Hellburner

Which was the universe at ordinary, Meg would say, if Meg was talking, but none of them seemed to have the energy to talk right now, just trying to ride through the braking and not think, he supposed, all of them coming down off hype, and exhausted.

Second accel. He made the deep sustained breaths and shut his eyes. Black around them and black inside: reality had caught up to him, and Cory was dead. Long time back. Another life. Pace the breaths and count, the way you had to with a shove like that, to keep conscious. Hotdogging from Baudree, far as anybody could do that with a mass like this—

“What in hell’s he doing?” Ben asked plaintively. “Where

are we going?”

“Going back to base,” Meg said.

“You got read-out?”

“Nyet. But you feel the direction, rab.”

“Come off the mystic stuff. Nobody ‘feels’ the direction.”

“Hey. There’s ways and ways to feel it, cher, we did it. Where else they got to take us? —And there’s those of us that feel the sun. Those that lived close to her—“

“Hell if, Kady.”

“Nothing mystic. We got magnetics. Science boys say

so.”

“That’s shit.”

“Dunno. But the sun’s starboard by 15 and high by 5.”

“Trez garbage, Kady.”

“Hey. Trez mystique, Pollard.”

“Could get us a comlink,” Sal grumbled. “Bloody damn hurry, they could let us come aboard. I got a serious bet on with Mitch’s guys. And we’re alive to collect…”

“What’d you bet?”—Ben, alarmed.

Familiar voices in the dark. He was safe here. Porey was outside, Porey who wanted him to make decisions, when Ben and Meg were the ones who decided—exactly the way , Graff said about merchanter crews, and he couldn’t under- ; stand why Porey expected him to follow UDC rules; he didn’t want the say, just fly the ship, that was all, and he’d i done that, hadn’t he? He’d done the part he wanted, and for his part, he didn’t care where they went from here, whether Meg was right or whether they were going to turn up somewhere out in real combat, he wanted to talk to Mitch and the guys, just a real quiet chance at the crews they’d worked with, chance to store it down, debrief—forget the things he’d been through.

But that wasn’t the way it worked. God, that was still to go through, the meds were going to haul them in and go over them with a microscope. And he’d gotten spoiled, he wanted the massage, the stand-down and the beer and somebody else to make up his bunk, the kind of treatment you got on the carrier, that was what, he’d gotten spoiled… But the barracks was where he lived. He looked forward to messhall automat cheese sandwiches… french fries and a hamburger and a shake, one thing Percy’s fancy cooks couldn’t come up with, not with the right degree of grease. You had to have things like that or you didn’t know you were alive, and not in some passing dream…

Eyes were watering, tear tracks running down his face. He didn’t know why. He just listened to carrier ops, com chatter between base ops and here, and traffic control; and Meg was right, they were routed in.

Did it, he kept telling himself, the dark was proof of that, the feel of the ship was proof of that. He’d done what he wanted to do, the most outrageous thing he’d ever planned to do, and he didn’t know what was left but to be free to do it. Didn’t even have to teach how. Tape would do that. He just had to get it together for the next time they let him fly….

“We find—“ Graff said, to the gathering of Optexes, “when we bring in an integrated crew—the sum of the one

is reliably the sum of the rest. People in this profession, given the chance to pick their own partners, sort themselves, I don’t know how otherwise to express it. You don’t work with anybody under your ability, where you know your life is on the line. Yes, they’re all four that good…”

“This crew is tape-taught,” a reporter said. “What does that say about human skill?”

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