Porey left a cold, cold silence. He didn’t know what he was arguing for or against, or who was on trial. Porey just stared. “If,” Porey began, and the phone beeped. Porey grabbed up the handset, snarled, “This is a conference, damn you—“ and the face went expressionless while Dekker had time to think, Something’s happened…
Graff was paying the same kind of attention. Porey said, “Procedures. Stat. —Estimate,” and looked grim as he hung up and stood up. “Pod’s hung.”
“God.” Dekker thought Porey wanted the door—grabbed for the switch.
“Dekker!”
“I can help, sir,…”
“No!” Porey said. And there was no argument.
Meg hauled clothes on, still wet—damn sweater hung on an earring. She finessed it loose the painful way and got her head through—
Mitch, the skuz, was standing in the locker room door.
She jerked the sweater down. “Getting your thrills, Mitch?”
“Serious talk, Kady. Question. Couple of touchy questions.”
Private, the man wanted. Hell of a way to get it; and time was, Mitch didn’t get two seconds, but Mitch didn’t look like trouble, Mitch looked like business, and curiosity was killing her. “So? Give.”
“What is their damn hurry with Dek, do you get any feel?”
She bit her lip. Shook her head. “Neg. No. What are you asking?”
“Is Ben on our side?”
“Absolute. No question, and Sal and I fly with him.”
Mitch ducked his head, looked up with the straightest eye contact she’d ever had out of him. “Ben made a phone call last night. Dek got pulled this morning. You know about that?”
“Yeah. Ben could have slipped it to the lieutenant—about two jumps ahead of me, you want the truth.”
“That schedule of his. Did he set it? Is it his choice? Or is Porey doing it?”
“Much as I know it’s his schedule.” It was sensitive territory. She wasn’t sure she wanted to discuss any crew business with Mitch, who was Dek’s competition in this place. But Dek had her scared to hell, that was what she had said to Sal and that was what made her confess now. “I can believe Ben might have stopped him. I just hope it didn’t land either of them in trouble.”
“Second touchy question. You apparently aren’t too damn bad. How much of it do you think is tape?”
“I was good before I came here, mister.”
Mitch held up a hand. “No offense. Straight q & a—they’re talking about shoving it on the rest of us, I want to know from the ones that know—does that damn thing really work?”
Sounded like an honest question. “Different way to learn, same way you guys learn, what I hear, this Neural Input stuff. I don’t know what’s the difference, except we trank deeper—by what I hear. How could I tell? I don’t get the other kind.”
“Rumor is they’re running you guys up to mission level sims. They’re saying they’re using you guys for guinea pigs because you came in cold, as far as these boards. That if it works with you—we’re next and we got no choice. Now they’re hauling Pollard and Aboujib back into Testing? Makes the rest of us damn nervous, Kady.”
Made her nervous when he put it that way.
“You know anything about Pete Fowler, you ever have any—weird feelings off that stuff?”
“I’m not being him, Mitch, I’m not any damn dead guy. That’s not what’s going on….”
“He was twenty-nine, he was a good, fast thinker, he was regular for Elly Sanders—she was the longscanner. You want any more? Pete’s faults? His virtues? I can tell you. He was a nit-picking sumbitch about the checklist….”
“I’m telling you I don’t know anything about Pete Fowler. I damn sure haven’t got a fix on Sal and I always was a stickler for doing—“
“Mitch!” somebody yelled, out in the sims. “They got a pod hung!”
“Oh, shit,” Mitch said, and he was running—she started running after him, scared as hell, no idea what they could do, why they were going—but it was somebody she knew in that damned thing, and she moved.
“What’s the status?” Porey asked, leaning over a tech— Security ops had eight monitors and four of them were black, except for green letters showing CORE-21, that was the sims area, anybody who worked up there knew that section, and Dekker knew it, made a guess what those black monitors showed before Porey got his answer.