Hellburner

“All right.” She calmed her breathing rate. Panel lights lit. Scopes lit. “Go!”

Numbers hemorrhaged.

“God!”

“Nothing yet?” Dekker asked the desk on his mid-test break; and the secretary in Testing said, “No, sir. No result yet.”

“Are they out yet? Have they left?”

“1 don’t think so, sir.”

He tried FleetCom. He had a new comtech and had to explain everything again. “I just want to know if the lieutenant’s ever checked in.”

“He’s in a meeting,” FleetCom said.

“Has he gotten his messages?”

“/ think He has. Excuse me….”

On hold again, when all he wanted to do was hang up; and he didn’t want to offend FleetCom by doing that before the tech got back to him. He wished he hadn’t called. Five-minute break from his own Evaluations, it was 1456 by the clock, the granola bar and soft drink were wearing extremely thin, and he was regretting it. //he could get off the phone, he could get down the hall to the vending machines.

No word on his partners. Aptitudes was a four-hour session. You could take a little longer coming out from under the trank if you reacted….

God, he didn’t know what to—

“Ens. Dekker? Sorry to keep you waiting. I did get hold of the lieutenant. He says see him in his office at 1400. That’s 21a, Admin.”

“I’m in Evaluations til 1700. I’m in the middle of tests—“

“Excuse me….”

Hell!

He put a hand over his eyes, he leaned against the counter and waited. Looked pleadingly at the secretary across the desk, then. “Do they ever take this long on Aptitudes?”

“I don’t know, sir. I’ve only worked here for four…”

“Ens. Dekker? I’m sorry…. the lieutenant says he can’t talk at 1700, he’s got another meeting.”

“Will he clear a phone call for me to One? That’s all I want.”

“/ think he wants to talk to you about that.”

Shit. “Look—“ He shut out the light and the secretary’s presence with the palm of his hand. Tried to think. But he kept seeing fireballs. Hearing that door clank. “Is that all he wants? The phone call? Or does he want—look, can / talk to him online? Two minutes.”

“He’s in a meeting, sir. Just a moment.”

He was late by now, by two minutes. You weren’t late in Evaluations. You didn’t antagonize the examiners. Who were UDC to begin with.

“The lieutenant says he needs to talk to you. He says at 2200.”

“2200.” Graff didn’t plan to sleep, maybe. “Right. Thanks. Yeah. I’ll be there.”

“My partners aren’t out of Test yet,” Dekker said. “They went in at 0600. It’s 2202 and Testing doesn’t answer questions….”

“They’re all right,” Graff said, quietly, from the other side of the desk. “I can tell you that much.”

“So what do you know?”

“That they’re being very thorough.”

“They’re not reacting to the drug or anything—“

“No. They’re all right. I did check.”

It wasn’t regulation. He wasn’t convinced. He wasn’t at all convinced.

GrafT said: “On the other matter—“

“I just want to call my mother. Make sure she’s all right.” He kept his frustration to himself. He didn’t want to push Graff. He was running short of friendlies in Admin.

Graff said, “I got your message. I understand. There’s a good possibility her phone calls are being monitored by the police. Possibly by someone less official.”

“Who?”

“All we know,” Graff said, “is the same thing you saw in the news. We’re investigating. I could wish this lawyer weren’t involved—personally. Is your mother a member, a contributor—of that organization?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. —Arc you asking me her politics?”

“You don’t have to answer that.”

“She hasn’t got any politics that I know of. She didn’t when I lived there. I don’t think she would change.”

“She was never politically active. Never expressed any opinions, for or against the government, or the Earth Company?”

Bit by bit the line of questioning made him uneasy. It wasn’t like Graff—at least as he knew Graff—to probe after private information. He didn’t think it was necessarily Graff’s idea—and that meant whoever was investigating. So he offered a bit of his own reasons: “I was rab when I was a kid, the clothes, the haircut—Kady says I was a stupid plastic, and I guess I was; but I thought I was real. I used the words. My mother—got hot about it, said politics was all the same, didn’t matter what party, all crooked, she didn’t want any part of it—told me I was a fool for getting involved. They’d shot these people down on Earth. I think—“

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