Shove them up into Mission Ready, with him?
God, Porey wouldn’t do that. Porey’d said himself that he wouldn’t lose another ship: the Fleet couldn’t afford it. They weren’t going to do that…. They couldn’t do that….
“Rumor is,” Jamil said, “the Fleet thinks your guys have the stuff, so they’re just going to go with them, put them right in on the pods—“
“They can’t do that,” Dekker said. It came out a thin, helpless kind of voice. “No way. They haven’t got ships to throw away on a notion like that—“
“Rumor is,” Mitch said, “they were running some kind of new tape off Pete and the guys during the mission, rumor is the Fleet thinks they can take that tape and sub it for the whole damn training sequence—“
Legs nearly went out from under him.
“Seems,” Jamil said, “they wanted crew that hadn’t been biased by all this prior training—“
“Shit, no….” He couldn’t feel anything below the gut. He got a couple of breaths and managed to stay on his feet. “This is shit, guys, I don’t know where you got this, but this is shit. No way are they going to do that…”
Trace said, “First we got Tanzer, now we got a guy thinks he can program us like computers?”
“Where’d you hear this stuff?”
“In the slightly off chance,” Mitch said, “that we’re dealing with bugs, we decline to answer that in specific. But we thought you’d like to know.”
“Shit—“ He wasn’t doing too well with words. His teeth started chattering. “I got to talk to the lieutenant….”
“It’s Porey we have to make a dent in.”
“Good luck with that,” Trace said.
“We can not show up tomorrow. The whole lot of us.”
Dekker shook his head, made a wave of his hand, suddenly struggling to get control of his jaw. “N-no. This is a m-man m-makes ex-examples. Trust me that I kn-know.”
“God, the man’s freezing,” Trace said. “Get him a sheet or something.”
“I kn-know what I’m t-talking about. You don’t pull a st-strike—he’ll p-pick one of you—“ Pauli got past him into his room. But he kept looking at Mitch. “Guy’s a control freak. I m-met him. F-flew out here with him…” A blanket settled around him. He made a stiff, half-successful grab after it. But it did nothing for his chill. He let Pauli pull him back toward the bunk, while Mitch said, “You guys go on. Let’s get his door shut….”
Mitch stayed, and Pauli did, and Jamil and Trace. Dekker sat down on the bed, tucked the blanket around him. Mitch said: “The man’s making an example, all right—he’s going to kill you, you understand that? High team gets the next run. That’s us or that’s you, Dek. You can kill yourself in sims, if one of those girls screws up.”
“They aren’t damn b-bad…”
“Listen, Pollard may know what he’s doing, Pollard had a background, but they hauled these girls in here for no other reason than they were with you in the action out there and they’re somewhat famous in the Belt. They’ve got no place in the program, Fleet’s listening to helldeck gossip, no solid background in hours—“
“They survived.”
“Yeah, they survived whoring their way around helldeck. That’s what they did for a living, Dekker, I don’t know if you heard, but that’s the plain truth.”
He didn’t believe he’d heard that. That was how it got as far as it did. “Screw you, Mitch, you keep your opinions to yourself.”
“All right, all right, they’re friends of yours, I’m sorry. But you came in there new. You ask Pollard where these girls got their credit. With him, with Morrie, with any ship they ever handled… no bad karma for it, but they didn’t make their keep with the runs they made—“
“You stow it, Mitch. I worked with them.”
“You never flew with them. Never knew shit what they could do, and now because they were with you, they got a rep the Fleet takes for granted—‘ ‘
“They passed the Aptitudes, Mitch, the examiners shoved them right into the board sims, you’re telling me any of us sailed through into the sims?”