“Dekker did not get on well in school,” Saito said. “Fell in with a group of young anti-socials—read, quasi-rab—and got caught vandalizing station life-support—a series of smokebomb incidents, as happened. One might assume it was their idea of political statement.”
“A very stupid one.” He had read the file, though not with Saito’s interpretation. Sabotaging one’s own life-support hardly qualified as intelligence—and Dekker was far brighter than that. Or should have been.
“He got very little education. It’s all classroom theory, mere. Very little hands-on. Dekker doesn’t learn by lecture. His episode with the court nearly had his mother fired and deported, for a minor out of control—“
On a merchanter ship, it would have had the youngster scheduled for a station-drop and a go-over by psychs. Possibly with mother or cousin in tow, but not absolutely. There was no use for such a case aboard—
But Dekker was not insane. Quite remarkably sane, considering his upbringing. Graff took a sip and frowned, passing it on to Demas.
“She spent her personal bank account on lawyers and bond for the boy’s behavior,” Saito said. “She enrolled him in vocational training. Electronics, her own profession. He ducked out of that and got a position pushing freight. Lied about his age. Made very little money, but he was out of trouble. He went back to school—probably found out he needed the math for a license—and apparently became an upstanding citizen, though by this time he was in remedial in all his subjects....”
“One brush with the rab. And no other troubles,” he said, “until the Belt.”
“Until he absconded with Alyce Salazar’s daughter—with whom he’d been a correspondent since his return to school.”
“Mmmn,” said Demas, “the miraculous reform.”
“And no record there,” Saito said, “until Cory’s death. A model citizen. Solvent—“
“On Ms. Salazar’s money.”
“But solvent. A hard worker. He had been on Sol before he left. Had, one suspects, a habit of pushing himself beyond the legal limits on his license....”
“Certainly a talent,” Graff murmured, thinking. .. “Why did no one at Sol ever Aptitude him?”
“With that score in social responsibility, I don’t think anyone ever thought of tracking him for ops.”
“A mortal waste.”
“Earth has a million more who want the slot. They can afford human waste.”
“Dekker’s a statistical anomaly.”
“Especially in that population. But they didn’t recognize the profile. Sports or trouble, that was their analysis. And he was off the team very quickly. He wasn’t physically adept, of course. And temper didn’t serve him well. You do not frustrate that lad. But you know that.”
Morbidly interesting, Graff thought, to know what a profile like his own might have meant—in the motherwell. “Pressure on the genome.”
Demas muttered: “Emory? Or Wallingsford?”
And Saito: “Don’t we fight this war for that distinction?”
“Who knows why we fight? Because we stayed by the Company? But what’s the Company? Not wise, nor representative of the motherwell. Nothing I’ve met tells me that answer.” Demas passed the bottle again, to Saito.
Graff asked, “Can we help his mother? We’ve civilians working in FSO. Maybe she could be employed there.”
“There’s mat peacer contact. She certainly won’t pass our security clearance with that attachment.”
The bottle came back to him.
“Because she’s naive and desperate, she’s a security risk? She wouldn’t have access to the FSO lunch schedule.”
Saito said: “Being Dekker’s kin and outside our wall is a security risk. And there’s the vid. The Dekker affair may have died out of the media—but watch them remember it now. Command will be extremely reluctant to solidify that association. The peacer connection—
“Our employing her could be an interesting embarrassment to their side.”
“And there’s the claim of harassing Salazar.”
A most uncomfortable thought occurred to him. “You don’t think Salazar could have hired Ms. Dekker’s lawyer, to control both sides of the lawsuit?”
“Not legal, of course—to pay both sides’ legal help. That much is true even in Sol System.”
“Possible, though. Isn’t it? Their system of exchange makes a private transaction hard to trace.”
“Oh, it’s even possible the peacer groups see Salazar as a way to their objectives; possible that the money is flowing to this conflict from the peace and the defense committees. Mars is relatively leftist, relatively isolationist. They see their interests remote from the EC as a whole. Pursue some of these groups deeply enough and you come out the door of their opposition.”
“Moebius finance,” Demas said. “These groups survive on fund-raising. Particularly their executives and staff. How could these people survive without each other?”
Completely paranoid.
“The enemy of my enemy,” Demas said, and took the bottle up, “threatens both our livelihoods. And of course the Fleet is innocent in this game. Earth’s parliaments and congresses understand Mazian. Mazian gains command of R&D. Of Sol Two. God, one wonders what traded hands.”
Graff thought privately, and dared not say, even to them: Our integrity. Our command. Mazian was going to fill the captaincies with his choices—
Porey among the first.
Fingers felt all right. Wasn’t sure about the ownership of the hand, though. Schitzy experience, that was. Meg held her eye from blinking with one set of fingers and tried to apply the pencil without blinding herself—Dek had been kind enough to make a supplies run from the quarters to the lab-dorm, only thing she’d asked of him last night: Get our makeup, God, we got to look like hell—
“Dek was a skosh bizzed last night,” she said to Sal, who was putting earrings in, stealing a bit of mirror past her shoulder. “Don’t you think?”
“Man’s doing all right.”
“You?”
You had to catch Sal like that, blindside. Sal met her eyes in the mirror, wide-open.
“So, Aboujib?”
Sal said, scowling, “Scared as I hoped to be, give me a damn field of Where-is-its? and a: Some of these things are rocks, Aboujib, and some of these things are missiles? I never memmed a field faster in my damned life—“
“Pass?”
“Hey. I didn’t have a heart attack. —Kady, I got seriously to talk to you about your sojer lessons. They’re severely real, these sumbitches.”
She would have turned around. But mirrors was the best place to catch Sal. “Truth, Aboujib. You want to go back to tile Hamilton?”
She saw the hesitation. The little nip of a lower Up. “Without?”
And had this moment with her heart up in her throat. She’d passed, dammit, they’d told her. Finally got a chance at a ship and a guy she got on with, and, dammitall, here was Sal pulling in the other direction, she saw it plain.
And it was a lot of hours with Sal, a lot of bad times and a lot of good, but on the other hand there was Dek—there was Dek, who—God....
Sal’s frown had gone. The lower lip rolled out in a rueful sulk. “I dunno, Kady, I dunno how you talk me into these things.”
“Aboujib, come serious. You want to be back there.”
“I tell you what. I want, I seriously want, a little damn couple finesses on that simulation. They got no them-check, there’s not a damn interset macro in there—maybe they been getting this thing from Shepherd types. Ought to ask a freerunner about rocks, Kady, ought to ask us how not to go boom in a fire-track—“
“I’m not asking that.’’
“Well, I’m not the hell going back to the Hamilton. Leave you here with the guys?” Frivolous. Deliberate. The mask was back and Aboujib’s long eyes were half-lidded. ‘7 lay you bets, Kady.” Flick of a nail against a large earring. “Ben didn’t flunk that mama. Not our Ben. Scare hell out of him the way they did me—and they get a class A per-for-mance. So with this child. Miner nerves, here. Don’t tell me fire-track. They’re saying I got to set up the positional? Somebody else is going to have his finger on the fire-button? Shit-all. I want the guns, Kady.”