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

Автор книги: C. J. Cherryh

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Текущая страница: 40 (всего у книги 45 страниц)

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 that 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 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, that’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?”

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, I 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—that’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, that’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 I do. Because I think that 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 that’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.”

“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.

Most of all he hoped the lieutenant was one of the good guys, because the lieutenant was no fool: (he lieutenant knew enough to figure who around here could get into the system and drop an unsigned message in his file. They didn’t have TI techs above a 7A in this place. He’d checked that, already.

CHAPTER 15

SHOUTING in Percy’s office again. Dekker sat on the bench outside, between a couple of marine guards, and stared at the opposite wall, acutely aware of the traffic in the main corridor, people stealing glances hi this direction—you got a feeling for notoriety, and disaster, and you knew when you’d achieved it. Wake up to a stand-down and a see-me from Graff, who had nothing to tell him, except that somehow the Aptitudes in his unit were skewed, that they wanted to see Ben and Sal back in Testing, and Graff was due in a meeting with Porey, immediately. Which left him here, in the hall, listening to war going on in the office, and he hoped it didn’t aim at Graff. Mutiny in the Shepherd ranks, if that was the case—Graff was the only point of reason in their lives since the disaster of the last test; and personally, he wanted to kill Porey. They told him he was supposed to go fight rebels from a planet clear to hell and gone away from Earth and right now the targets he most wanted were Comdr. Edmund Porey and whoever had screwed up Ben and Sal, if that was what had happened.

Something crashed, inside the office. He tried not to twitch, found his hands locked, white-knuckled. The guards exchanged looks, dead expressionless.

Marines weren’t anxious to go in there either.

Weights rang back down into the pad, and Meg collapsed on her back on the bench, nerve-dead. Patterns still danced behind her eyelids, but the adrenaline was gone, it was only phosphenes.

Message came from the lieutenant, and Dek had been outright shaking when he’d read it. Bad shakes. Thank God Ben had done—whatever Ben had done. Sal was close-mouthed on it—but she had me idea it involved last night, phones, and messages Dek would have highly disapproved.

Weights banged, close to her head. Her eyelids flew open. Mitch was standing over her. Hell of a start, even if he was decorative: the son of a bitch. She had as little to do with Mitch as possible. Ben and Sal had gotten called in to Testing. Dek...

“What’s this about Dekker getting scrubbed?”

Mitch wasn’t alone. The other traffic in the gym wasn’t casual. A delegation gathered around—Pauli, Franklin, Wilson, Basrami, Shepherds, all of them on her case; Shit, she thought, and sat up, looking for a way to shut this action down. “Maybe you better ask the lieutenant. I dunno.”

“Word is there was a fight last night.”

Double shit. Damned thin walls. “Wasn’t any fight. A discussion. That’s our business.”

Pauli said, “Discussion that scrubs a crew?”

Basrami said, “Word is, the lieutenant gave him a mandatory stand-down. The lieutenant’s been climbing all over Testing. Saito’s still there, with Porey’s com chief. Now the lieutenant’s talking with Porey and Dek’s hanging outside with the guards. Doesn’t look arrested, but he doesn’t look happy.”

More information than she’d had. The grapevine in this place was efficient except in her vicinity.

Mitch asked, “So what’s going on, Kady?”

“All I know,” she said, “we got the stand-down before we got to breakfast. They wanted Ben, they wanted Sal in Testing, they wanted Dekker in Porey’s office. They didn’t want me, so I came here to blow it off.”

“Come off it, Kady.”

“It’s the truth! I don’t know a damned thing except Dek’s been severely pushing it. Could be a medical stand-down—I hope to hell it’s a medical. Porey’s been on his back. He hasn’t said, but we screwed a sim, he talked to Porey, and he’s run hard since. You want to tell me?”

Silence from the guys. Then Mitch said, “They giving any of this special tape to him?”

Nasty question. “Not that I hear. I don’t think so. —No. There’s been no time like that in his schedule.”

“Are they going to?”

Scary question. “Him, they don’t need to, do they? He knows what he’s doing.”

“Just asking,” Mitch said.

“Yeah,” she said, “Well, whose would they give to him? Tell me that.” Five on ten they made the same and only guess she could, and the idea scared hell out of her. “They took my mates into Testing. They told Dek report in. They didn’t tell me an effin’ thing. I’m either the only one right in the universe or I must be one of the problems.” Which shaded closer to her private anxiety than she wanted. She got up, picked up her towel, for the showers. “So if you got any news, you owe me.”

“Nothing,” Pauli said. “Except a serious concern for the program. And Dekker.”

Belters rarely said ‘friend.’ You didn’t say, I care, I love, I give a damn. They wouldn’t do that. But they came asking. Even that skuz Mitch. Made her think halfway better of Mitch, and that gave her another cause to worry.

“Yeah,” she said. “Thanks. If I hear anything, either.”

The door opened. Graff said, stone-faced, “The commander wants to see you.”

“Yessir,” Dekker said.

No questions. Graff was negotiating with an unreasoning, unreasonable son of a bitch and didn’t need trouble from another source. He got up and walked in, saluted, and Porey said, all too quietly, “You may have had a problem, mister. This whole damn program may have a problem. So I want an answer, I want a single, completely straight answer If you were second-guessing the Aptitudes, where would you have expected Pollard and Aboujib to fit in the crew profile?”

“Ens. Pollard’s a computer tech, theory stuff.” He had one sudden chance, maybe, to do something for Ben, which would drop the lot of them down the list, break Meg’s heart and save all their skins. He debated a split second, then: “UDC Technical Institute. I’d have thought he’d be handling the computers. —To be honest, sir, I’d have thought he’d go somewhere up in Fleet Ops—they were, going to send him to Stockholm. He’s got—”

Porey snarled, “We’ve got enough UDC hands in this operation right now. What about Aboujib? Co-pilot?”

He didn’t know what all this was about. Not enough to maneuver with. “Ben taught her numbers. I’d expect she’s good. Longscan or armscomp. She’s—” He flashed on Sal’s frustration with the scan assignment. “I don’t know– don’t know. What she wants—is the Fire button.” His mind was on what Porey had said about Ben. He thought he might have done Ben harm, bringing in the Stockholm business. He made a desperate, uninvited counter. “Sir, I haven’t got any doubts about Ben Pollard. He went UDC because they had his program, but he’s Belter. He wouldn’t do anything but a hundred percent for his partners.”

Porey left a cold, cold silence. He didn’t know what he was arguing for or against, or who was on trial. Porey just stared. “If,” Porey began, and the phone beeped. Porey grabbed up the handset, snarled, “This is a conference, damn you—” and the face went expressionless while Dekker had time to think, Something’s happened...

Graff was paying the same kind of attention. Porey said, “Procedures. Stat. —Estimate,” and looked grim as he hung up and stood up. “Pod’s hung.”

“God.” Dekker thought Porey wanted the door—grabbed for the switch.

“Dekker!”

“I can help, sir,...”

“No!” Porey said. And there was no argument.

Meg hauled clothes on, still wet—damn sweater hung on an earring. She finessed it loose the painful way and got her head through—

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 that—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 habitual: 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.

Then number two monitor showed a faint haze of detail. Chamber wall and a pod directly in Meg’s suit spot, he’d bet his life on it.

“She’s all right,” he said, feeling the shakes himself. “Sir, she knows her business.”

Porey wasn’t saying a thing about the transmission difficulties, wasn’t giving any orders now, he just muttered, “Kady’s on notice with me, you make that clear, Mr. Graff.”

“Yes, sir,” Graff said.

Word came from another channel that the Pod Rescue Unit was being deployed. At least some of the rescue squad had gotten there, and was launching the track-guided equipment that could tow the pod.

Meanwhile an engineer was giving instructions and Meg started identifying and freeing up the bolts that released it from its track.

“Shit...” came over the com; and froze his heart.

“What’s the matter?” the chief asked; but he could see it for himself, the pod’s number decal—number three. The pod they’d been scheduled for.

“That’s Jamil,” he said, to whoever cared, and looked for a chair free. But there wasn’t one. “Jamil and his guys took our slot—said they could use the time...”

Didn’t take much calc to find a lighted, open hatch, and Meg beelined for it, braked and took a shaky bent-kneed impact, another showout miner-trick, with a hand-up catch at the rim of the lock to stop the rebound. She cycled the lock on battery power, breath hissing with shivers—it wasn’t cold coming through the suit, not this fast, it was shock starting to work, in the loneliness of the airlock. Let the rescue crew do the maneuvering with the PRU, the chief had said, they wanted her out of there and that lock shut before they powered up the mags and she agreed, she didn’t know shit about the tow system: it was on now, it was moving, bound for a pod access lock where meds were waiting, and they weren’t going to need her unless the mags were definitively crashed.

Moment of intense claustrophobia then, just the ghostly emergency light, then a door opened into a brightly lit ready-room full of guys willing to help with the suit.

She got the helmet off, drew a breath of icy clean air and got a first welcome bit of news—power-up was proceeding, pods were answering; they for sure weren’t going to need her again out there, and she could unsuit and take the lift out to gravitied levels and the lockers. Good job, they told her, good job, but they were busy and she got herself out of the way, let them tend the suit, unaccustomed luxury for a miner-jock, and boarded the lift out of there.

Slow, slow business in the recovery of the pod, and they could only watch, in 1-dock Security ops. Dekker hung at draffs back and Percy’s, listened to the output from the rescue team on the open speaker.