“Won’t cure everything, cher.”
“Makes a start, doesn’t it?”
“He’s a partner,” Sal said.
“Yeah. Moonbeam that he is.”
“Soldier-boys aren’t going to listen to him or us.”
“Dek-boy’s on total overload. I’ve seen this guy not at his best and this is it. He’s not stupid. Lot of tracks in that brain—mat’s his problem. All he has to do is follow one and he’s in deep space so far you need a line to bring him back. But none of them pay off. His crew’s dead, he’s still hurting, not a damn word out of his mama, Porey’s on his back, we’re in deep shit, and he’s not thinking, he’s just pushing at the only track he’s got. The only one that’ll move. Don’t give this boy time as a dimension. He’s just fine—as long as it’s now.”
“Yeah. Yeah. I copy that. What do they say, hyperfocus and macrofocus?”
“And dammit, you don’t let this boy make executive decisions. Paper rank’s got nothing to do with this. It’s who can. Effin’ same as the merchanters.”
“Meg?”
He hesitated over that. Didn’t have to think, though. “Meg’s Meg. Meg’s the ops macrofocus. The Aptitudes pegged her exactly right. Meg always knows where she is. Knows two jumps ahead. Dek’s the here and now, not sure what’s coming. No. I’m the exec.”
Silence a moment. Maybe he’d made Sal mad. But it was,; the truth.
“So how do we tell them!” Sal asked.
“Sal, —you want to switch seats tomorrow morning?”
She sat back and looked him in the face, shocked. “God,; you’re serious. They’d throw us in the brig.”
“Is that new? No, listen, we can do it: same boards, different buttons. You got eight different pieces of ordnance, mat’s the biggest piece of information to track on. I can diagram it for you. Inputs, you got two, one from Meg if you got time to sight-see, one from longscan, which you know what that looks like…”
“Ben. What are you up to?”
“Surviving this damn thing.” A long, shaky breath. Going against military regs wasn’t at all like scamming the Company. But it did start coming together, now that he was thinking about the pieces. “Because I want the damn com p. Because, screw ‘em, it’s what 1 do. Because I think mat ET sumbitch in there effin’ knows we’re in the wrong spots and it doesn’t feel right to him and it’s killing him. I don’t know this crew that died, but I can bet you, one of them was the number one in this unit, no matter who they had listed. That guy died and they bring us in and put Dekker in charge? No way.”
“What’s that make me, mister know-all? Why in hell did they Aptitude me longscan and you the guns?”
He’d spent a lot of time thinking on that. He reached up and laced his fingers with Sal’s. “Because you want ‘em too much, because you enjoy blowing things up. —Because mat’s not what the tests want on that board.”
She let go. “Where’d you get that shit?”
“Hey. Hetldeck psych. Cred a kilo. And I know what the profiles are. I’m from TI. TI writes these tests. They got this Command Profiles manual, lays out exactly what qualifications they want in fire-positions and everything else. Enjoying it’d scare them shitless. We’re not inner system. You got to lie to the tests, Sal, you got to psych what they want us to be and you got to be that on those tests—only way you get along.”
“Meg—Meg is doing all right with this stuff. Tape doesn’t bother her.”
“Meg’s an inner systemer, isn’t she? She knows how to tell them exactly what they want to hear. Meg’s doing what she wants. We’re not.’9
“So what do we do? Is Aptitudes going to listen, when they made the rules?”
“Lieutenant might.” If Graff could do anything. If it wasn’t too late. He was scared even thinking about what occurred to him. But running into a rock was scarier than that. And that was likely. A lot of scary things were likely. Like a crack-up tomorrow morning. Stiff neck for a week after Dekker’s twitch at the controls.