He just rolled over in the blanket and tried to fall unconscious, if sleep was out of reach; but images rolled over and over like riot behind his eyes, the argument with Meg about her flying, Graff sitting mere and telling him Get over to Testing, Porey saying, You’re meat, until you prove otherwise…. But the sequencing of events didn’t make sense. They’d brought Meg and Sal here to wake him up, they’d had to start from the Belt directly after the accident, directly after he ended up in hospital—-they’d brought Ben from closer in and Ben had gotten here faster, that was all, but they must have started at the same time.
They’d had the hearing, Graff had said, and they’d wanted him to testify. But he hadn’t. And still Porey had come in to take the program over. And they had tapes. Tapes they’d made off Pete and Elly and Falcone on the mission, leading up to the wreck—
Union tech, then, the same deep-drug tech that they’d sworn once they could beat—but the ship wasn’t up to specs and the program was screwed and they had to keep their funding going, had to keep getting the ships built—
So the Fleet had seized control and they had to have another pony show? They swore to somebody they’d get the program turned around and to do that they had to hold out some brand new tekkie trick that was going to win the war so they couid get the money?
They wanted to try out the tech on unbiased crew—and for that, they hauled in Meg and Sal clear from the Belt, pulled in Edmund Porey and a carrier, blasted away from Sol Station like a bat out of hell an hour after the riot in the messhall landed him and half the program in the brig?
Then Porey had wanted to talk to him, personally, when he hadn’t, that he knew, talked to Mitch, or any of the other recruits in any private interview?
Porey knew him—personally, at least insofar as they’d met during his trip out from the Belt in the first place; Porey had ferried him out from the Belt—it wasn’t impossible that Porey had had his hand on his career long before this … maybe even suggested him for the program when they enlisted him: he had no idea, but Porey had been in a position to have done that. Maybe that was why the interview in the office, that had gone so badly; maybe Porey was justifiably angry that he’d been in the center of controversy, when Porey had brought him here specifically to keep him out of media attention, because of the Salazar mess—
Then his mother, devoutly noninvolved, got fired—and went after MarsCorp; and peacer groups showed up with lawyers to back her suit?
He lay shivering in his bed, thinking, Why? on the frenetic edge of exhausted sleep. Everything looped back, as if he was the gravity well nothing could escape….
There were so many things that didn’t make sense. There were so many pieces of his life being gathered up and shaken—everything that went wrong from here to Pell seemed to have his name on it, in bright bold caps. Paul F. Dekker.
A guy couldn’t have that kind of luck, no way in hell one stupid miner-jock could just chance to be where carriers moved and officers intervened—
And Graff just happened to care so much he went to all the trouble to collect his friends to rescue him?
Like hell. Like hell, lieutenant, sir.
. “What was I going to say to him?” Graff asked. “Ask these people and they might give you what you want, but dammit, you don’t deal with them like that.”
Demas said, in his null-g unmonitored sanctuary in the heart of the carrier, “Nothing you can do, J-G. No way to stop it even if you’d known in advance. This was decided at much higher levels.”
“Did you know? What do you know?”
Demas shook his head. “I don’t and I didn’t. I would guess there was consultation. I would hope there was consultation of more man Porey with his own captain, but knowing what Mazian decides these days, I have some trepidation on that account. But who knows? Tape-tech works for Union.”