Hellburner

And somebody said, “Better sedate him.”

“No,” he yelled. “No.” And promised them, “You don’t need to.”

“Are you going to be all right?” they asked him.

“Yeah,” he said, and lay there getting his breath. But there was a whine of hydraulics and a clank, and they shoved him into a tube, telling him: “You have to stay absolutely still…”

Like a spinner tube, it was. Like back in the belt, in the ship. He lay still the way they told him, but it got harder and harder to breathe.

Flash of light. Like the sun. He heard a beeping sound that reminded him—that reminded him—

“Elly—Elly, Wilhelmsen, don’t reorient, screw it, screw it, you’re past—“

“He’s panicking,” someone said.

He screamed, at the top of his lungs, “Wilhelmsen, you damned fool—“

Fifteen-minute recess. Break for restrooms and the corridor and the hospitality table.

Mitch moved close enough to say, “They’re dithering, sir.”

Graff said, “Ease down. Not here.”

“They’re saying it can’t be flown. That’s a damn lie.”

“Ease down, Mitch. Nothing we can do out here.” He had Saito at his elbow. He could see Tanzer down the hall with Bonner, in hot and heavy discussion.

Demas came back from the phone in the office. Said: “A word in private.”

Graff said, “Mitch. Be good,” and took Saito with him, farther up the hall. “You get him?”

“Couldn’t get hold of Pollard. Talked to Higgins. The neurosurgeon wanted to run another brain scan. Higgins and Evans agreed. Dekker went off the edge, he’s under sedation. Higgins says he remembers the accident. Nothing further. He may never be able to remember how he got in that pod.”

“Damn.”

“You’ve got to tell it plain, Helm.”

“Break it wide open? We don’t know what the captain wants. We don’t know and if it were safe to use FleetCom he would.”

Saito said, “It can’t be worse. At this point I’d advise going past protocol. Worst we can do is alienate Bonner and a few handpicked legislators who came out here with him. This is a set-up. But it has records. The contractors are here defending their systems. And there may be a few line-straddlers in the senatorial party.”

That was a point. Bonner was already alienated. This was likely a breakaway group of legislators Bonner favored putting in here to hear what Tanzer put together—but the fact that they let him talk at all was either a try at getting something incriminating out of him; or maybe, maybe there were members of the group that wanted more than one view. “God only knows what we’re dealing with. No Pollard, no Dekker. It’s a small hand we’re playing. All right. I’ll tell Mitch. Wraps are off.”

Past lunch and beyond, and Ben paced the waiting room. He’d read all the damned articles available to the reader, he’d become grudgingly informed in the latest in microbiologic engineering, the pros and cons of seasonally adjusted light/ dark cycles and temperature in station environments, the ethics of psychological intervention, and the consequences of weather adjustment in the hurricane season to the North American continent, not to mention five posture checks for low-g workers. He’d occupied himself making changes in a program he had stored on his personal card, he’d been four times at least to Dekker’s room to see if he was out from under sedation—he’d lost count. You could hear the clangor and rattle of lunch trays being collected—they had a damned lot of hurt and sick: people in here, people that had let a welder slip or gotten in the way of a robot loader arm, one guy who’d taken a godawful number of volts closing a hydraulic switch—he heard the gossip in the corridors coming and going, he was saturated with hospital gossip on who was missing what and how the guy with peritonitis was doing today and what was the condition of the limb reattachment in 109?

While the orderlies were having lunch.

Another trip out to Dekker’s room. Can’t wake him, Higgins said. We’ve gotten the blood pressure down now. But he’s tired. He’s just tired—

“I’ve got a shuttle pulling out tonight—tell the lieutenant I’ve done everything I can do. I want to see him. I’ve got to get out of here.”

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