“Dek, what are you guys having for breakfast?” Call from the end of the narrow room, down by the display.
Damn, they’d posted the scores.
Lot of guys went and had a look. “Hell,” he groaned, but it wasn’t ragging this time, it was a rueful shake of heads and a:
“Dek, looks like you got the run.”
“Not yet,” he said to Almarshad.
“No, I mean you got the run. You’re posted. Mitch is back-up one, we’re two, half a point between us.”
Blood went to his feet. He sat there, with his crew, who weren’t celebrating, who just looked at him; and got up as Mitch and Almarshad came over and congratulated him, not looking happy, not taking it badly either. It was too serious for that, too damned uncertain for that.
“Not a thorough surprise,” Mitch said. “Sounds like we’re headed for girl-tape for sure.” Ragging it a little close to the edge, mat. But he took Mitch’s offered hand, and Meg let him lay a congratulatory hand on her shoulder after. “Kady. Class job, you guys. Sincerely.”
Meg looked as if she’d swallowed something strange. Sal just looked smugly satisfied, and gave Mitch a kiss on the cheek.
Ben said, “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe this. What am I doing here?”
Chapter 16
HIS mother had said often enough, You don’t care, Paul, you just don’t care about people, there’s got to be something basic missing in you— Maybe there was. Maybe he didn’t feel things other people did. Maybe machines were all he came equipped to understand, all that was ever going to make sense to him, because he couldn’t stay away from them… he honestly couldn’t live without doing this…
He couldn’t turn it loose. When he was away from the ship, he could think reasonably about it, and know that it was a cold way to be, and that if he could be something different and he could be back in the Belt with people he cared about, doing nothing but mining, he could be happy— he’d been happy there; he could have been again, in the right company…
But when he got up here in nuIl-#, in the rider loft, with the four Hellburner locks staring him in the face, and the ship out there, behind number1, then everything was different, every value and priority was revised. The ship was different, every value and priority was revised. The ship was a presence here. Was waiting to be alive; and he was, in a way he wasn’t in the whole rest of his life. He was scared down in the gravitied quarters, scared out of his reason, and be realized he’d gotten everyone who cared about him in one hell of a mess; but up here—
Up here he knew at least why he’d made the choices he bad, right or wrong, he knew why he’d kept going, and why the pods made him afraid—just that nowhere else was this. Nowhere else had the feel this did. It didn’t altogether cure being scared, but it put the fear behind him.
This was where he would have been on mat day, dammit, except for Tanzer, except for Wilhelmsen being put in the wrong place, at the wrong time… it felt as if his whole life had gone off-line since then, and he was just now picking up again where it should have been, with the people he should have had: time that had frozen on him, was running again, the mission was in his pocket, and right now the only thing he was honestly afraid of up here was being pulled from the mission again—
But nobody in command would mess with him—not now. It wasn’t Tanzer in command. He was too valuable. He was somebody, finally, that people couldn’t shove aside, when all through his life people had been trying, and they couldn’t do mat again. If he did this—if he lived through it—
If he made good on everything he’d promised.
“Dekker.”
Percy’s voice, echoing over the speaker, making his heart jump.
“Sir?”
‘ ‘Mission dump has gone to your files. We have incoming,”
Cold hit his gut, raw panic negated every reasoning. It couldn’t happen. It wouldn’t happen, it wasn’t true…