“Mr. Dekker.”
“They’re with Jamil!”
“Mr. Dekker, shut up and believe there are reasons more important than your personal opinion. We have a program with problems, a ship with problems, and what happened to you and what happened up there isn’t the only thing at issue. They’re Lendler Corp technicians; and they didn’t take a spontaneous dislike to you, do you read that, Mr. Dekker? Lendler Corp has a multitude of Reel contracts, which has UDC contracts, which leaves us with serious questions, Mr. Dekker, does it penetrate your consciousness that there may be issues that have a much wider scope than your need for vengeance or my personal preferences? If things were otherwise, I’d turn you loose. As is, you keep your mouth shut, you keep it shut on this and let Security handle it. We’ll get them. It may take time, but we’ll get them. We want to know whether there’s a network, we want to know if there’s any damage we don’t know about, we want to know if there is a connection to you personally or if you just have incredible luck, do you understand that, Mr. Dekker?”
“Yessir,” he said, past a choking anger. “Yessir, I understand that.”
“Then you see you keep your mouth totally shut about what you know. You don’t even tell your crew; and believe me I mean that. —Mr. Graff?”
“Sir.”
“Escort Mr. Dekker to my office. I’m not through with him.”
“Walk slowly,” Graff said, on the way out of ops. Porey was back mere on com calling in senior Security, he was well sure: Fleet Police already had the pod 3 access as secured as it could be with medics at work; they had the answer they’d been looking for and the mess only got wider, with tentacles into God knew what, Lendler, any other corporation. You didn’t take a highly educated technical worker and suddenly turn him into a saboteur and hand-to-hand murderer, not overnight, you didn’t; which meant Kent was other than a peaceful citizen, Kent was skilled and malicious, and somebody in Lendler Corp had gotten him credentials and arranged for him either to get here or to stay here, at the time a lot of Lendler Corp had transferred out—Porey was right on this one. They had, as Villy was fond of saying, pulled a string and got a snake. Potential faults in the equipment, faults in the programming, faults in the assignments, and Porey still hadn’t closed on the monumental coincidence of his pulling Dekker from the test today in the first place, why he’d had sudden misgivings on this day of all days…
The message that had turned up in his personal file, with no identifying header or record, damned sure hadn’t been a spontaneous generation of the EIDAT system, and his stomach was increasingly upset, with guilt over the concealment of that security breach, and the conviction exactly who had inserted that message—along with a cluster of Testing Labs files nobody outside highest security clearances should have been able to access at all.
Bias in the tests, Earth-cultural bias in the Aptitudes, consequently in the choices and reactions trained into the UDC and the Shepherd enlistees—a bias that didn’t want aggression on the fire-button or command decisions out of the pilots: he’d only to run an eye down the questions being asked and the weight given certain answers to see what was happening; and before the accident phone calls had already been flying back and forth between Sol One and B Dock: Porey had already invoked military emergency on Intellitron in as fine a shade of a contract clause as a merchanter could manage—demanding access to programs Intellitron had held secret thus far: Pending mission. Medical question. Emergency. Credit Edmund for the nerve of a dockside lawyer… and meanwhile, aside from the possibility of active sabotage, they had to wonder how many other examples of mis-assigned crews they were going to find, they had a clear notion why the UDC crews had had problems, and knew, thanks to Pollard, why the whole program might have a serious problem—which he couldn’t, for Pollard’s sake, confess.
Friendliest Edmund Porey had ever been to him, after he’d broken the news and Porey had absorbed it. And, dammit, he didn’t want Percy’s kind of friendship—he didn’t want Porey deciding he could help Porey look good, and putting in a request for him on staff, God help him, even if it meant a promotion. Not at that price. And it looked that way now, it looked increasingly that way, with no word from his own captain, no evidence Keu was still in charge over at FSO.