Live practice. Hell of a way to word it, considering.
They ran the sims in the prototype itself up to four hours a day, its V-HUD and instruments linked realtime to the carrier boards and the sims library, thanks to what Ben called the effin’ difference between the UDC’s EIDAT and the Fleet Staatentek. Ben seemed personally vindicated in mat—what it all meant, he wasn’t sure, but it ran.
And they did, not the first time, damned sure, the screw-up had been what Meg called egregious and Sal called words he’d never heard. Until, this sim-run ...
This run, he looked at the result and the fact Ben had psyched that relocated target right and laid the probability fan right over the son of a bitch, dead center—that was a fluke, but Ben swore he’d had a good hunch—which was what Elly had used to say. Same words. That was a spook-out, too; but it was another fluke. The cockpit wasn’t haunted and his crew didn’t see spooks in the mirror. He slept with Meg with no illusions it was Pete Fowler, hell if, Meg would say. You didn’t confuse one with the other...
And that still wasn’t what worried him. It was what Ben said, it wasn’t supposed to fall down this easy. They were out here on no other reason than keeping him away from the media, he told himself that once a day and he managed to relax and worry about Mitch and Almarshad, who were the ones in jeopardy—stilt catching glitches; and the crew who was dogging it and trying to come up from scratch and a couple of total disasters pulled a hundred percenter?
He’d thought he knew the answers, he’d eased off, kicked back, taken it for granted he was just going to steer while everything was going to go to hell and they started handing him stuff that fit together.
Adrenaline had come up, hold-it-steady had become tracking-on, this last run; he was still hyped and on his edge and he hadn’t been this alive down to the nerve-ends since—
Since he’d screwed the sim. You knew all along something was wrong with our set-up, Ben kept insisting. And by comparison, now it wasn’t wrong, and he couldn’t sit still and couldn’t help remembering how it felt to be a hundred percent On, and right...
With a crew he cared about, dammit, more than he’d ever cared about human beings in his life, and too damn many deaths and too many lost partners, with a chance to make runs they’d plotted, the way the UDC hadn’t let them do it, and that perfect run lying on the table saying... Can’t do it twice. Complete fluke. Can’t pull it off again... System can’t be that perfect. Something’s wrong.
His gut was in knots and his suspicion began to be, in two blinks of an eye and the work of an overhyped brain, that it could be working because his team had come in with miner-experience, something the lofty Shepherd types with their fancy tech hadn’t had, or—
Or the tape off his dead partners worked, and Porey hadn’t given up when they’d had to downgrade the crew to basics—it wasn’t basics anymore. They’d either pushed the sim to the limit—or it had lied to them. And he didn’t put that past Porey, he didn’t put anything political past Porey, if he wanted to prove something to some committee in charge of finance ...
They were on the damned list, that was what, they always had been, that son of a bitch had jerked him sideways and just kept going with his crew. What was it, a confidence-building exercise? Another damned psych-out for more damn political reasons? He felt sick at his stomach.
“You all right, Dek?”
He looked at Meg, realized everybody was looking at him.
“Dek,” Ben said, “you aren’t spooking on us, are you?”
He shook his head solemnly. “It’s August eighth, Ben.”
“Huh?” Sal said. Meg frowned. But Ben said;
“It better be, Moonbeam. It had effin1 better be.”
“Yes, sir,” Graff said, at the table, hands folded, looking straight at two very anxious senators and a busy background of senatorial aides. There was a committee, inevitably if there was a glitch, there was a committee, thank God currently meeting at Sol One, in the comfort of class 1 accommodations: it wanted answers and this was the forerunner, the shockwave.
“Why is a junior lieutenant left in command of this base? What in hell does your base commander think he’s doing taking that carrier out? We give you the authority you ask for, and immediately the program goes to hell in a handbasket, while the officer in charge removes a carrier and declares he’s going to test, without notifying the UDC or the Joint Committee, with a highly controversial figure aboard, conveniently unavailable to an ongoing investigation, while a distorted version of the whole damned training program leaks to the media? What kind of circus are you running here?”
His stomach was in knots. He missed certain of the references. Demas and Saito had advised him certain things to say, certain points to make, the direction he should go with these men. But Demas and Saito didn’t know one truth he knew. Neither did Porey and neither did the captain.
“Sir,” he began on that track, “with all respect, I deny that the breach was in our Security.”
“Are you suggesting the UDC leaked it? What about Dekker’s phone call to Sol One? What about other phone calls from other Fleet personnel?”
He hoped to hell there wasn’t a recorder going. “Let me explain, sir. Fleet personnel are contained in a security cocoon within the former administrative apparatus. Our personnel are issued cards which do not work with civilian accesses, which can’t access BaseCom or the internal phone system without going through FleetCom, which is physically aboard the carriers, if there were anyone outside this facility for them to call, nearer the Belt. The one exception was Dekker, who—“ They began to interrupt and he kept going. “—who made his only call to his mother in my office, on my authorization, and I recorded the call in its entirety in case any question arose about that contact. The UDC system is run through BaseCom, which is linked by other means to station central. Those are the principal routes information can take. There is the shuttle, and there is contact between human beings who can walk from one place to another If information flowed from this facility, it took one of those routes.”
On which they had evidence, except a member of a Fleet unit also had accesses he wasn’t supposed to have... that Fleet Command didn’t know about... which, if he confessed it now, was damning to him, to the Fleet, to Dekker’s crew at minimum, to the Fleet’s credibility and their support from the legislative committee, at worst.
While at least at some level the UDC and potentially the legislature knew about Pollard’s security clearance—and might possibly know he’d somehow retained system access— if Pollard himself weren’t under higher orders.
God, he should never have held his information source secret from Porey. Never.
“I suggest you use the channels you have to find out what’s going on, lieutenant. Somebody in your command with real authority had better get his ass into this station, find out where the leak is and get this program off the evening news. You’re public as hell, reporters are demanding to come over here in herds, we’ve got a very fragile coalition that worked hard to give you what you asked for, and let me tell you very bluntly, lieutenant, if anything goes wrong with this rumored upcoming test you’ve lost the farm. You cannot disavow another failure, your captains can’t pass the buck to junior officers. Do you understand that? Am I talking to anyone who remotely understands the political realities of this situation?”
“Yes, sir, I do understand.” No temper. “I am thirty-eight unapparent years of age, sir, and older than that as you count time. I was in command of this base during the last hearings, I was lately the director of personnel in this program, I am currently in charge of this facility and the testing program, and of the investigation, and we do have an answer, at least to what happened to Jamil Hasseini and his crew.” He reached in his pocket and held up a yellow plastic washer. “This caused the so-called accident.”