Mitch, the skuz, was standing in the locker room door.
She jerked the sweater down. “Getting your thrills, Mitch?”
“Serious talk, Kady. Question. Couple of touchy questions.”
Private, the man wanted. Hell of a way to get it; and time was, Mitch didn’t get two seconds, but Mitch didn’t look like trouble, Mitch looked like business, and curiosity was killing her. “So? Give.”
“What is their damn hurry with Dek, do you get any feel?”
She bit her lip. Shook her head. “Neg. No. What are you asking?”
“Is Ben on our side?”
“Absolute. No question, and Sal and I fly with him.”
Mitch ducked his head, looked up with the straightest eye contact she’d ever had out of him. “Ben made a phone call last night. Dek got pulled this morning. You know about that?”
“Yeah. Ben could have slipped it to the lieutenant—about two jumps ahead of me, you want the truth.”
“That schedule of his. Did he set it? Is it his choice? Or is Porey doing it?”
“Much as I know it’s his schedule.” It was sensitive territory. She wasn’t sure she wanted to discuss any crew business with Mitch, who was Dek’s competition in this place. But Dek had her scared to hell, that was what she had said to Sal and that was what made her confess now. “I can believe Ben might have stopped him. I just hope it didn’t land either of them in trouble.”
“Second touchy question. You apparently aren’t too damn bad. How much of it do you think is tape?”
“I was good before I came here, mister.”
Mitch held up a hand. “No offense. Straight q & a—they’re talking about shoving it on the rest of us, I want to know from the ones that know—does that damn thing really work?”
Sounded like an honest question. “Different way to learn, same way you guys learn, what I hear, this Neural Input stuff. I don’t know what’s the difference, except we trank deeper—by what I hear. How could I tell? I don’t get the other kind.”
“Rumor is they’re running you guys up to mission level sims. They’re saying they’re using you guys for guinea pigs because you came in cold, as far as these boards. That if it works with you—we’re next and we got no choice. Now they’re hauling Pollard and Aboujib back into Testing? Makes the rest of us damn nervous, Kady.”
Made her nervous when he put it that way.
“You know anything about Pete Fowler, you ever have any—weird feelings off that stuff?”
“I’m not being him, Mitch, I’m not any damn dead guy. That’s not what’s going on....”
“He was twenty-nine, he was a good, fast thinker, he was regular for Elly Sanders—she was the longscanner. You want any more? Pete’s faults? His virtues? I can tell you. He was a nit-picking sumbitch about the checklist....”
“I’m telling you I don’t know anything about Pete Fowler. I damn sure haven’t got a fix on Sal and I always was a stickler for doing—“
“Mitch!” somebody yelled, out in the sims. “They got a pod hung!”
“Oh, shit,” Mitch said, and he was running—she started running after him, scared as hell, no idea what they could do, why they were going—but it was somebody she knew in that damned thing, and she moved.
“What’s the status?” Porey asked, leaning over a tech— Security ops had eight monitors and four of them were black, except for green letters showing CORE-21, that was the sims area, anybody who worked up there knew that section, and Dekker knew it, made a guess what those black monitors showed before Porey got his answer.
“They cut the power, sir,” the ops tech said, “Chief Jackson got the spin shut down. Cameras are working, they’re on another generator, but all the pods are full crewed and frozen out there til they get power back on.”
The core was totally dark, even the access areas—requests for personnel movement going out over com, the same sequence that must have attended his own accident, Dekker thought glumly—like standing off and watching it happen to him.
“Do we have a recovery team out there?” Porey asked, and the tech answered that they were still trying to organize mat—only way they had to haul you back if a pod had to totally crash was suit up and go out there; the construction workers that formed the rescue squad were coming in from their off hours and from work around the carrier—
“Too damned long,” he said, he didn’t care if he was out of turn: “I know the systems, sir, I’m used to a suit—“
“You’re not going out there,” Porey said, and adjusted the com in his ear, scowling, eyes showing the least anxiety while he listened to something elsewhere. “—You have one?” he asked someone invisible. “Suiting now?”
They’d found somebody closer. Dekker drew a controlled breath, then, still wanting to do something; but rescue was evidently getting into motion. Black monitors. No emergency lights—the fool engineers had put the viewport shutters on the main power. Power was cut, completely, complete black in the chamber, no ventilation in the pod, no heat, no filtration for anybody out there. God hope the mags weren’t all crashed.
“Patch through the suitcom,” Porey said. Graff said to the tech at the boards in simulation Control, “Give us audio, here. Are we getting anything out of the pod?”
“We don’t get anything. Whole core section’s on that generator.”
“What the hell kind of engineering is that, dammit to bloody hell, what kind of operation do we have here?”
“An old one,” Graflf said. “Lot of patch-jobs.”
“Piece of junk,” Porey muttered. “Nothing moves, does it?”
“Not the shutters, not the internal lights—there’s a requisition to get them on another circuit, but the engineers have found a problem doing that.”
“Can they power up with the rest of those pods sitting out there?”
Should be able to,” Graff said, while Dekker kept his mouth shut. Should be able to, once they got the one pod clear. If it didn’t, if they were all crashed, everybody was in trouble. Imminent trouble.
“One man’s not enough out there,” he said tautly. “They’ve got no locators, those are all killed with the power.... Sir, in all respect, I know what I’m doing....”
“Shut down, Dekker, you’re not going up there.”
A dun seam of light showed at the edge of one monitor— lock door, he figured, on a leech and hand-battery. Audio cut in, unmistakably a suit com, heavy breaming, little else, and a white star appeared in both monitors: suit-spot shining in all that black.
Sim chiefs voice, then: “You’re going across the chamber, zenith climb about ninety meters.. . sensor range within.
“Copy that.” Female voice, unexpectedly. Familiar voice that sent a sinking feeling to the pit of his stomach as the star shot off at a fair speed. Scary speed.
“Don’t hurry it, don’t hurry it...” from the chief. “Dammit, slow down.”
Meg didn’t. Meg was hotdogging it, scaring hell out of him and the sim chief—miner showout, but habituaclass="underline" a miner knew his distance without his eyes, by reckonings they didn’t teach in construction, and she wouldn’t miss: blind in the dark, she wouldn’t miss: that was the push she was used to—and she was counting and caking.
“Shouldn’t argue with her,” Dekker muttered, sweating it. “She knows her rate, she’s feeling it.. .tell the chief that.”
“Is that Kady?” Graff asked. “Dekker, is that Kady out there?”
“Yessir.”
“Get her the hell out of there!” Porey said into the mike. “This is Comdr. Porey. Get her out of there. Now!”
Took a little relaying of instructions. Meg developed a problem with her mike. Didn’t fool Porey, didn’t fool anybody, but there wasn’t a thing Porey could do from here. Meg was closing into sensor range, you could hear the pings on audio and see the rate drop.