Fan of junk in the carrier path. Dek repositioned and gave Sal the window on a roll to the main objective, and Meg input him the latest calc in long vision, new definition to the hostile fire-paths he was ready to see, more precise positions she was inputting to Sal and to him.
Feeling too good, too damn good, you didn’t cut a rip like that, couldn’t sustain it…
Couldn’t get overconfident, the damn sim kept throwing them targets and you couldn’t believe you were getting them, effin’ sim had to be playing with them…
Couldn’t go on this way—she was the only one in the crew who had time to worry, worry was the job description, taking the long view, mission objective, degree of criticality, sight and target, sight and target, priority was seen to, ride home couldn’t be this—
“Shit!”
Whole list of hits. It had felt too good all the way through, and Dekker shook his head, looking at the outcome, all of them gathered around the table, getting the same news. Objective achieved, path cleared, flock of surprises locked and taken out…
“Too soft,” Ben muttered. “Too soft, this thing. I don’t like it. It’s not supposed to fall down like this…”
Dekker rocked his chair on its hinge, propped a knee against the table and surveyed his crew, the chart-table with its windowed displays—not the stuff they’d worked with in the station, not the hard plastic chairs and the scrub-boards and the antique display system: anything they wanted, Porey said, and for himself he still had crises of disbelief.
And moments of slipping reality—like this one, that showed him faces he knew with reactions that just weren’t wrong… Pete and Elly and Falcone riding in the cockpit with them an hour ago, if he wanted to be spooked about it; but that wasn’t really what had happened: the carrier had that tape lab down the corridor, the way the carrier had a lot else it hadn’t let out, and his crew spent hours there, but they didn’t drug deep anymore, they didn’t need to, that was the story from the tape-techs. Done was done and their sessions were simply reaffirming the synched reactions, making sure—Meg said—they didn’t pick up any bad habits in live practice….
Live practice. Hell of a way to word it, considering.
They ran the sims in the prototype itself up to four hours a day, its V-HUD and instruments linked realtime to the carrier boards and the sims library, thanks to what Ben called the effin’ difference between the UDC’s EIDAT and the Fleet Staatentek. Ben seemed personally vindicated in mat—what it all meant, he wasn’t sure, but it ran.
And they did, not the first time, damned sure, the screw-up had been what Meg called egregious and Sal called words he’d never heard. Until, this sim-run …
This run, he looked at the result and the fact Ben had psyched that relocated target right and laid the probability fan right over the son of a bitch, dead center—that was a fluke, but Ben swore he’d had a good hunch—which was what Elly had used to say. Same words. That was a spook-out, too; but it was another fluke. The cockpit wasn’t haunted and his crew didn’t see spooks in the mirror. He slept with Meg with no illusions it was Pete Fowler, hell if, Meg would say. You didn’t confuse one with the other…
And that still wasn’t what worried him. It was what Ben said, it wasn’t supposed to fall down this easy. They were out here on no other reason than keeping him away from the media, he told himself that once a day and he managed to relax and worry about Mitch and Almarshad, who were the ones in jeopardy—stilt catching glitches; and the crew who was dogging it and trying to come up from scratch and a couple of total disasters pulled a hundred percenter?
He’d thought he knew the answers, he’d eased off, kicked back, taken it for granted he was just going to steer while everything was going to go to hell and they started handing him stuff that fit together.
Adrenaline had come up, hold-it-steady had become tracking-on, this last run; he was still hyped and on his edge and he hadn’t been this alive down to the nerve-ends since—