“You said there was. Are you changing your story?”
“I’m not changing anything! There was a ’driver out there. It didn’t answer our hails, it ran right over us—”
“Denial,” Pranh said quietly. “Anger. Transference. I’ve talked to the investigators. There’s no ’driver. There never was a ’driver near you. One was working. It’s possible there was a high-v rock. A pebble.”
“Pebble, hell! I want to talk to the police. I want to know what that ’driver captain says! I want a phone!”
The doctor went to the door, leaned out and spoke to someone outside. And left.
“I want to talk to somebody from Management!” he yelled at the empty doorway. “Dammit, I want to talk to somebody who knows what’s going on out there!”
But all that came through the doorway was a pair of orderlies with a hypo to give him.
He swore when they laid hands on him and when they gave him the shot; and he swore all the while he was sliding back down again. He felt tears running on his face, and his throat was raw from screaming. He thought of Cory, Cory shaking her head and looking the way she did when something couldn’t be fixed.
Can’t do it, Dek.
And he said to himself and to Cory, Hell if not.
Two pieces of news Ben had for Bird when he walked into the Hole, and good as one was, the bad won. Hands down.
“We got an LOS on a big one,” Bird muttered as he sat down on his bed. He threw that out flat, because it was completely swallowed up in this. “Sure it was cops?”
“They left a note. A sticker.” Ben showed it to him, folded, from his pocket. “It was worse than this. I straightened up some—folded Sal and Meg’s stuff.”
“Got them too.”
“Got them too.”
“Damn.” He shook his head. It was all he could think to say.
“Maybe,” Ben said, “maybe they’re just checking us out. I mean, legally, they can search anything they want—and we have this claim in—”
“Legally I’m not sure they can,” he said, tight-jawed. “But the complaints desk is hell and away from R2.” Then he thought about bugs, signed Ben to hush, got up and took him out and down the hall to a table in the bar. By that time he figured Ben knew why. Ben looked worried as he sat down.
“Two beers,” he said to Mike Arezzo. And brought them back and sat down. He said to Ben: “They could have bugged the place. But if we ask to move, they’ll be asking why and they’ll get interested.”
“I don’t know why they’re on us in the first place,” Ben said. “It’s that damn Dekker, I know it is. No telling what story he’s telling them.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Well, it would be damn useful to know. I can talk to somebody in—”
He laid a hand on Ben’s arm. “Don’t try to fix this one. I don’t care who you know. It’s too dangerous.”
“Dangerous, hell! We haven’t done anything but save that guy’s neck!”
Ben really believed in some things. Like The System and The Rules he regularly flouted. “You remember you asked me about Nouri and his lot. And I said that wasn’t that long ago. Police can do any damn thing they want to. They did then. They still can. Your company education tell you that?”
“There are regulations they have to follow—”
“That’s fine. There’s regulations they sometimes don’t follow. Remember Nouri? Wasn’t anything they didn’t search on these docks; and you didn’t say, I got my rights. The company has its easy times and it has its crackdowns, and both of us can remember when toilet paper didn’t have stuff in it to break it down so you can’t make press-paper anymore, you got to use those damn cards you stick into these damn readers that we don’t know where the hell they connect to; I can remember when ships could kind of work in and out of the sectors and you could link up and share a bottle; now they’ll slap a fine on you you’ll never see the top of. I can remember when they didn’t care about this stupid war with people clear the hell and gone away from here, that they say now can just come in here and blow us to hell, and once upon a time we didn’t have the company bank taking LOSes out of your account if you paid for a search, not until Recovery turned up an absolute no-can-do. I’ve seen a hell of a lot change, friend. I’ve heard about how the company has to do this and the company has to do that, and if we organize and everybody stands together the company’s going to give in. Hell! We’re not the Shepherds, the company doesn’t have to give in. The company can replace us, the company’s aching to replace us, and if it wasn’t for the charter that says they have to deal with independents on a ‘fair and equitable basis’ they’d have screwed us all right out of existence. They teach you that in company school?”
“There are still rules. They’re still accountable to higher management.”
“Yeah, they’re accountable. The only accounting that matters is the balance sheet. We shouldn’t have filed on that ship, Ben. We shouldn’t have done it.”
“You’re not making sense. It’s the company’s rules. They set up the salvage rules. You’re saying they’re not going to follow them?”
“Ben, the rules aren’t supposed to cost the company money. That’s the Rule behind the rules. I’ve had a bad feeling about this whole business from the beginning. You don’t win big. You never win big.”
“If you don’t take the breaks you have you damn sure don’t win anything!”
“You’re all shiny new and bright polished. I was that a long time ago.” He took a mouthful of the beer and swallowed. “I remember when they started making this stuff, too. You don’t want to see the vats this came from.”
“Yeah, well, maybe everything you remember was better. Maybe everything now is shit. Or maybe it was always like this.”
“We didn’t always have the company on our necks. We didn’t always have them gouging every penny they can get their hands on, we didn’t always have a friggin’ military shipyard next door making us a target—we haven’t always had all this damn happy stuff on the vid all the time, when we know nothing happy is going on back home, Ben!” It was too much to say, even out in the bar, where bugs weren’t likely. It was too much even to think about. Ben looked confused.
“Here’s home, Bird. This is home.”
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s mine, too. But sometimes I’d like to kick its ass.”
Meg and Sal came in the door. They had to explain to them how it was.
Sal said, “Sons of bitches,” meaning, he hoped, the cops. But Meg and Sal were smarter than Ben in some ways. They shut right up, and said a dinner would patch things—
Funny, he thought then, that they had never even once thought that the cops could have been searching after something Meg and Sal had done, and them almost certainly skimmers, and just back from a run. But the company never minded skimming much, the way it never minded how Sal took money from guys—Sal just didn’t do favors for free, unless she was your partner. And truth be known she got a bit out of Ben, the way they’d just gotten their dinner paid for. Company brats understood each other.
The gals didn’t even look much upset, just kind of shrugged it off and shook their heads as if two guys who got into somebody else’s trouble could expect police. Or maybe they were just trying to keep everybody level-headed, you never knew with women. They might be madder than hell and thinking how they’d like to break certain guys’ necks, but they’d think about it awhile and figure they were owed for this, more than a couple of beers.
So they said they’d go straighten up, and they left. Ben lingered a minute finishing his beer and then said he’d go check the bank and make sure the money got logged right, which was an excuse: God only knew where Ben was really going.