Hellburner

He’d not hit her. Thank God, he’d held it back, he hadn’t hit her. Only respect he’d ever shown her, mat last year… and if they shipped him out from here—the only respect he might ever have a chance to show, except that phone call.

“Forgive me,” the lieutenant said. “I have to ask this—in your judgment, is it possible—is it remotely possible she did make threats against MarsCorp?”

Ingrid Dekker wasn’t a walkover. She wasn’t going to stand and take it—not without handing it back. “If they threatened her. But she wouldn’t—wouldn’t just take it into her head to do that, no, I don’t believe that.” I have to ask this…

At whose orders… sir….

“Are you close to your mother—still?”

God. He didn’t want to discuss it. But the lieutenant had been on his side, Graff if anybody was still his lifeline. He didn’t want to put his mother in a bad light. She was the one in trouble and she needed all the credit she could get. He said, looking at a spot on the front of Graff’s desk: “I was a pain in the ass, sir. She said if I went to the Belt I didn’t need to come back. I—was sincerely a pain in the ass, sir. I was eighteen. I was in with a rough crowd. —I was stupid.”

Graff didn’t say anything to that, except: “Have you corresponded with her?”

“No, sir.” He stared fixedly at that spot on the desk, wondering if they might search his room and bleed his datacard for it, next use he made. Maybe they already had. “Not recently. —I’ve got about four, five k I’d like to send over to her account. If I could do that. She’s not working, she’s going to need the money.”

“I’ll talk to Legal. See what the procedures are. —As I said, we’re going to be looking into the case. If mere are strings to be pulled, maybe we can pull them.”

“I appreciate mat, sir.”

“Are you ready to get back to work?”

“Yes, sir.”

Graff keyed something on the deskcomp. Glanced at it. “I don’t know if they can get your friends back to quarters this watch. But you’re their unit commander, you have access there on any shift, if you want to check up on them.”

Not back to quarters? Not in this watch? His heart did a tic and a speed-up. He looked at Graff, met a level, I-can’t-tell-you kind of stare.

“What are they doing?” he asked Graff. “They’re hi there for Aptitudes—it’s a four-hour test, for God’s sake…”

“You have access there.”

“I’ve been over there. They wouldn’t tell me a damn thing!”

Graff had never been one to hold back information, not under Keu, and not under his own administration. Now…

“I suggest you go over there,” Graff said. “That’s all I can say.”

Didn’t like the damned drugs. Didn’t effin’ like the floating feeling. Told you stuff you didn’t want to hear. Told you you’d effin the if you screwed it… and Ben didn’t want to the, he sincerely didn’t want to the…

“Fire!”

His heart took a jump, he felt neg g, he went spinning away—you should feel blood pooling in your head and your feet and he didn’t, didn’t feel anything right except cold breeze on his face and his lungs getting air again—

He could see light. Felt somebody holding his sleeve. He was fiat on his back in g and Dekker was holding on to him, saying, “It’s all right, it’s all right, Ben—“

Wasn’t who he wanted to wake up in the arms of. He stared at Dekker, with his heartbeat still thumping away like explosions, and recalled they were surrounded by dots all but six of which were trying to kill him—

except he was in bed and Dekker wasn’t flying the ship.

He took slow assessment of this fact. He took a look around the ceiling of a disgustingly barren room, recalled signing his name, and them telling him Sal was in, and him talking to the tech and screwing with the sim, because he’d been mad as hell and wanting to get court-martialed and wanting to go to bed with Sal Aboujib if he had to get shot at to do it—only viewed backwards, as he had to see it now, that sequence didn’t highly make sense.

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