“Meg, I’m serious, don’t want to offend you. Good to see you. Good you came. But if you’ve got any loophole out of enlisting, any way in hell back to the berth you had, you should go back....”
“Five hundred-odd million ft, I come for this man. What about those letters you wrote? ‘Getting along fine, a real chance at something, the first thing in my life I know I want to do—’ “
“That was bullshit. It’s like anywhere else. We got a fool in charge.”
“Yeah, well, we dealt with fools before. Got no shortage of ‘em in the Belt. Some have even got seniority.”
“They got plenty of it here. —Too damn many funerals, Meg. I’m sick to death of funerals—”
“Death is, jeune rab. Better to burn than rot.”
Plasma spreading against the dark. Whiteout on the cameras. He said, urgently, “Meg, go back where you’ve got a life, for God’s sake. You’ve got a berth—”
“—without shit-worth of seniority.”
“Well, you won’t get any here. They won’t count your hours, just give you a flat 200. Spend your whole life out in the Belt and that’s all it’s worth. They’ll screw you any way they can.”
“Mmmnn. Yeah. Sal’s seriously pissed about that—but she’s computers anyway. Straight quantifiable skills stuff. / was an EC shuttle pilot, remember? Earth to orbit. LEO to Sol One. You name it, I ran it, four years riding the gravity slopes. And it’s all in the EC’s own infallible records. Here, I got seniority.”
“Shit,” he said, cold inside, he didn’t know why, except Meg was hell to stop when she had an idea, and Tanzer was a damned fool. It’d be like the UDC, to look at just that record of Meg’s hours and do something seriously stupid. Like put a shuttle jock on the combat line. “Meg, you don’t know. We got innate stupidity here, serious innate stupidity. The equipment’s a real stress generator, you understand me? They made the sims realtime to start, but the UDC guys won’t spend four, five hours in the sims, hell, no, we’re too short on sim-time for that, and we got guys too experienced to need that, so what do we do? We pitch the sims down to be do-able. Comfortable. Spread the time around. You read that?” His head ached. His voice was going. The capacity to care was. “They’re killing us. Take guys with reflexes to do the job, and then they fuck with the sims till you got no confidence in them. That’s a killer, Meg, that’s a damn killer, ship’s so sensitive you can screw the thing if you twitch—”
“You fly it?”
A memory chased through his nerves, oxygen high and an adrenaline rush, hyper-focused—
“Yeah,” he said, voice gone shaky with memory. “Yeah. Mostly the sims. But twice in the ship.” And he knew why he wasn’t going to take a Medical. Better to burn, Meg had said. And he did that. He did burn.
Door opened. “Mustard or ketchup?” Sal’s voice. “Got one each way....”
“Mustard,” he said, grasping after mundane sanity. The smell ought to make him sicker than hell, the hospital food hadn’t smelled of grease and he’d all but heaved eating it. But maybe it was the company: maybe it was the smell that conjured the cafeteria and the sounds and shoptalk over coffee: he suddenly wanted the burger. He took a real chance with his stomach and his head and hitched his shoulders around against the wall so he could sit up to eat, and handle the milkshake. A sugar hit, carbohydrates and salt, a guaranteed messhall greaseburger with dill pickles, chili sauce, tomatoes and mustard—
“How can you eat that?” Ben asked. “God!”
Meg said, “Shut up, Ben,” and took the ketchup burger herself.
Earth system, Meg had to be, then. Rab, rad, and, Meg had said it once, falling behind the wave of change on Earth: go out into the Belt and you stepped back a century at least—old equipment, a hodgepodge of antique fads and fashion—rab-rad gone to Shepherd flash and miner Attitude. But Meg was old genuine rab, he believed it, the rab they’d gunned down at the Company doors when he was a kid. So Meg had come home to hamburgers and ideas she was so far out of the current of, he hurt for her. And he was scared for her.
Damn right she was a pilot. The Fleet was raking up all the recruits they could beg or bribe away from the Shepherds, and they’d evidently made her an offer, given her her hours—a fool friend, an almost-lover near young enough to be her son, cracked up in hospital, needn’t have been any part of it. Couldn’t go by what Meg said. Couldn’t. She had a lot of virtues, but strict accounts wasn’t one of them. It was enough she’d come to the hospital to get him. It was enough she’d stand there and risk arrest and losing everything to get him out. Meg was like that. Might go, might stay. But if she stayed—
if she stayed—
He got most of the hamburger down. He got down half the shake and half the fries. He sat there in a room with Ben and Sal talking about computers and the UDC, and Meg wolfing down the first hamburger she must have had in years, and looking not a bit changed—a few more lines around the eyes, maybe. And when he had to put the rest of his shake aside, he shut his eyes for just a moment and sat there, and thought about Cory. He thought about Bird, and the Belt. He thought he was there for the moment, but it wasn’t a serious drift, just remembering. Safe.
Want to break his damn neck, Ben thought. Skuz ate the mess and went out cold, no wonder. Poor dead cow. Fish weren’t intelligent. Thank you.
Sal leaned on his arm and whispered a thoroughly indecent proposal, which reminded him what he hadn’t gotten in the last year, what with the course work and the computer time and all—a proposal that didn’t make a man think all that clearly about the value of his life and the necessity of getting out of this hellhole ...
“Yeah,” he said thickly, directing thoughts to getting his ass out of here and snagging Sal into the TI—and down to Stockholm. Sal was damned good. In several senses. “Yeah. —Meg, hate to leave you with the skuz there, —d’ you mind sitting on him?”
“Any way he can make it,” Meg said smugly. “Us freefallers are adaptable—how’s yourself, Ben?”
He was out of practice. Polite society did that. He actually felt his face warm. “Hell, ask Sal in a while.”
Sal hooked her arm in his and said, “Details later. Serious interpersonal relations. —You got a notion where, mate?”
“Whole damn room to ourselves,” he said. And elbowed the door open.
Dek said, “You want to dispose that?” and handed Meg the remnant of the milkshake. She went to the bath to dump it and came back to find Dek on his feet rummaging a locker—his, she figured, and hoped he wasn’t thinking of getting dressed. Her own back ached with the g-shift off the shuttle—she’d gotten soft, living on the Hamilton’s c-forced decks. It was the little muscles that hurt, the ones you used pulling your body around in freefall, a lot of them in unusual places, and she seriously didn’t want to face the guys outside....
“You’re not going to walk,” she said; he ignored the question, lifted a stack of folders in the top of the locker and said, sounding upset, “The tape’s gone.”
“What tape?”
“Sim tape. I guess they took it back to library. Damn sure they’ve been through here.”
“They?”
“MPs. Crash investigators. Whatever.”
“They already had the hearing, Dek. VIPs left this morning.”
He was looking white. He leaned one-handed against the locker frame and looked at nowhere. “I’m tracking, Meg.”
Meaning quit treating him like a spacecase. Joli jeune rab, face like a painted angel and a body language that said Screw you—in any sense you wanted to take it.