Sal slid down, slid over, rolled onto one elbow, all shadow, braid-clips a-wink in the dim light. Eyes eclipsed and looked at him again.
“Weren’t treating her right, Ben. She took it. But, tell the truth, she wasn’t seriously happy on the Hamilton.”
“Personalities?”
Sal traced something with a long fingernail on the sheet between them. Second eclipse. And glanced up. “Could say. Guys put the push on her. Guys said—” Shift of the eyes toward the door and a lowered voice. “Said it was damned good she’d got shot, it put Dek at the controls....”
“Shit.”
Sal shrugged. “Probably true. She says it is. But that’s the Attitude, you understand? She took the jokers. She took the shit. But they said she’d got an affinity for gravity wells, didn’t want her flying in Jupiter’s pull—big joke, right?”
Severely big joke. The idea of infalling a gravity well made him nervous as hell. Going down to Stockholm, if he got mere, as happened, he intended to drink a lot of cocktails before the dive—because he was Shepherd—a Shepherd orphan, as happened, thank God he’d been on R2 when the ship went. But sometimes, on his worst nights, he dreamed of metal groaning, bolts fracturing, the sounds a ship would make when compression began— pop, and bang and metal shrieking—
Yeah, Shepherds made jokes. Shepherds defended the perks and prerogatives they got from the Company for flying where others couldn’t. And Meg was insystemer, inner systemer, even blue-sky; and there on Sal’s ticket....
So Dekker got the credit with the Shepherds, for one hell of a flight; and Meg, who’d nearly got her arm blown off for the cause—got the shit: Dekker hadn’t asked for a post with the Shepherds, that was the Attitudinal difference....
“She wanted to come,” Sal said. And gave a long breath. “Couldn’t let her go alone.”
“To find Dekker? She didn’t effin’ know him. She didn’t—”
Pilot, he thought then. Meg was a pilot same as Dekker, didn’t care about anything but to fly. And the Shepherds didn’t want her at controls?
Double shit. But things the other side of the wall still didn’t make sense in that light.
“So she’s in bed with the guy?”
A movement of sheet, shrug of Sal’s shoulders. Silence a moment. Then: “Hormones.”
“What kind? That’s the question.”
“Like he’s the best, you know what I mean? Beating him’d—I dunno, it’d prove a lot of things.”
“God.” He fell onto his back to think about that a tick.
“I mean.” Sal said, “if even the Fleet had offered her back then what they’d offered Dekker—if they’d just offered, she’d have been gone. But she was lying in pieces and patches, as was—couldn’t blame them, really, but it severely did hurt....”
Up on his elbow again. He was hearing craziness he might have to fly with. “She’s not any damn twenty-year-old, Sal, if you want to talk hormones, here, you got to have a whole different wiring. Reactions aren’t there. They’re not going to be there for any sane human, Sal, the guy’s flat crazy, it seems to be a pre-rec on this ship—”
Silence a moment. Sal was all shadow and maybe anger, you couldn’t know when you were talking to a cutout in the dark. Finally Sal said, with a definite edge to her voice, “She’s not any twenty-year-old, but she was damned good, Ben, you weren’t out there with us, you didn’t see how she’d finesse a rock—and we got shit, Ben, the Company gave us shit assignments, because we were worse than freerunners, we were freerunner lease crew, and they were trying to run us broke, to crack the ship-owners, that was what they were up to. We never got one good draw from that ‘random assignment procedure’—Meg had a record on Sol, Meg was on the Company’s hit list because Meg was rab, Meg didn’t dress by the codes, Meg didn’t think by the codes, Meg wouldn’t kiss ass and they screwed her, Ben, same as B.M. screwed her, same as the Hamilton screwed her— So here the damn Fleet comes in and says, By the way, will you come in and haul Dek out of his mess? —Didn’t even say, You want to fly for us? Said, You want to come haul this chelovek out of his funk and we’ll cover your record? That’s all, that’s all they promised, Ben. And she got this look—shit, what was I going to do? She’d stuck by me. Maybe it’s time somebody went with her.”
He’d never heard Sal talk that way—Sal with an attack of Obligations. But, shit-all, —
That thought led down a track he didn’t want to take, something about old times, about what they’d had on helldeck, confidence that came of knowing the guy you were sharing a ship with wasn’t out to screw you—whole damn universe might be out to do that, but your partner wouldn’t, your partner had to have the same interests you did, and you just didn’t cheat on him.
You just didn’t cheat on him....
He rolled out of bed, buck naked and cold in the draft from the vents, he walked over to tile other bunk and leaned his arm against it, because if he stayed in that bed he was going to start thinking about Morrie, and he didn’t like to do that, not in the middle of the dark.
So Sal was being a fool. So Meg thought she could get the years she’d lost back again and the system wouldn’t screw them all.
Rustle from behind him. Movement. Arms came around him, and the chill myriad clips of Sal’s braids rattled against his back.
“Cold out here, Ben.”
“I want out of here, dammit, I’m not aptituded for combat. I got a place in Stockholm...”
Sal said, holding him tight, “What’s Stockholm?”
CHAPTER 7
MAINDAWN and in the office early, trying, before the mainday rush hit, to make sense of the reports from the designers and the sims check. Graff took a slow sip of vending machine coffee, keyed the next page on the desktop reader. The report writer liked passives: ‘will be effectuated,’ ‘will be seen to have incremented,’ and especially convolutions: ‘may have been cost-effective in the interim while result-negative in the long-range forecast—’
Graff keyed the dictionary for ‘forecast.’ It said something about 1) terrestrial weather patterns and, 2) prediction. The latter, he decided, but keyed it up; and found something, as he’d suspected, different than his own definition of ‘prediction.’ These were the people who designed the computers and the software that ran the sims, for God’s sake, and they were giving him messages about Old Earth weather patterns and fortune-telling?
He tried to read these reports out of Tanzer’s staff. He felt responsible in the captain’s absence. He worried about missing something. He worried about not understanding Tanzer face to face, and these were the only lessons in blue-sky usage on his regular reading list.
‘Effectuated/ he could guess from particles. And he didn’t have that small a vocabulary. He didn’t use that many semicolons in his reports; he wondered was his style out of fashion; and he wished not for the first time that he’d had at least one of the seminal languages—given the proliferation of derived meanings, that was what Saito called the problem words, cognates; and metaphor. All of which meant a connection between ‘forecast,’ planetary weather, and the Lendler Corp techs who, between working on the sims and writing reports, danced a careful and convolute set of protocols between his office and Tanzer’s—’effectuate,’ hell. Obfuscate’ and ‘delegate’ and ‘reiterate, but nothing effectual was going to happen with that investigation except Lendler Corp gathering evidence to protect itself against lawsuits from the next of kin.
Save them the trouble. Stick to Belters. Belters didn’t sue Corporations, Belters didn’t have the money or the connections to sue Corporations.