Текст книги "Devil to the Belt (novels "Heavy Time" and "Hellburner")"

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 32 (всего у книги 45 страниц)

Probably it was Yes. Probably. Meg was still standing there. Meg and Dekker walked off together toward the security door, so he figured they’d better catch up.

The other side of the door, Meg said, “We got it worked out.”

Ben said, “Not fair, man’s not up to this.”

Dekker looked as if he wanted holding on his feet, as was. But Dekker said, “Going to try for that tape, Ben. You want to test in?”

He threw a shocked look back at the doors, where roomfuls of walking dead were flying nonexistent ships. “To that? No way in hell. Non-com-ba-tant, do you read? No way the UDC is risking my talent in a damn missile. I’ll test for data entry before I do that—”

“What’s Stockholm got?” Sal asked. “They say Pell’s got a helldeck puts Sol to shame. Got eetees and everything.”

“Yeah?” He was unmoved. “I’ve seen pictures. Can’t be that good in bed.”

“Got real biostuffs, just like Earth. There’s Pell, there’s Mariner Station—”

“Yeah, there’s Cyteen going to blow us to hell or turn us into robots. Don’t need to go to Cyteen—our own service is trying to do it to us...”

Seriously gave him the willies, that did. Get into his mind and teach him which keys to push, would it?

A programmer didn’t need any damned help like that.

No answer, no answer, and no answer. Graff was beyond worrying. He was getting damned mad. And there was no place to trust but the carrier’s bridge, with the security systems engaged—but workmen had been everywhere, the UDC had very adept personnel as capable of screwing up a system as their own techs were of unscrewing it—and it was always a question, even here, who was one up on whom. “I know the captain knows about Dekker,” he said to Saito and Demas and Thieu—age-marked faces all; and the only reassurance he had. “Pollard, Aboujib, Kady all shipped in here—you’d think if he is moving them, they’d be couriering something, a message, two words from the captain—”

“Possibly,” Saito said, over the rim of her coffee cup, “he feared some shift of loyalty. Dekker is the key point. None of them have met in over a year. Friends and lovers fall out. And Pollard is UDC.”

“They came. Dekker’s leavetaking with Kady was– passionate to say the least. Pollard joined him here. Protocol says none of this is significant?”

“They’re not merchanter. That’s not what’s forming here.”

Puzzles, at the depth of things. Silence from the captain, when a word would have come profoundly welcome. He looked at Demas, he looked at Armsmaster Thieu, he looked at Saito. Com One. If Victoria spoke officially, it was Saito’s voice. If the Fleet spoke to Union or to blue-skyers, it was Saito, who made a study of words, and customs, and foreign exactitudes—and psychologies and expectations.

“What is forming?”

Saito shrugged. “That’s the question, isn’t it? I only point out—you can’t take our social structure as the end point of their evolution. Blue-skyers and Belters alike– their loyalties are immensely complex. Ship and Family don’t occur here. Only the basis for them. Difficult to say what they’d become.”

“Prehistory,” Demas murmured.

“Prejudice?” Saito asked softly.

“Not prejudice: just there’s no bridge between the cultures. The change was total. Their institutions are seminal to ours. But they don’t need kinships, they don’t need to function in that context. Their ancestors did. We’ve pulled our resource out of the cultural matrix—”

“Matrices. Wallingsfordian matrices.”

God, they were off on one of their arguments, splitting theoretical hairs. Demas was a hobbyist, and the carrier’s bulletin board had a growing collection of Demas’ and Saito’s observations on insystem cultures. He hadn’t come shipside for Wallingsfordians versus Kiimer or Emory.

“Saito. Is the captain setting up something you know about?”

A very opaque stare. “I’d tell you.”

“Unless you had other orders. Has the captain been in contact with you? Am I being set up?”

A moment more that Saito looked at him and never a flinch. “Of course not.”

CHAPTER 8

HARD day?” Villanueva asked, at the dessert bar, “Could say.” The one claim you could make for Earth’s vicinity was more varieties of sweet and spice than a man could run through in a year. And Graff personally intended to try during his tenure here—a tenure in which combat was beginning to look preferable. “What’s this one?” he asked of the line worker, but Villy said, “Raisin cake. Allspice, cinnamon, sugar, nutmeg—” “You have it down,” Graff was fencing. He was sure Villy wasn’t here entirely for the dessert. He didn’t want the lecture. He didn’t want the inquiry. He was, however, amazed at Villy’s culinary expertise.

Villy shrugged. “You guys always ask. —How’s Dekker doing?”

“All right till the colonel clipped him.” He weighed asking. He couldn’t stand the suspense. “Did he send you?”

Hesitation. “Could say that.”

“What’s he after?”

“He’s saying put the boy back into lower levels. Use Mitchell’s crew, use me and mine. He says he takes your point, no command substitutions, no crew subs until we get this thing operating.”

“Why doesn’t he make his own offers?”

“Seems us pi-luts talk better to each other, at least where it concerns capabilities. You want the truth—I suggested he lay off the substitutions.”

“Wish you could have done that earlier.”

Villanueva gave him a look back. “Truth is, I did.”

Graff picked up his tray and tracked Villy to the tables in the officers’ mess, said, “Do you mind?” and sat down opposite him before he had an answer.

“Be my guest,” Villy said.

There had to be looks from other tables, assessing their expressions, the length of their converse. Graff said, urgently, “It’s no deal, Villy. I can’t. Your colonel’s got no right to pull him—”

Do him credit, Villy didn’t even try to defend the technicality. “Mitchell’s crew and mine. No subs. When Dekker passes the medicals and the reaction tests—ask the colonel then. He’ll put him back on. Just wait till the boy quiets. For his own sake. For the program’s.”

“Whose medicals? Yours or ours?”

Villy evidently hadn’t considered that point. “I’ll talk to the colonel. Maybe we can arrange something. We can’t afford another set-back. You know it and I know it. We’ve got to pull this thing together before we lose it.”

“I’m willing. But I want the heat o/Dekker’s tail. The kid’s had enough.”

“No argument here.”

A bite of cake. Time to reflect. “Captain Villy, —do you personally know what happened in the pod access?”

Villy didn’t answer that one straightaway either. “If I knew it was us I wouldn’t say. If I didn’t know anything, I wouldn’t have an answer. What does that tell you?”

“You dance well.”

Villy laughed, not with much humor. Tapped the table with his finger. “We got the senatorial and the techs out of here. We’ve got the program back in our hands. We’re not going to get another design. That’s the word.”

First he’d heard. Had they won one? “No redesign?”

“That’s the whisper going down the line. Heard it from the Old Man, We don’t get the AI. Rumor is, we’re going for another run in the sims, try to build a stricter no-do into the pilot, not the machine.”

Graff leaned back, heart thumping. Took a breath. He couldn’t tell whether Villanueva was happy with that situation or not. “So what’s your opinion?”

“Go with it. That’s what I’m saying. Your best. And ours. We try to set the tape, best we can. Then we fly with it. —You won it, J-G. Enjoy it.”

The nickname was traveling. And he wasn’t sure he’d won anything: he’d gotten extremely wary of concessions from Tanzer’s office. But Villy said:

“We’re not happy with the situation—I don’t trust your tape-teaching, and that’s evidently what they’re leaning on, heavier and heavier. I don’t like the damn system, I still don’t think drugging down and walking through any situation is any cure for some kid hitting his personal wall—we can’t guarantee your reflexes, or mine, are going to be in every guy that’s ever going to run through this program.”

Old argument. Graff said softly, delicately, “That’s why we’re getting them where we’re getting them.” But he didn’t say, And we’ll fill out the primary pilot list outside Sol System. You didn’t say that. On the captain’s orders you didn’t. Earth didn’t want to know that.

No.

“Listen,” Villy said, “you know and I know we’re reaching the bottom of the barrel. People don’t go out to be miners and Shepherds because they’re upstanding citizens. They’re ex-rab, they’re asocials ... These two girls you got in–both of them have records...”

The rab was some kind of Emigration movement. Pro-space. Anti-Company. It had turned violent, ten years ago, big blow-up, company police had panicked, opened fire on a crowd...

“Dekker has a record,” he reminded Villy. “He’s also popular in the Belt. The Company system out there was crooked. He beat it. You know what the UDC’s setting up, making his life difficult? It’s certainly not the best PR move the UDC could make. And Kady and Aboujib were part of Dekker’s crew out there, such as survived—another pilot and a numbers man, as the Belters call it: good ones, for what the record shows.”

Villy made a wry expression, took a sip of coffee. “May be. We’ll see—once the boy’s back in the sims. Personally, I hope he makes it. He’s a son of a bitch, but Chad didn’t dislike him.”

“Wasn’t any animosity on either side, that I know. Dekker got along with Wilhelmsen.”

A pause. “J-G, off the record—between you and me: do you really buy it that Chad’s crew dumped him in that pod?”

“I don’t buy it that Dekker went crazy when he saw the ship blow. Not till the MPs tried to make him leave mission control, get him away from the senators and the VIPs. After that, no, he wasn’t highly reasonable. Would you be? So he said something that wasn’t politic—people do that. Other people don’t necessarily try to kill them in cold blood. No, I’m not accusing the crew. I find it almost as unlikely as Dekker doing it to himself. You’ve got to understand, Villy: this kid spent a couple of months in the dark, in a tumble, in the Belt—bad accident. He couldn’t get the ship back under control. This isn’t a guy who’s going to suicide that way, of all the ways he could pick. And no Belter’s going to do that to him. Not the way they did it. So you tell me what happened.”

Villy thought about that one, thought about it very seriously, by all he could tell. Then; “Let me tell you about Chad’s crew. They’re professionals, Rob’s got a father he’s supporting, guy got caught in a tractor accident, insurance won’t pay anything but basics; Kesslan and Deke are real close with Rob—they’re not going to risk it, for one thing, even if they were that mad, which I don’t think they were. I think they understood Dekker’s outburst. Might not have liked it, but understood it. Murder just doesn’t add.”

Made some sense—granted the father had no means of support; which he personally didn’t know—nor understand, inside Earth’s maze of cultures and governments, any more than he understood the motives and the angers that bred in the motherwell.

“Won’t say,” Villy added, “that there aren’t some others Dekker could’ve touched off. But don’t try to tell me it was Chad’s crew.”

“I respect your judgment.” Mostly, that was the truth. “But what do we do? Dekker doesn’t deserve what’s happened. His crew didn’t deserve what happened. Wilhelmsen—didn’t deserve what happened. Let me tell you, in that hearing, I never tried to suggest that Wilhelmsen was primarily at fault, because I never believed it. He was good. It was exactly what I said: that substitution killed him and it killed the rest of them.”

Villy was listening, at least. Maybe it was something in the coffee. Reason seemed possible of a sudden and he hammered it home. “It’s not possible, it’s not the way things work at light speed, Villy, it can’t be, you can’t treat people like that. An ops team is a living organism. You don’t split it and expect it to perform with anything like efficiency.”

Long silence. A sip of coffee. “We’ve changed the damn specs so often it’s a wonder anything mates with anything. The mechanics are overworked, they can’t do the maintenance in the manufacturers’ specs, on the schedule they’re being handed, with the staff they’ve got. That’s the next disaster waiting to happen and nobody wants to listen to them. We’ve got a program in trouble.”

“We’ve got a human race in trouble, Villy. I’ve been there, I’ve seen what we’re fighting—I don’t want that future for the species, I don’t happen to think that social designers can remake the model we’ve got—”

But when you thought about it, just trying to talk to Villy—you began asking yourself—however we, haven’t we, already? Hasn’t distance, and hasn’t time?

Like to take you outside the well, like to open your eyes, Captain Villy, and let you feel it when you drop out and in. They’d never get you back here again....

Because the part of Villanueva there was to like, came alive when he was talking about his job. You saw that sometimes in his face.

“You have no attachment,” Villanueva said, “no feeling for being from this planet.”

“I’ve met what isn’t,” Graff said.

Interest from Villy. Quirk of a brow. “What are they like?”

“They’re them. We’re us. Sociable fellows. They don’t fight wars.”

“So why are you in this one?” Villanueva asked. “Earth didn’t ask for this—not our business, a plane clear to hell and gone away from us. Earth Company brought us this thing. The old bottom line. They rooked us into it. Rooked you in too? Or what made you enlist?”

Good question. Complicated question. “Our ship’s routes. The ship I was born to. Polly d’Or. Didn’t ask for trouble, but they tried to cut us out, wanted to regulate where we came and went—retaliation for the Earth Company’s visas. Economics on one scale. Our ship on the other.”

Villy still looked confused, still didn’t get it.

“We’d lose everything. The Fleet’s what keeps those routes open. Only thing that does. They can’t enforce their embargo.”

“Hell and away from us.”

“Now. Not forever. Lucky you have us. It’ll come here– eventually it’ll come here.”

“Not everybody believes that.”

“Nobody outside this system doubts it. You’ll deal with Cyteen—on your terms. Or on theirs. Their technology. You want your personality type changed? They can do it. You want your planet re-engineered? They can do that. They are doing it—but we can’t get close enough to find out what. We don’t get into that system anymore.”

“We.”

“The merchanters they don’t own.”

“You ever been down to a planet?”

He shook his head.

“Ever thought about it?”

“No.”

“What are you afraid of?”

The question bothered him. He was in a mood right now. Maybe it was Tanzer. Maybe it was because he’d never really thought about it.

“Maybe all those people. Maybe being at the bottom of the well, knowing I can’t get myself out of it.”

Villanueva frowned, said, finally, “I grew up under blue sky. But if they get me down there I can’t get out either. Trying to retire me to the damn HQ. I want this ship to fly. It’ll be the last one I work on. I want this one to fly. That’s my reason.”

“We got a few slots, Captain Villy.”

A glance, a laugh. “Old guy like me?”

“Time’s slower out there. Remember I’m in my forties.”

Villanueva pushed back from the table, leaned back in the chair. “Damn you, you’re trying to seduce me.”

He felt a tight smile stretch his mouth. “We’re the only game there is. You don’t want to the in the well. Take you out. Captain Villy. Don’t let them send you down....”

“Damn you.”

“Think on it.”

Villy set his elbows on the table. “About the Dekker business—”

He was merchanter—before he was militia, before he was Fleet. And you did try to get it screwed down tight, whenever you talked deal.

“Dekker’s back in the program.”

“Marginally back in the program. Contingent on the medicals.”

“Our medicals.”

“Coffee could use a warm-up. Yours?”

Rec hall, the term was, but it was the same messhall, they just pulled the wall back and opened up the game nook next door dinner started at 1800h, canteen and a bar opened at 2000h if you could keep your eyes open that late, which Dekker didn’t think he could, even if it was one of the rare shifts his duty card wouldn’t show a No Alcohol Allowed. He was walked out, talked out—”Get the man a sandwich and shove him in bed,” was Meg’s advice; and he was in no mind to argue with it.

There were a few empty tables left in the middle. They drew their drinks. “Stake out a table,” Dekker advised them. “Nobody’ll take it if your drinks are sitting.”

Ben was in the lead; Ben stopped and hesitated over the choice of seats in front of them. “They got a rule where you sit or what?” Ben asked, with a motion of his cup forward. Dekker looked, numbly twigged to what was so ordinary a sight it didn’t even register: all UDC at the one end of the hall, from the serving line; all Fleet at the other.

“This end,” he said.

“There some rule?” Ben repeated.

“They just do.” Sounded stupid, once you tried to justify it. “Not much in common.” But you didn’t sit at the other end. Just didn’t.

“Plus §a change, rab.” Sal gave a shake of her metal-capped braids, set down her drink and pulled back a chair. “You sit, Dek. We’ll do. What shall we get? Cheese san? Goulash? Veg-stew?” Fast line or the slow one, was what it amounted to.

“Dunno.” He hadn’t known how sore he was till he felt a chair under him, and now suddenly everything ached. The walking tour of the facility was a long walk, and bones ached, shoulders ached, head ached—he said, “Chips and a chicken salad—automat, if you don’t mind.” Do them credit, the cooks kept the stuff as fresh as you could get on the line; or the rapid turnaround did. Something light sounded good, and come to think of it, sleep began to. He wasn’t up for a long evening. In any sense. He hoped Meg wouldn’t take offense.

They’d done all the check-ins, gotten Meg and Sal scheduled for Aptitudes tomorrow—Ben had outright refused to sign up, declaring they could damned well get his Aptitudes from the UDC, or court-martial him for failure to show for tests: not an outright show of temper with the examiners, no, just a perfectly level insistence they look up his Security clearance, Ben said; turn up his assignment to Stockholm ... Benjamin Pollard wasn’t taking any Fleet Aptitudes until they showed him his old ones or put him in court.

Damned mess, he reflected, sorry for Ben, truly sorry for what had seemed to a pain-hazed mind his only rescue. Ben’s talk about court-martial upset him. Ben’s situation did. And all the lieutenant would say, when he had in fact gotten a phone call through to him, was: We’ll work with that. Let me talk to the examiners, all right?

He ground at his eyes with the heels of his hands, listened to the dull buzz of conversation and rattling plates over the monotone of the vid, and wondered if there was anything unthought of he could do, any pull he personally had left to use, to get Ben back where he belonged—as much as that, if there was anything he could do to send Meg and Sal back home—no matter that Meg really wanted her chance at the program. He’d been on an emotional rollercoaster since this morning, he’d been ready to go back to routine and they’d stopped him; they’d told him the lieutenant was fighting that, and he’d been ready to come from the bottom again—

til, God, Meg hit him with the business about flying either with him or against him.

He didn’t want her killed, he didn’t want to lose anybody else—he didn’t want to be responsible for any life he cared about. He kept seeing that fireball when he shut his eyes; in the crowd-noise, he kept hearing the static on Cory’s channel, in the tumbling and the dark—because Meg’s threat had made it imminent, and real.

The hall seemed cold this evening. Somebody had been messing with the temperature controls, or the memories brought back the constant chill of the Belt. He sat there rebreathing his own breath behind his hands, knowing (Ben had a blunt, right way of putting it) knowing he was being a spook, knowing he hadn’t any right to shove Meg around, or tell her anything—no more than he’d had any right to take Ben’s name in vain or ask for Meg and Sal to come here—he supposed he must have asked for Meg, too, since they were here, even if he couldn’t figure why the Fleet had gone to that kind of trouble—

Except the captain had wanted him to testify in that hearing Ben had told him about, the one it was too late to testify in, even if he could remember—which he couldn’t.

So he’d let the captain down, he’d let the lieutenant down—in what cause he didn’t know; he only knew he’d disrupted three lives.

So Meg hadn’t been happy where she’d been, so the Hamilton wouldn’t let her right to the top of the pilot’s list: you didn’t get into that chair just walking aboard, Meg had to have known that, Meg must have known what to expect, coming in on a working crew with its own seniorities and its own way of doing things...

So you took a little hell. So you stuck it out. Everybody took hell. He hadn’t been all that good at keeping his head down and taking it, but, God, he’d started a police record when he was thirteen: he’d been a stupid kid—and Meg had done a stupid thing or two, run contraband, something like that, that had busted her from the Earth shuttle to the Belt; but he and Meg were both older, now, Meg ought to know better and do better—he’d made it in the Belt; so had Meg—so she had to have damn-all better sense than she was using—

“You all right?” Meg asked. They were back with the sandwiches. He took a drink of the cola, wished he hadn’t gotten an iced drink.

“Yeah,” he said, chilled. He took his sandwich and unwrapped it while they sat down with their trays. Something on the vid about the hearings. ‘Missile test,’ they called it. That was Hellburner’s cover story. They talked about hearings adjourning on Sol One.... He wished they’d change the channel. Watch the stupid rerun movies. Had to be better. The message net had to be better.

“What else do we need?” Meg was asking. “What about these tests tomorrow? Is there anything we can do to prep ourselves?”

“Nothing but a lot of sleep. Relax. They put you through anything on the carrier? They did, me.”

“Didn’t see a damned soul on the carrier, except at mealtimes. We played gin most of the way.”

“Nice guys,” Sal sighed, “and the reg-u-lations said we couldn’t touch ‘em.”

That got a frown out of Ben. And Sal’s elbow hi Ben’s ribs.

Meg said, “So what do we do? What’s it like?”

“They hook you up to a machine, like medical tests, eye tests, response tests, hand-eye, that sort of thing.”

“Hurt?” Sal asked.

“Yeah, some.”

“You going to study up?” Sal asked Ben.

“I’m telling you, I’m not taking them. I’m not showing. Let them court-martial me, it’s exactly what I want.”

“Ben,—”

Guys stopped by the table. C-Barracks. Techs. Mason, among them, nudged his shoulder with his tray. “Dek,” Mason said. “How you doing?”

“All right,” he said, “pretty tired.”

“Good to see you. Real good to see you....”

“Pop-u-lar,” Ben said when Mason and his guys had moved on. “Just can’t figure how. All these people get to know you and they haven’t broken your neck.”

“Ben,” Sal said, defending him. But it didn’t sting, couldn’t even say why, just—it didn’t. Ben didn’t ask for help, Ben didn’t ask for anything—Cory had been a lot like that. Ben was going to fight his way out of this mess on his own, and that was at least one piece of karma he wouldn’t have to worry about.

“Best—” he started to say. And caught a name on the vid, sounded like Dekker. He picked up Sol Station, and... lodging a complaint—

“Ms. Dekker, what specifically are you alleging?”

God. It was. She looked—

“Dek?” Meg asked, and turned around to look where he was looking, at the vid, at a woman in a crowd of reporters. Blond hair was faded. Face was lined. She didn’t look good, she didn’t look at all good...

Something about MarsCorp, something about threats, an investigation into phone calls ... Some organization backing a suit—

Sal said: “What’s going on?” and Meg: “Shhh.”

He couldn’t track on it. Didn’t make sense. Something about losing her job, some civil rights organization launching a lawsuit in her name—

“It’s his mother,” Ben said; he said, “Shut up, dammit, I can’t hear—” But he could see the background, see the MarsCorp logo, he knew that one—MarsCorp offices on Sol Station, police, reporters, some guy who said he was a lawyer—something about her son—

Picture jumped, tore up. The local station cut in with the channel 2 program information crawl—but he wasn’t finished yet, wasn’t damned finished yet...

“They cut it off!” He shoved the chair around to get up, get to a phone, saw the shadow of the tray and the sense of balance wasn’t there. He staggered, hit it, food went everywhere, cup bounced—”Shit!” He was flat off his balance, elbowed the guy trying to hold his feet, guy grabbed at him and he didn’t want a fight, he just wanted the phone. “Get out of my way!”

“You son of a bitch!” The guy had his arm. Ben and Meg and Sal grabbed for him, Ben saying something about Let him go, the man’s upset; but the guy wasn’t letting him go, the guy swung him and he grabbed for a handhold on the UDC uniform, about the time there were a whole lot of other chairs clearing, and Fleet was all around them. A high voice yelled, “You damn fools, stop it—”

Wasn’t any stopping it. The UDC guy hit him, and he hit the guy with everything he had, figuring it was the only blow he was going to get in—couldn’t hear anything, with guys coming over the tables, guys pushing and shoving and punches flying past his head—he didn’t want to be here, he wanted the damned phone, wanted the truth out of the station, that was all—

Lights were flashing on and off, shouting filled his ears, fist rattled his skull and gray and red shot across his vision as arms came around him and hauled him out of it.

He wasn’t breathing real well, couldn’t half see: he yelled after Meg and Sal in the melee, couldn’t tell who he was hitting when he tried to break free—

“Dekker!” That was the lieutenant. So he was in deeper shit; but more imminently of a sudden, he had his wind cut off as they bent him over a table. Something cold clicked shut around his wrists. That scared him: he’d felt that before... and it got through to his brain that the guys holding him were the cops, and Graff s voice made him understand that help was here, the fight was over, and the lieutenant wanted him to stand still. He tried to; which meant they got the other wrist, locked the cuff on, and at least pulled him back off the table so he could get a breath...

“The guy shoved him.” Meg’s voice rang out loud and dear. “Wasn’t Dek’s fault, he was just trying to get up – it was an emergency, f God’s sake. This ass wanted to argue right of way!”

Guys started shouting all around, one side calling the other the liars.

“Clear back!” Voice he knew but couldn’t place. His nose was running and he sniffed. Couldn’t say anything, just tried to breathe past the stuffy nose and the clog in his throat.

“What happened here?” the Voice asked – he blinked the haze mostly clear and saw a lot of MPs, a lot of angry guys standing along the wall with more MPs and soldiers. What Happened Here? drew shouting from all around, Meg and Sal profane and high-pitched in the middle of it, how the guy’d bumped him, how his mother was in some kind of trouble on the news . . .

Had to talk about his mother, God, he didn’t want an audience, didn’t want to talk about his mother in front of everybody. He tried to look elsewhere, and meanwhile the lieutenant was saying they’d better move this out of here, he’d take him in custody —

Please God. Anywhere, fast.

The other voice said: “I think we’d both better get this moved out of here,” and he made out the blurry face now for Captain Villy, with a knot of UDC MPs and a whole lot of trouble. They were holding Meg, and Sal, and Ben, among a dozen mixed others. “Move ‘em,” Villy said, and there were Fleet Security uniforms among the lot. He started to argue for Meg and Sal and Ben; but: “Dekker,” Graff said sharply, and said, “Do it.”

He did it. He kept his head down and walked where they wanted him to, he heard Graff at the top of his lungs chewing out the rest of the guys in the messhall and Villanueva doing the same, telling them they were all dunned fools, telling them how they were on the same side.

Yeah, he thought. Yeah. Tell ‘em that, lieutenant.

Himself, he didn’t want to think what was going on back at Sol Station, didn’t want to think what he’d just done back there in the messhall; he kept his mouth shut all the way to the MP post, and inside; him, and Ben and a whole crowd of their guys and the UDC arrestees; but when they tried to take Meg and Sal into the back rooms:

“I want Fleet Security—laissez, laissez, you sumbitch —ow!”

And Sal screamed how she was going to file complaints for rape and brutality....

The MPs got real anxious then. “Where’s Cathy?” one asked, and a guy got on the phone and started trying to scare up a female officer, while Meg argued with them about holding on to him, “Dammit, let him go, he’s just out of hospital, for God’s sake—man got up and bumped a tray, his mother was on the news—”

God. “Meg, shut up. It doesn’t matter!”

“That sumbitch shoved you!”

At which the sumbitch with the custard all over him started yelling at Meg, somebody shoved, Sal started yelling, and he couldn’t do anything, he was cuffed, same as Ben was, same as the UDC guy was, except they’d made the mistake of not doing that with Meg and Sal.

“Meg,” he yelled, “Afeg!”

They got rough with Meg, they got rough with Sal, he kicked a guy where he saw a prime exposed target and they shoved him up against the wall, grabbed him by the hair and by the collar and shoved him into a chair.

“She didn’t do anything,” he said, but nobody was listening to him. He said, “None of them did anything....”

They got Meg and Sal out of the room. Ben and the other guy, too, and left one guy to stand and watch him. He was dizzy, the adrenaline still had his head going around, and his nose dripped a widening circle on his shirt. He tried to sniff it back, breathing alternate with that disgusting sensation; and in his head kept replaying as much as he’d heard on the vid about what was going on with his mother....