Familiar walls, posters, game tables, drift of guys out to the hall. Ben and Sal gave them a: Come on, you’re late, and he wondered suddenly where this hall was, or why he should stay in it, when there were so many other like places he could be—spaced, he told himself, sane people didn’t ask themselves questions like that, sane people didn’t see the dark in the light…
“Hey, Dek, you all right?”
Mason. “Yeah. Thanks.”
Hand on his shoulder. Guys passed them in the hall.
“He all right?” Sal asked.
“Yeah,” he said. Somehow he kept walking as far as the messhall, couldn’t face the line. “I’m just after coffee, all right? I’m not hungry.”
They objected, Meg said she was getting him a hamburger and fries, and the sumbitch meds and dieticians would log it to her, the way they did every sneeze in this place, maybe screw up her medical records. He waved the offer off, went over to the coffee machine and carded in.
Nothing made sense to him. Everything was fractured. He was making mistakes. He’d glitched the target calls right and left this morning.
It had been this morning. It had to have been this morning… but he’d run it so many times…
He walked back toward the tables, stood out of the traffic and muttered answers to people who talked to him, not registering it, not caring. People came and went. He remembered the coffee in his hand and drank it. Eventually Meg and Sal came out of the line, so did Ben, and gathered him up.
Meg had the extra hamburger. “You’re eating,” she said. “You want the meds coming after you?”
He didn’t. He took it, unwrapped it, and Ben hit him in the ribs. “Pay attention, Dek-boy.”
“Huh?”
“Huh,” Ben echoed. “Salt. Pass the salt. God. You are a case today.”
“Thinking,” he said.
Ben gave him a look, a shrug in his direction. “He’s thinking. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before.”
“Ben,” Meg said.
“Dekker. Pass the damn salt.”
“Shit!” Wasn’t approved com, the sojer-lads got upset, but she was upset, so what?
“It’s all right, it’s all right,” the examiner said. “You’re doing fine, Kady.”
“Tell me fine, I screwed my dock…”
You couldn’t flap the voice. “It gets harder, Kady. That’s the object. Let’s not get overconfident, shall we?”
“Overconfident, my—“ She was shaking like a leaf.
Different voice. Deep as bone. “You shoved a screen in over your pilot’s priority. Did your pilot authorize that?”
Hell, she wasn’t in a mood for games. She thought she knew that voice. It wasn’t the examiner.
“Kady?”
“Had to know,” she muttered. Hell, she was right, she’d done the right thing.
“Not regulation, Kady.”
Screw the regs, she’d say. But she did know the voice. There weren’t two like it.
“Yessir,” she said meekly, to no-face and no-voice. Dark, that was all. Just the few yellow lights on the V-HUD and the boards, system stand-down.
“You think you can make a call like that, Kady?”
Shit. “Yessir.”
Silence then. A long silence. She waited to be told she was an ass and an incompetent. She flexed her hands, expecting God only—they sometimes started sim on you without warning.
Then the examiner’s quiet voice said—she wasn’t even sure now it was alive—
“Let’s go on that again, Kady.”
She couldn’t stand it. “Was I right?”
“Your judgment was correct, Kady.”
“Ms. Dekker, do you have proof of your allegations?”
“Talk to my lawyer.”
‘ ‘Is it true your son is in a top secret Fleet project?”
“I don’t know where he is. He doesn’t write and I don’t give a damn.”
“How do you feel about Ms. Salazar’s allegations—“
More and more of it. A Paris news service ran a clip on Paul Dekker that went back into juvenile court records and fee other services pounced on it with enigmatic references to ‘an outstanding warrant for his arrest’ and his ‘work inside a top-secret Fleet installation.’
Graff punched the button to stop the tape, stared at the blank screen while Demas hovered. FSO had sent their answer Regarding your 198-92, Negative. Meaning they’d turned up nothing they cared to say on the case—at least nothing they trusted to FleetCom—or him.