“Alcohol is not a prohibition during this watch. It will be available from time to time as schedules permit; but I suggest you not have a hangover in the morning: schedule will start with orientation to the library, tile loft, the prototype—
“About which, remember you people are the best of the best—a carrier’s survival and the accomplishment of its objectives is in large part your mission. You will live very well here, as you can see: core crews and technicians will occupy these quarters, with adequate staff to assure your undivided attention to your duty, which is solely the operation of your craft, the protection of your carrier and the achieving of strategic and tactical objectives. Additionally, privilege is extended in special facilities to your maintenance personnel, your library research technicians, and your communications and analysis personnel—you will sit at the top of a pyramid of some seven hundred staff and crew, with information gathering and processing facilities interfaced and cross-checked with the nerve center of the carrier itself. Everything you need. Anything you reasonably request. And, yes, tactical and targeting decisions will be part of your responsibility, in consultation with the captain of this ship. You will learn to make those decisions in close cooperation with carrier staff, decisions which were not, until now, your responsibility. Command believes your expertise in gravity-bound interactions and object location is an invaluable resource; and you will no longer receive cut-arid-dried mission profiles. You will construct them yourselves. This is a policy change reflecting a change in the source of policy: how long we can maintain that control of policy rests directly on your successful completion of this mission.
“In the meanwhile, enjoy yourselves, ask the staff for anything within reason, and consult your individual datacards for further briefings.” The second half of the cracker and cheese. Porey walked slowly toward the exit. And stopped. “Enjoy yourselves, gentlemen. Ladies.”
Scared hell out of a guy—Porey, as Meg would put it, doing courtesy.
“Shit,” Ben said, closing ranks with him and Meg; and Sal said, close after, “So that’s Porey up close.”
“That’s Porey,” Dekker said.
“Po-lite chelovek,” Meg said. “Nice place, and all…. You wouldn’t ever mink it, would you? Son of a bitch.”
A massacre, a slaughter of the innocent. Graff braced his finger against his lips, watched the vid in dismay, the crowd, the peacers shouting, the blond woman with the stringing hair looking distractedly left and right over the crowd like something trapped. Reporters asked, “Is your son the model they’re basing this tape on? Are you in communication with him?” Ingrid Dekker shook her head in bewilderment, saying, “I don’t know. I don’t have anything to do with him, nothing he did has anything to do with me… it’s aever had anything to do with me…”
God.
He sat there, watching the alien scene, steps of some ornate building, a cathedral, they said, in London, the placards and banners, the sheer mass of human beings…
A bas la Compagnie, they were yelling. Down with the EC.
And elsewhere on Earth’s life-rich surface, a UDC spokesman was claiming that the attitudes of the rab movement were infiltrating the Beet, that the real aim was to disarm Earth’s local forces, that the Earth Company was attempting to use the Fleet and the whole construction push in the Belt to take political control of the UDC and establish a world dictatorship…
Disaster. Utter political disaster.
“The tape is the damning thing. Someone’s given out details. Someone in a position to know what we’re doing—“
Saito said, “Don’t discount Tanzer. The UDC has those records at their disposal, a lot of damaging data. We had to accept the UDC structure in place, and after the takeover, we knew it was a bomb waiting to go off.”
“What side are they on, Com, for God’s sake? Do they think it’s a bloody game we’re playing?”
“Their power is in question. Their sight has unquestionably shortened. The question whether or not they’re in control of the EC or whether the EC is in control of Earth’s policy—it’s a very large, a very sensitive, issue in this system. The EC has enormous power, a constituency spread over the stations and the refineries and worlds outside this system. And we outsiders only know the EC. But there are governments, many governments on Earth, that consider the situation out there solely the EC’s war.”