Mason looked at him narrowly while he took time to chew the bite and wash it down with soft drink. “Nothing.”
“What, nothing? What’s that look mean?”
“You here as a friend of Dekker’s? Or officially?”
“Look, I’m a programmer, not a psych. I was minding my own business on Sol One. FSO hauled my ass out here because Dekker named me next-of-kin. Lt. Graff hands me his personals, doesn’t tell me shit else, asks me find out what happened to him, and that’s where I am, trying to find out why he’s lying there seeing ET’s and angels, so I can get back to Sol One before my posting’s gone. What’s that look mean?”
Mason said slowly, “You’re not here on Tanzer’s orders.”
“I don’t know Tanzer. The FSO jerked me over on a hush-up and hurry. Humanitarian leave, on account of Dekker wanted me. What’s the UDC got to do with it?”
“Uniform you’re wearing isn’t exactly popular in some quarters.”
“So what are we? Union spies? Not that I heard.”
“Say Dekker wouldn’t be lying in that bed except for the UDC CO here.”
Ben took a look at the door. Nobody around. Nobody listening, unless they routinely bugged the vending machines. “Mason. This is Ben Pollard. Ben who was Morrie Bird’s partner. Ben whose ass your ship saved once upon a while. You seriously mind to tell me what the hell’s going on and why Dekker rates all this shiz?”
Mason swallowed a bit of sandwich and sat there looking at him and thinking about it. “Say it’s a real pressured environment.”
“Yeah?”
“The UDC doesn’t like Belters. You must be the exception.”
Belters who might be old, exiled rab, Ben thought, Shepherds who looked like Mason—that haircut wouldn’t get a security clearance from the UDC, but he didn’t say so. He said, carefully, “There’s some feeling, yeah, but I never ran into it. Went into Tl, computer stuff—in no pain until they snatched me here. What’s this about Dekker and the CO?”
”Tanzer’s run the R&D for the UDC insystem stuff since Adam was an Earther, he’s got his System, and his friends in high places, til the Fleet signed us in to fly for them. The UDC wanted to do the test and documentation through their facility—all right, they had the set-up and the sims and the knowledge of the suppliers and the technical resources; which is how R&D’s got their hands on the ships and put their guys in the seats, because the U friggin’ DC is trying to get the Fleet demoted to a UDC command.”
“I’ve heard that. Mazian’s all over the news trying to get funds. The opposition wants it with strings.”
“You’ve seen the big ships. But the secondary stuff the Fleet’s building—top secret stuff, fast. UDC’s never flown anything this hot. Design screw-ups, spec screw-ups, materials failures. They cut the budget which means they go to the drawing-board again and make changes—no mind it costs another 150 million for a study and an 80 mil legislative session that could’ve made up the difference—no, that’s fine, that’s going in the damn senators’ pockets and feeding the contractors. We had one glitch-up with a pump that wasn’t up to specs, we got another because security’s so damn tight the company making a mate-up device can’t talk to the company writing the software, you figure that?”
“Must be the programmer that did the EC security system.”
“Listen.” Mason’s finger stabbed the water-ringed table-top. “Right now they’re six months behind schedule and talking about one damn more redesign on the controls. The UDC bitched and bitched about sim time, said Tanzer’s ‘boys’ were the ones to do the test runs because they had the hours and the experience—you want to talk to me about hours? Shit, I’m twenty-seven, that’s twenty fuckin’ years I’ve lived on the Hamilton, and they give me 200 hours at nav? 200 fuckin’ hours, you believe that? They won’t log anything you ran up before you were licensable at your post. I was nav monkey when I was seven, I was running calc when I was ten, I was sitting relief on the edge of the Well when I was twelve, and then they say they’re counting only a quarter of the time our ships logged us—as a compromise because it was civilian hours? Ninety days a tun, thirty heavy, and on call 24 fuckin’ hours a day in Jupiter’s lap for longer than these sim-jockeys would hold up, and they give me 200 hours? I was 2000 plus on my last run out from R2!”
“That’s crazy.”
“Yeah, but that’s UDC rules. You only get hours for the time you’re logged on. Who logs on? Who ever logs on? You do your fuckin’ job, you’re too busy to log on, with a load coming and the watch rousting you out of your bunk at 2100 to check you’re where you think you are, because somebody thinks we got a positional problem, shit if I’m going to log on as officer of record and get my fuckin’ hours for the UDC. Same shit they’re pulling on the merchanters. You know why they don’t count real hours on us? Because the UDC’s got four pilots can claim real hours on a par with us, and last week they had five.”
“The guy with Dekker’s crew?”
“Wilhelmsen.” Mason leaned closer, said, “Listen, —”
And stopped as a nurse came in and carded a soft drink. The nurse left. Mason said, “We’ve got a lot of pressure. You got maybe four, five hours at a run. Virtual space display. Neural net Assist. Real sensory overload. Hyperfbcus, non-Stop. And you don’t sub in some stranger in the last twelve hours before a run, you don’t have bad feeling between the pilot and the techs, you don’t plug in a guy with a whole different visualization system. You want to figure how much pressure Wilhelmsen was under to perform? Shit, he missed a target. He could’ve let it go. But he was too hot for that. He flipped back to get it, schitzed on where he was, and took three good guys with him. You know why Dekker’s in here? Dekker—Dekker told Wilhelmsen’s crew to their faces that he could have done it.”
“Shit.”
“No kidding. Wilhelmsen’s navigator took severe exception, there were words—”
“Before or after they sent Dekker to hospital?”
“Let me tell you about that, too. Yeah, Dekker was in shock. He was watching it in mission control. But he didn’t need any hospital. They wanted him quiet. They wanted him not to say a thing in front of the senators and the VIPs they had swarming around the observation area.”
“They.”
“The UDC. Tanzer. They doped him down and let him out after they got the last of the VIPs on the shuttle out of here. And twelve hours later they haul Dekker out of the sim that’s been running for six—”
Evans walked in. Stood there a moment, then said, “Lt. Pollard. Getting the local news?”
Ben remembered to breathe. And shoved back from the table. “We knew each other, back when. Old news. —Nice seeing you, Mason.”
“Nice seeing you,” Mason muttered, and got up himself, Ben didn’t wait to see for what. He chucked his plastics in the bin and walked out, with a touch of the pulse rate and the cold sweats he’d used to feel in the Belt, when the Company cops were breathing damned close to them.
Infighting with the UDC? A major Reel project going down the chute and the blue-sky UDC fighting to get its boys in the pilot seat and the Earth Company militia under its command?
He wished he were in Stockholm.
“Lt. Graff?” Bonner said, and Graff got up from beside Demas, walked quietly to the table and swore to tell the truth.
“State your name, rank, citizenship, service and age,” the clerk said.
“Jurgen Albrecht Graff, Fleet Lieutenant, EC Territories, ship merchanter Polly d’Or, assigned militia ship Victoria, under Captain Keu, currently Helm Two on the ECS8, uncommissioned, age thirty-eight.” Heads perusing documents, drowsing on hands, came up and looked at him with dawning close attention.