Door opened. It was the marines or it was Meg to
Dekker’s rescue. But Dekker wasn’t fighting the hold he had, Dekker was backed against the bathroom doorframe with a kind of consternation on his face, as if he’d just heard something sane for once.
“Ben, back off him.”
“Yeah, yeah, he’s all yours, I got no designs on him.” He let Dekker go and Dekker just stood there, while Sal grabbed his arm and said, “Benjie, cher, venez, venez douce.”
Hell of a mouse Meg had on her cheek. Meg was wearing a towel around the waist and not a stitch else when she put her arms around Dekker’s neck and said something in his ear, Come to bed, probably—but he wasn’t sure that was what Dekker needed right now, Dekker needed somebody to bounce his head off the wall a couple more times, if it wouldn’t wake the neighbors.
“Cher. Come on.”
Sal tugged at him. He went back to their room, Sal trying to finesse him into bed. Ordinarily nothing could have distracted him from that offer. But he was thinking in too tight a loop, about Dekker, the sim upcoming, and the chance of a screw-up. He sat down on the edge of the bed. Sal massaged his back, then put her arms around his neck, rested against his shoulders.
“Meg’ll handle him,” Sal said.
“Meg should take a good look at him. Sal, we got a problem. Major. He says he’s quitting.”
“Quitting!”
“You want to lay bets they’ll let him? No. Nyet. No way in hell. We got ourselves one schitz pilot. I got nightmares. He’s got ‘em. He’s been pushing himself like a crazy man—“Put Meg in?”
‘ ‘I think we better consider it. I think Meg better consider it—at least on the one tomorrow. I don’t know if they’ll stand for it. But that’s our best current idea, if we’re going to get in there with him.”
Sal gave an unaccustomed shiver. “They give us that damned tape. Hell, I’m used to thinking, Ben. I’m used to making up my own damn mind. I can’t. I don’t know that I am. It’s a screw-up, soldiers no different man the corp-rats, you get the feeling on a screw-up.”
“You’re doing all right.”
“The scores are all right. But I still never know, Ben, I don’t get anything solid about what I’m doing, I don’t ever get that feeling.”
He didn’t either. He hauled Sal around in front of him, held on to her, Sal being warm and the room not.
Sal held on to him. He buried his face in Sal’s braids and tangled his fingers in the metal clips. “Dunno, Sal, 1 dunno. I’ve done everything I know. Meg should screw him silly, if he wasn’t so skuzzed.”
“Won’t cure everything, cher.”
“Makes a start, doesn’t it?”
“He’s a partner,” Sal said.
“Yeah. Moonbeam that he is.”
“Soldier-boys aren’t going to listen to him or us.”
“Dek-boy’s on total overload. I’ve seen this guy not at his best and this is it. He’s not stupid. Lot of tracks in that brain—mat’s his problem. All he has to do is follow one and he’s in deep space so far you need a line to bring him back. But none of them pay off. His crew’s dead, he’s still hurting, not a damn word out of his mama, Porey’s on his back, we’re in deep shit, and he’s not thinking, he’s just pushing at the only track he’s got. The only one that’ll move. Don’t give this boy time as a dimension. He’s just fine—as long as it’s now.”
“Yeah. Yeah. I copy that. What do they say, hyperfocus and macrofocus?”
“And dammit, you don’t let this boy make executive decisions. Paper rank’s got nothing to do with this. It’s who can. Effin’ same as the merchanters.”
“Meg?”
He hesitated over that. Didn’t have to think, though. “Meg’s Meg. Meg’s the ops macrofocus. The Aptitudes pegged her exactly right. Meg always knows where she is. Knows two jumps ahead. Dek’s the here and now, not sure what’s coming. No. I’m the exec.”
Silence a moment. Maybe he’d made Sal mad. But it was,; the truth.
“So how do we tell them!” Sal asked.
“Sal, —you want to switch seats tomorrow morning?”
She sat back and looked him in the face, shocked. “God,; you’re serious. They’d throw us in the brig.”
“Is that new? No, listen, we can do it: same boards, different buttons. You got eight different pieces of ordnance, mat’s the biggest piece of information to track on. I can diagram it for you. Inputs, you got two, one from Meg if you got time to sight-see, one from longscan, which you know what that looks like...”
“Ben. What are you up to?”
“Surviving this damn thing.” A long, shaky breath. Going against military regs wasn’t at all like scamming the Company. But it did start coming together, now that he was thinking about the pieces. “Because I want the damn com p. Because, screw ‘em, it’s what 1 do. Because I think mat ET sumbitch in there effin’ knows we’re in the wrong spots and it doesn’t feel right to him and it’s killing him. I don’t know this crew that died, but I can bet you, one of them was the number one in this unit, no matter who they had listed. That guy died and they bring us in and put Dekker in charge? No way.”
“What’s that make me, mister know-all? Why in hell did they Aptitude me longscan and you the guns?”
He’d spent a lot of time thinking on that. He reached up and laced his fingers with Sal’s. “Because you want ‘em too much, because you enjoy blowing things up. —Because mat’s not what the tests want on that board.”
She let go. “Where’d you get that shit?”
“Hey. Hetldeck psych. Cred a kilo. And I know what the profiles are. I’m from TI. TI writes these tests. They got this Command Profiles manual, lays out exactly what qualifications they want in fire-positions and everything else. Enjoying it’d scare them shitless. We’re not inner system. You got to lie to the tests, Sal, you got to psych what they want us to be and you got to be that on those tests—only way you get along.”
“Meg—Meg is doing all right with this stuff. Tape doesn’t bother her.”
“Meg’s an inner systemer, isn’t she? She knows how to tell them exactly what they want to hear. Meg’s doing what she wants. We’re not.’9
“So what do we do? Is Aptitudes going to listen, when they made the rules?”
“Lieutenant might.” If Graff could do anything. If it wasn’t too late. He was scared even thinking about what occurred to him. But running into a rock was scarier than that. And that was likely. A lot of scary things were likely. Like a crack-up tomorrow morning. Stiff neck for a week after Dekker’s twitch at the controls.
“Should we go talk to him?”
“No. Not direct.” He eased Sal off his lap, went and got a bent wire out of a crack in the desk drawer.
“What—?” Sal started to ask, and shut up fast. She watched in silence as he bent down and fished his spare card out of a joint in the paneling.
He put it in the reader, typed an access, typed a message, and said, “ ‘Scuse, Sal. Taking a walk.”
Sal didn’t say a thing. He opened the door, went out through Dekker’s and Meg’s blanketed, dark privacy—towel and all.
“Ben?” Dekker asked.
“ ‘S all right,” he said, “forgot something.”
He slipped out to the corridor, around to the main room of the barracks, and around to the phones.
Linked in. Accessed the station’s EIDAT on system level. With a card with a very illegal bit of nailpolish on its edge.
“What in hell?” Dekker asked when he came through again.
“Hey,” Meg said. “Easy.”
He got through the door and Sal didn’t ask a single question, not while he folded up, not while he put the card away in its hiding spot behind the panel joint. You grew up in ASTEX territory, you learned about bugs and you developed a fairly sure sense when you might be a target for special monitoring. He didn’t honestly think so. But he took precautions and hoped to hell the bugs, if they existed, weren’t optics.