There’d been an accident and the ship had blown up. And his partners were dead. Or maybe never existed. It was a sim. Bright ball of nuclear fire. And he was here and they were in it, and it was all green glowing lines out there, whipping and snaking to infinity.
He remembered faces now. People he thought he liked— Bird. Meg and Sal. Cory, and Graff. Pete and Elly and Falcone. Faces. Voices. Falcone yelling, Hey, Dek, see you tomorrow.
But Falcone wouldn’t. Elly wouldn’t. They never would.
“You damn bastards!” he yelled. “Bastards!”
Interns came running, grabbed hold of him. “No,” he said, reminded what happened when he yelled. “No. Tommy!”
“Get the hypo,” one said, and he got a breath, he got a little sanity, said, “I’m not violent. I don’t need it. It’s all right. Let go, dammit! Get the doctor!”
They eased up. They stopped bruising his arms and just held him still.
“Just be quiet, sir. Just be quiet.”
“No shots. No damn shots.”
“Doctor’s orders, sir.”
“I don’t need one. I swear to you, I don’t need one.”
“Doctor says you’re not getting any rest, sir. You better have it. Just to be sure.”
He looked the intern in the face. Big guy, red face and freckles, lying across him. Out of breath. So was he. And two other large guys who were leaning on him and holding his legs.
“Sorry,” he said, between breaths. “Don’t want to give you guys trouble. I really don’t want to. I just don’t want any shot right now.”
“Sorry, too, sir. Doctor left orders. You don’t want to be any trouble. Right?”
“No,” he said. He shook his head. He made up his mind he had better change tactics. Agreeing with them got him out of this place. It would. It had. He couldn’t remember. It was only the drugs he had to worry about.
“Just hold still, sir. All right?”
“Yeah,” he said, and the hypo kicked against his arm. Stung like hell. His eyes watered.
He said, “You fuckin’ get off me. I can’t breathe. Let me up, dammit.”
“Soon’s you shut your eyes, sir. Just be quiet. You loosened a couple of John’s teeth yesterday. You remember?”
He didn’t remember. But he said, out of breath, “I’m sorry. Sorry about that. I’m better. A lot better.”
“That’s good, sir.”
“Friend of mine was here,” he said. But the drug was gathering thick about his brain. He said it again, afraid he might not remember when he waked. Or that it hadn’t happened at all.
He went to sleep when they drugged him and he waked up and he never knew where or when. He was going out now. He felt it happening. And he was scared as hell where he would wake up or what would be true or where the lines would lead him.
“Ben,” he cried, “Bird. Ben, come back— Ben, don’t go— they killed my partners, Ben, they fuckin’ killed us—”
“This isn’t validated,” the check-in clerk said, and slid the travel voucher across the desk in the .6 g of 8-deck. “You need an exit stamp.”
Ben took the voucher with a sinking heart. “What exit stamp? Nobody said anything about an exit stamp. There’s no exit stamp in the customs information.”
“It’s administrative, sir. Regulation. I have to have a stamp.”
“God. Look, call Sol One.”
“You do that from BaseCom,” the clerk said. And added without expression: “But you need an authorization from your CO to do that, sir.”
“And where do I get that?” You didn’t yell at clerks. It didn’t get you anything to yell at clerks. Ben said quietly, restrainedly: “My CO’s on Sol One—I need the UDC officer in charge.”
“This is a Fleet transport voucher.”
“I know it is,” Ben said. “But this uniform is UDC. Is it at all familiar to you? Where’s the UDC officer in charge?”
The clerk got a confused look, and focused behind him, where someone had come into the office, to stand in line was Ben’s initial reckoning; but whoever it was said, then, “Lt. Pollard?”
Voice he’d heard before. A long time ago. He turned around, a little careful in the .6g, saw a blue uniform and a black pullover, a thin, angular face and nondescript pale hair. Brass on the collar.
The trip out from the Belt. The Hamilton. And Jupiter’s well.
Graff. Fleet Lt. Jurgen Graff. Carrier pilot, junior grade.
“There’s an office free,” Graff said, meaning very evidently they should go there. Now. Urgently. A Fleet lieutenant wanted to talk to him, and he was stuck on Fleet orders in something that increasingly felt like a deliberate black hole?
“I’ve got a flight out of here at 1800. They’re talking about an exit stamp. I need some kind of clearance.”
“You don’t have a flight out of here. Not this one.”
He slowed down, so that Graff had to pull a stop and look at him. “Sir. I need this straightened out, with apologies, sir, but I’ve got a transfer order waiting for me back on Sol One, I was told not to communicate with my CO, I’m not Fleet personnel. I understand the interservice agreements, but—”
“Five minutes.”
“I’m UDC personnel. I want to see a UDC ranking officer. Sir. Now.”
“Five minutes,” Graff repeated. “You don’t want your friend screwed. Do you?”
“My friend— Sir, I don’t care what happens to my friend. I’ve got an appointment waiting for me back on Sol One, and if I lose it, I’m screwed. I’m just a little uneasy about this whole damn arrangement, —sir. This isn’t what I was told.”
“There’s another shuttle out the 22 nd. 2100 hours.”
Ben caught a breath. Three days. But Graff’s moves meant business and you didn’t argue a security matter on the open dock—no. Even if it was blackmail. Extortion. Kidnapping.
Graff waited. He came ahead. He went with Graff into a freight office and Graff waved the lights on.
“Yes, sir?” he said.
“We need him,” Graff said. “We need him to remember.”
“Sir, I just graduated from TI. If I’m not back there for the interviews they’re going away. They’re going to assign those slots and I’m stuck teaching j-1 programming to a class full of wide-eyed button-pushers, —sir. Excuse me, but I’ve not been in contact with any officer in my chain of command, I’ve gone along with this on the FSO’s word it had notified my CO. I’m not sure at this point I’m not AWOL.”
“You’re not. You’re cleared.”
“I’ve got your word on that. I haven’t seen any order but the one that had me report to the FSO on One. What have you done to me?”
“You have my word. I’ll get a message to your CO.”
“You mean they haven’t?”
“I’ll double check. We’ve played poker, haven’t we, Mr. Pollard?”
“Yes, sir.” Days of poker. Him. Dekker. Graff. No damn thing else to do on a half-built carrier.
“This is poker,” Graff said. “For the major stakes. How is he?”
“What does it matter? What’s he into?”
“Say I need him sane.”
“He’s never been sane.”
“Don’t joke like that. In some quarters they might take you seriously.”
“I am serious. The guy’s good, but his tether on reality’s just a little frayed.”
“Maybe that’s what it takes to do what he does.”
He stood there close to Graff, looking into Graff’s sober face in this very unofficial office and suddenly wondering who and what Graff was talking about and what Dekker did regularly do that had put him where he was. He said, carefully, “Dekker got lost out in the Belt. Banged around a lot. Real disoriented.”
“We know that.”
And how much else? Ben wondered. God, how much else? News didn’t escape the Belt. Security didn’t let anything get out. Even yet. Everything about the mining operation out there was under wrap. You didn’t know how much the Fleet might know. Or what tiny, inadvertent slip would let them guess what they’d done track there and what they might have been involved in that might screw his security clearance for good.