“Ben?” Sal murmured, but the blow to the hip did it. He shoved the door open into the dark next door and snarled, “Dekker!”
Dekker made a sound, Meg gave a sharp grunt above a crack of flesh and bone meeting. The son of a bitch had got her.
“Dekker!” He shoved past a smooth female body to get a shove of his own in, got a grip and held it. “Dekker, dammit, you want to take a cold walk?”
Same as he’d yelled at Dekker on the ship, when Dekker got crazy. He had one hand planted against a heaving, sweating chest, right about the throat, and Meg had cleared back, gotten to the light switch. He couldn’t see anything but a blur, and he didn’t let up the pressure—if Dekker moved to hit him Dekker was going to be counting stars, he had his mind made up to that. Dekker was gasping for breath—eyes open now.
“Spooks again,” Meg panted.
“I’ll say it’s spooks, this is the damn spook! I dunno why yon sleep with him.”
The inside door opened and Sal came in at the periphery of his vision. He heard Meg saying, “It’s all right, it’s just surface,” and kept his own hold on the lunatic, who still looked spaced and shocky. Dekker’s heart was going hard, felt like detonations under his hand. Dekker’s eyes had lost their glaze, started tracking around him.
Drifted back again, looked halfway cognizant.
“Let up,” Dekker said.
He thought about that. He thought about Meg saying for the last damn week Dekker was just confused, and Sal saying back off and give him some space. While Dekker kept a sim schedule the other crews were talking about. He gave Dekker a shove in the chest. Hard.
“Let up, hell. I’ll solve your problem, I’ll break your neck for you. You hit Meg, you skuz, you know that?” Dekker didn’t say anything, so he asked, for Dekker’s benefit, “You all right, Meg?”
“Yeah.”
“Hell of a bruise coming,” Sal muttered.
Dekker set his jaw again, didn’t exactly say go to hell, but that was the look he gave, along with the impression he might not be in control of his voice right now. When Dekker shut up, you either kept a grip on him or you got out of his way. So he kept his hand where it was, asked, civilly, “You still talking to him, Meg?” ,
“Wasn’t his fault, Ben.” Mistake. Meg sounded shaky herself, Meg had evidently gotten clipped worse than he thought, and that wobbly tone upset Dekker, he saw that. Dekker quit looking like a fight, just stared at the ceiling, gone moist-eyed and lock-jawed.
Great.
He gave Dekker another shove, risking explosion. “You want to, maybe, get a grip on it, Dek-boy? Or you want to schitz some more?’’
Dekker made a move for his wrist, not fast, just brushing him off. He let Dekker have his way, stood back and let Dekker sit up with his head down against his knees a moment, to wipe the embarrassment off his face.
“You know,” he said, pressing mat advantage, “you do got a serious problem, Dek. You busted Meg who’s trying to help you, the meds are bitching you’re pushing it too damned hard—you seriously got to get your head working » Dek-boy, and we got to have a talk. Meg, Sal, you want to leave him with me a minute?”
Dekker looked away, at the wall. Sal shoved Meg out of the room and Dekker didn’t look happy with the arrangement, didn’t look at him when the door shut, just sat in bed and stared elsewhere.
Towel on a chair. Ben got it and wrapped it around himself—wasn’t freezing his ass off, wasn’t matching physique with pretty-boy, either—wouldn’t effin’ be here arguing with him, except he was supposed to go back into pod-sims with a guy who couldn’t figure out what time it was.
“Just drop it,” Dekker said.
“Drop it, huh? Drop it? Wake me up in the Middle Of, and I should drop it? We’re getting back in that pod at 0900, I’m not seriously inclined to drop it!”
Dekker leapt up off the bed and shoved him. “Just fuck off! Fuck off, Ben, all right? —I’m resigning.”
Took a second for that to make sense. Didn’t look as if Dekker was going to shove him twice, didn’t look as if Dekker was anything but serious. Resign from the Fleet? You couldn’t. From the program? Moonbeam had cold feet of a sudden?
Serious problem here, damned serious problem, from a ; guy who had dragged him into this so deep he couldn’t see t out, whose neck he had every moral right to break already; Dekker was piling the reasons higher, except Dekker wasn’t exactly copacetic enough for a fight at the moment, and there were two women in the other room, primarily Meg, but Sal, too, who would take severe exception to his murdering the skuz.
“Resigning,” he echoed Dekker.
Dekker leaned an elbow against the wall, wiped his shave-job mop out of his eyes and muttered, “Before the sim. First thing I can get anybody on mainday.”
“When did this notion take you?”
Dekker’s jaw locked again, visibly. Knot of muscle. Nowhere stare. But you waited and it would unlock, sometimes in ways you didn’t want, but he waited. Dekker took a second swipe at his hair, and stood with his hand on the back of his neck.
“I haven’t got it, Ben, mat’s all. I’m schitzing out.”
“Yeah?” He wasn’t eager to climb into that pod with a lunatic, he didn’t know why in hell he had this urge to pull Dekker out of his funk and assure he was going to have to do that—it was instinct kept him here, to hold the seams of the partnership together, maybe, what they had right now being better than the hellish situation they could have. “Schitz I’m used to. You want to explain this new idea?”
“Doesn’t need explaining. I can’t cut it anymore. Can’t do it.”
“Nice of you.”
“Yeah.”
“Dekker, you are the absolute nicest son of a bitch I ever met, God, what do we do to deserve how nice you are? We are stuck in this fool’s outfit, they’re feeding us this damn experimental tape on account of they got it off your crew and you skuz out on us. Do you think they’re going to give up on the investment they got in us? —No, they’re going to put us out on the line with some only skosh saner fool and take stats on how long we take to make a fireball! Thanks, thanks ever-so for the big favor, Dek, and mercy for the vote of confidence, but you got to excuse us if we don’t all break into party, here.”
“I’m sorry.” Dekker turned his back on him, leaned a second against the bathroom door, then went in and shut the door.
“Dekker, —“
Didn’t like that sudden cut-off. Didn’t like that, I’m sorry, out of the son of a bitch. There weren’t locks on the doors. Not in this place. So he hauled the door open.
Dekker was bent over the sink. Mirror-Dekker looked up, white as death, with a haggard expression that scared hell out of him.
“You contemplating anything stupid, Moonbeam?”
“What time is it, Ben? You know what time it is?”
“You know what the hell time it is.”
“Not all the time, Ben, not all the fuckin’ time I don’t know what time it is, all right? I’m losing it!”
“You never knew where it was in the first place.”
“It’s not funny, Ben. It’s not damn funny. Let me the hell alone, all right?”
Hell if. He grabbed Dekker by the elbow and steered him out of the closet of a bathroom, Dekker balked in the doorway and Ben slammed him hard against the doorframe. “Listen, Moonbeam, you don’t need to know where the hell you are, that’s Meg’s department. You don’t need to wonder what’s coming, that’s Sal’s. You don’t need to know a damn thing but where the targets are and get me a window, you hear me? Time doesn’t mean shit to you, it doesn’t ever have to mean shit, you just fuckin’ do your job and leave ours to us, you hear me?”