Since he’d screwed the sim. You knew all along something was wrong with our set-up, Ben kept insisting. And by comparison, now it wasn’t wrong, and he couldn’t sit still and couldn’t help remembering how it felt to be a hundred percent On, and right…
With a crew he cared about, dammit, more than he’d ever cared about human beings in his life, and too damn many deaths and too many lost partners, with a chance to make runs they’d plotted, the way the UDC hadn’t let them do it, and that perfect run lying on the table saying… Can’t do it twice. Complete fluke. Can’t pull it off again… System can’t be that perfect. Something’s wrong.
His gut was in knots and his suspicion began to be, in two blinks of an eye and the work of an overhyped brain, that it could be working because his team had come in with miner-experience, something the lofty Shepherd types with their fancy tech hadn’t had, or—
Or the tape off his dead partners worked, and Porey hadn’t given up when they’d had to downgrade the crew to basics—it wasn’t basics anymore. They’d either pushed the sim to the limit—or it had lied to them. And he didn’t put that past Porey, he didn’t put anything political past Porey, if he wanted to prove something to some committee in charge of finance …
They were on the damned list, that was what, they always had been, that son of a bitch had jerked him sideways and just kept going with his crew. What was it, a confidence-building exercise? Another damned psych-out for more damn political reasons? He felt sick at his stomach.
“You all right, Dek?”
He looked at Meg, realized everybody was looking at him.
“Dek,” Ben said, “you aren’t spooking on us, are you?”
He shook his head solemnly. “It’s August eighth, Ben.”
“Huh?” Sal said. Meg frowned. But Ben said;
“It better be, Moonbeam. It had effin1 better be.”
“Yes, sir,” Graff said, at the table, hands folded, looking straight at two very anxious senators and a busy background of senatorial aides. There was a committee, inevitably if there was a glitch, there was a committee, thank God currently meeting at Sol One, in the comfort of class 1 accommodations: it wanted answers and this was the forerunner, the shockwave.
“Why is a junior lieutenant left in command of this base? What in hell does your base commander think he’s doing taking that carrier out? We give you the authority you ask for, and immediately the program goes to hell in a handbasket, while the officer in charge removes a carrier and declares he’s going to test, without notifying the UDC or the Joint Committee, with a highly controversial figure aboard, conveniently unavailable to an ongoing investigation, while a distorted version of the whole damned training program leaks to the media? What kind of circus are you running here?”
His stomach was in knots. He missed certain of the references. Demas and Saito had advised him certain things to say, certain points to make, the direction he should go with these men. But Demas and Saito didn’t know one truth he knew. Neither did Porey and neither did the captain.
“Sir,” he began on that track, “with all respect, I deny that the breach was in our Security.”
“Are you suggesting the UDC leaked it? What about Dekker’s phone call to Sol One? What about other phone calls from other Fleet personnel?”
He hoped to hell there wasn’t a recorder going. “Let me explain, sir. Fleet personnel are contained in a security cocoon within the former administrative apparatus. Our personnel are issued cards which do not work with civilian accesses, which can’t access BaseCom or the internal phone system without going through FleetCom, which is physically aboard the carriers, if there were anyone outside this facility for them to call, nearer the Belt. The one exception was Dekker, who—“ They began to interrupt and he kept going. “—who made his only call to his mother in my office, on my authorization, and I recorded the call in its entirety in case any question arose about that contact. The UDC system is run through BaseCom, which is linked by other means to station central. Those are the principal routes information can take. There is the shuttle, and there is contact between human beings who can walk from one place to another If information flowed from this facility, it took one of those routes.”