“I got a seriously upset partner—out of my way, dammit!”
“So what’s with Dekker?”
“Something about getting clipped.”
“Shit!” Mitch said, and: “Pauli,” to the big guy behind him, Shepherd from the hall yesterday. She remembered. “Haul his ass back here. Fast.”
“What’s going on?” Sal asked as she and Ben showed up with a handful of other curious.
“Dekker’s been clipped,” Mitch said. “Just calm down, we’re going to see what the lieutenant says about this.”
Hell if she understood ‘clipped,’ she didn’t know Pauli from trouble, she knew Mitch too damn well, but Mitch’s outrage at least sounded to be on Dek’s side and stopping Dek seemed to be a priority on their side too. Pauli-whoever took out in the direction Dek had gone, and she went with, at a fast walk.
First comer showed an empty hall; but Pauli broke into a jog for a side corridor as if he knew where he was going, she caught up, and spotted Dek, all right, traveling at a fair clip himself.
“Dek!” she called out; and he stopped, took a damn-you stance and stared at them cold as cold.
All right. That was the surly young sumbitch she knew. She panted, “You got friends, chelovek, capish? Slow down. Deal with people.”
Dek looked half poised to walk off. Pauli said, “Is it true? They pulled you?”
“Yeah.” Dek’s mouth didn’t look to be working real well, he clearly didn’t want to talk; but about that time Ben and Sal showed up with some of the other Shepherds from the messhall, Ben with:
“What’s going on? —Dekker, are you being a spook?”
“Ben,” Meg exclaimed. Sal said the same. But Dek made a disgusted wave of his hand and managed to unlock his jaw.
“Nothing’s wrong, nothing’s the hell wrong. Sorry I got you here. Sorry I got you into this.”
A sane woman had to get things off personals. Fast. “Ben, Sal, this is Pauli, friend of Mitch’s; Pauli: Ben Pollard, Sal Aboujib. Say how-do, and somebody answer a straight question, f God’s sake. What’s going on here?”
“The damn UDC,” Dek said, “that’s what’s going on. Tanzer’s just tossed me out of the program.”
“He can’t do that,” Pauli said. “Screw him. He can’t do that.”
Somebody else said, “No way, Dek.” And another one:
“Mitch is on his way to talk to the lieutenant right now. No way that’s going to stick.”
Dek wasn’t highly verbal. He was white, and sweating. Sal said, quietly, with her arm in Dek’s: “You want to go back to the room, Dek?”
Ben said: “Screw it, he’s got a breakfast sitting back there, we all got breakfast back there, if nobody’s grabbed h.”
Leave it to Ben. Sal had a crazy man halfway turned around and stopped from strangling the colonel and Ben wanted his effin’ breakfast. Dek was looking at Ben like he was some eetee dropped by for directions.
“You mind?” Ben asked him impatiently.
“Yeah. All right,” Dek muttered. And went with him.
God, both of them were spooks.
“I’m looking at Dekker’s record,” Tanzer said, tapping a card on his desk, “right here: the medical report and his disciplinary record—including his violent behavior here in hospital, his defiance of regulations in the sims—”
“His behavior, colonel, was thoroughly reasonable, considering the level of drugs in his system. Drugs with possible negative psychological impact considering his history— which is in that file. That from my medical experts. He has grounds for malpractice.”
“This is the accident report.” Tanzer shoved a paper form across the desk at him. “Sign it or don’t, as you please. I’ll spare you the detail. I’m not calling the hospital records into question, I’m not charging him with flagrant violations of security with that tape, I’m not charging him for disregard of safety regulations. I am concluding there was no other person involved in the sims accident but Ens. Dekker.”
He kept every vestige of emotion from his face. “How ate you proposing he got into that pod?”
“I’m supposing he got in there the ordinary way, lieutenant, the same as any fool can climb in there. He just happened to be on trank. These are the records of his admission—he was flying before he got in there.”
“Was put in there.”
“He was in illegal possession of a tape that should have been back in library—”
“He had license to possess that tape, colonel. He’d been in hospital, he’d just been released, in condition your medics knew when they let him out with a prescription drug in his system—”
“Whatever drugs were in his system, he put there, before he decided to go on a sim ride.”
“Pardon me if I don’t rely on those doctors’ word, colonel, or their records.”
“Rely on whatever you like. I’ll tell you one thing: Dekker’s barred from the sims.”
“He’s going in there on my orders, colonel.”
“Check your rules, lieutenant. The sim facility and its accesses are under UDC direction.”
“You restrict one of my people from the sims, colonel, and the case is going clear to the Defense Department.”
“Then you better start the papers moving, lieutenant, because he’s barred. And if you give a damn for your program you won’t fife—that’s my unsolicited advice, because you don’t want him in public. Take my word for it you don’t want him in public. But until I get cooperation out of your office, you don’t get cooperation out of mine.”
“Do I understand this as blackmail? Is that what you want? My signature, and Dekker’s back in?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way. But let’s say it might signal a salutary change of attitude.”
“No deal. No deal, colonel. And you can stand by for FleetCom to be in use in fifteen minutes.”
“Good. About time you woke up your upper echelons. Tell them they’ve got a problem with Dekker. A serious problem.”
Trays were still sitting. They came into the mess hall and guys stopped and stared in that distant way people had when they were trying to spy on somebody else’s trouble. Talk stopped, mostly, and started again, and Dek didn’t look at anybody, didn’t talk to anybody, just sat down at his place at table and put the straw in his orange juice.
Ben gave her a tight-jawed look. Table was still all theirs. Pauli and the guys had gone off toward the breakfast line, but they hadn’t made it: they’d gotten snagged, talking to guys over by the wall, all Shepherd. There were UDC guys on the fringes—tables were either UDC or they were Shepherd, Meg marked that suddenly: there wasn’t another mixed table in the whole damned hall.
She didn’t like the quiet. Didn’t like the feeling around them. Dek was having his eggs. Ben was having toast. Sal gave her a look that said she was right, everybody else was crazy but them.
Young woman, blond hair in a shave-strip, came up, set her tray down, said, “You mind, Dek?”
Dek shrugged. That one sat down. “Trace,” the interloper said, looking her way, and offered her hand across the tray as a dark-skinned Shepherd kid took the seat next to Saclass="underline" “Aimarshad. Friends of friends.”
Pauli sat down, him with no tray, and said, “It’s us Tanzer’s after. —Pollard, you mind to answer whose side you’re on?”
Hell of a question, Meg thought. She watched Ben frown and think, then say, with a cold sweet smile on his face: “Hell, I’m not in Tanzer’s command. I’m Security-cleared. I’m Computer Technical, out of TI. I’m due somewhere else, and if I get there, frying Tanzer’s ass’d be ever so little effort. So why doesn’t somebody get me out of here?”
“Hear you were a good numbers man,” Pauli said.