeah, well, this rab did have such a thought. And I sincerely wasn’t going to sit and watch it.”
“So why’re the peacers paying for a lawyer for Dekker’s mama?”
“Peace on Earth’s like that rock. You got to calc things you don’t, in space. You got to ask, primarily, whose peace, whose way, how long? But Earthers don’t, generally. Blue-sky’s used to not caking all the factors.”
“Trez sloppy,” Sal said.
“The Corps don’t like you to calc all the numbers. Neither do the helldeck preachers. Listen all you like, you sojer-boys with the bugs. You sleep down with the Corp, you get up with fleas. How good’s your addition?”
“There is no excuse,” Tanzer said, “there is no mitigating circumstance except your personal decision to release Dekker from hospital without psychiatric evaluation, without appropriate procedures. The man’s a fuse, lieutenant. You knew that. Or don’t you read your personnel reports?”
Graff didn’t ask how Tanzer had. He said, patiently, standing in front of Tanzer’s desk: “Dekker didn’t do anything. He got up in a hurry and bumped a man he didn’t even know....”
“This is a finger you want on the trigger of the most sophisticated weapons system ever devised? Can’t navigate from a chair in the messhall? Is that his problem?”
“Your news service released a story without a next-of notice. Was that deliberate?”
“Is it a death situation? I think not. Your boy can’t tolerate a little stress? What in hell is he doing in this program? He blows and your whole side of the messhall comes out of the seats—“
“Your man did the grabbing and the shoving. Don’t try that one. It was simultaneous. There are too many witnesses.”
“Your witnesses were all in the middle of it. Your latest recruits were instigators. Is that what you call leadership? Is that what you call a cooperative relationship? Damned right, I don’t put all the blame on Dekker, / don’t blame the boy you dragged out of hospital and put into a high voltage situation, / blame the officer who made that boy a cause, which is damned well what you’ve done with your attitude and, for all I know, your direct statements to your command. You piled the pressure on that boy, you put those women in the middle of it, you set him up to draw fire—he was guaranteed to blow the first time he got any load more man he had. So his mama lost her job, damned right his mama lost her job—she was calling MarsCorp board members at two in the morning, threatening phone calls, you read me? She’s a spacecase—like mother, like son, if you want my opinion. It’s congenital!”
“You have no basis for any such conclusion.”
“Haven’t I? I’m telling you right now, right here, he’s never getting back in a cockpit and you aren’t giving any more orders in a UDC premise, not in the messhall, not the offices, not the classrooms, not the corridors or the hospital. Try that one, lieutenant. Take that one to your captain and see what he has to say.”
He had no instructions how to play that one. He wasn’t a lawyer. He didn’t know whether Tanzer could legally do that. He wasn’t in charge of policy. He didn’t know whether he should use Fleet Security to guarantee access. It was down to that. The phone rang—thank God for two extra seconds to think while Tanzer jabbed a button and growled an irritable, “I’m not to be disturbed.”
“Sir,” the secretary said, on intercom, “your line.”
Unusual. Tanzer picked up the phone to listen in private and his expression smoothed out and went completely grim.
“When?” Tanzer asked; and: “Any other information?” And, “Find out, dammit, however you have to.”
After which Tanzer hung up, glowered at him and said, “Get yourself and your crew up onto the carrier. Right now.”
“Incoming?” A strike at Sol? Union missiles?
Tanzer’s fist slammed the desk. “Get your ass out of this office, lieutenant, and get it the hell up to the carrier where you’re supposed to be competent!”
Incoming was no time to stand arguing, and arguing with Tanzer was no way to get information through the carrier’s systems; but if it was Union action there was no way he was going to make the carrier’s deck before criticality. “Phone,” he said, and reached for the one on the desk. The colonel made to stop him, and he held on to it with: “Dammit, they need a go-order. —Carrier-corn,” he told Tanzer’s secretary. “Fast,” —after which the secretary muttered something and he heard the lighter, fainter sound of Fleet relays. “This is Graff,” he said the instant he had a click-in. “Status.”