Living down at the bottom of the motherwell like his own brother did, writing him once a year about the wife and the kids and two pages at Earth to Belt mail rates about how he was putting in green beans this spring. God. Did people still think about things like that?
“Just sign this,” they said, and shoved a slate under Dekker’s hand—they had raised the bed up, propped him with pillows, but the trank was still thick and he could hardly focus. It was heavy g this time. It felt hard to breathe.
“What is this?” he asked, because he hadn’t gotten cooperation out of anybody in this place and he didn’t trust any of them. It might be a consent for them to go cutting on him, or giving him God knew what drug, and damned if he was going to sign it unread, in this place heavy as 1-deck.
They said—the theywho came and went sometimes, cops, doctors, orderlies, he wasn’t clear enough to figure that at the moment—”It’s just so you can get out of here. You want to get out of here, don’t you?”
“Go away,” he mumbled, sick at his stomach.
“Don’t you want to leave?” He had dropped the stylus. They put it back in his fingers.
He tried to get a look at it, then. It took a lot of work to make out the letters out of the general haze. But it said: AFFIDAVIT. Legal stuff. He worked some more at it. Finally he saw it was an accident report.
Accident. Hell.
He threw the thing. Maybe he broke it. It hit the wall and fell with a clatter like broken plastic. He thought, It wouldn’t do that upstairs.
He said, “I’m not signing anything without a lawyer.”
Hell of a mess they’d left. Meg was maddest about the jewelry. She sat there untangling earrings and swearing. “Ought to say we’re missing something. Serve the cops right.”
And Sal, sorting through the stubs of makeup pencils: “Blunted every damn point. Corp-rat pigs.”
“ Wehaven’t done anything.” It took some thinking, but that was the case. Meg unwound tiny chains and felt an upset at the pit of her stomach. “Sons of bitcheswhy the hell’d they toss everything together…”
Sal came over and leaned on her fist on the bed. Signed, fast and sharp, Careful. Which didn’t help the feeling in Meg’s stomach at all. If they were bugged, and the way things were going she’d believe it, they could make those bugs vid as well as audio.
They didn’t need this trouble. They wanteda chance at that ship, but they sure didn’t need this trouble, and trouble for the guys was what it smelled like.
They could move out. There were sleeperies besides the Hole. They could kiss Ben and Bird off and go find another lease after all; but if that second ship did come Bird’s way—
Then they’d want to cut their throats, was what. Bird and Ben were the best operation they had a chance with: no chance for her in the company. Not much for Sal either: with a police record you could work as a freerunner, but you didn’t get any favors and you didn’t fly for the company, and if anything went wrong on the deck you were on, you were first on the cops’ list.
Just about time something went right for a change. There’d been enough bad breaks.
Like the sector they’d just drawn, which got them a nice lot of ice and rock, in which Mama wasn’t keenly interested, no, thank you. That was the kind of allotments lease crews got lately: there were thin spots in the Belt, they were passing through one, and the ship owners took the good ones if they had to break health and safety regs to get out again.
Well, hell, you hung on. You stuck it. You skimmed when you had to and you did your damnedest. Meg Kady swore one thing: she wasn’t going to die broke and she wasn’t going to be spooked by any company cop throwing her stuff around.
Her hands got real steady with the little chains. She felt her mouth take on this little smile. Fa-mil-iar territory. Amen. “Cops on Sol are higher class,” she said to Sal, right cheerfully. “These shiz don’t take any courses in neat, do they?”
“Sloppy,” Sal said. “Severely sloppy.”
Salvatore sank into his chair, shoved a stack of somebody’s problems aside, and took his inhaler from the desk drawer and breathed deeply of the vapors—enough to set himself at some distance. He took a deeper breath. The drug hit his lungs and his bloodstream with an expanding rush, reached his nerves and told him to take it easy. He hated scenes. Hated them. Hated young fools handing Security more problems and doctors who invoked privilege.
Most of all he hated finding out that there was more to a case than Administration had been telling him.
The phone beeped. He took another deep breath, let it go: his secretary would get it; and he hoped to hell—
“Mr. Salvatore,” his secretary said via the intercom. “Mr. Payne.”
Third call from PI that day. This was not one Salvatore wanted, and he knew what Payne had heard. God, he wasn’t ready for this.
He punched in, said, “Mr. Payne, sir.”
“I’m told we have a problem,” the young voice on his phone said: Salvatore’s office didn’t have vidphones—he was glad not to have. Payne was junior, a bright young man in the executive, V. E in charge of Public Information and PR, directly under Crayton, who was directly under Towney himself, and there was absolutely no doubt somebody else had been chewing on his tail—recently, Salvatore decided. So Payne passed the grief down hischain of command, to Security. “That damned fool is going to keep on til we have a corporate liability. This isn’t going to help anyone, Salvatore.”
“I understand that.”
“Look, this is coming from upper levels, you understand that?”
“I do understand that, yes…”
“This is getting to be a damn mess, is what it’s getting to be. The girl’s mother is after that kid and the whole company’s on its ear. We’ve got contracts to meet. We’ve got schedules. We need that release. We need this case settled.”
“I’m advising him to sign it, Mr. Payne.” Salvatore took a deep breath—of unadulterated office air, this time. God, who was Payne talking to? “We’re working on it. There’s a possibility, the way I see it—” He took another head-clearing breath and took a chance with Payne. “There’s an indication the kids might not have been where their log said they were. It could have been a mistake, it could have been deliberate. I think they may have been skimming.”
There was a long silence on the other end. God, he hoped he’d not made a major mistake in saying that.
“What we have,” Payne’s voice said finally, quietly, “is a minor incident taking far too much company time.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I can’t be more plain than that. We don’tneed an independent involved in the courts, especially a kid with camera appeal. I’ve got the data on my desk, I’ll send it over to you. There wasno ‘driver. We have the log. There was no such entry. I’ll tell you what happened out there, captain, these two kids were up to no good, very likely skimming, probably scared as hell and taking chances with a rock way too large for their kind of equipment. Dekker either screwed up and had an accident that killed his partner, or there was a mechanical failure—take your pick of the safety violations on that ship. Maybe we should be prosecuting on negligence and probably on skimming, but I can give you the official word from Legal Affairs, we’re not prosecuting. The kid’s been through enough hell, there’s no likelihood that he’s going to be competent to testify, or that he won’t complicate things by raising extraneous issues in a trial, and we’re not going to have this drag on and on in a lawsuit, Salazar’s or his. There’s people on this station would love that, you understand me, captain?”