He couldn’t remember who. Someone he’d known. But the voice had no color in his mind. No sound. And he couldn’t recover it.
They said, shadows leaning over him, “Need to keep that blood pressure down, Mr. Dekker,” and he said: “Screw all of you, I don’t need your help,” and kept his eyes shut.
Whine of mag-Ievs. You got that through the walls. There was light out there, but it didn’t diffuse, despite the distances across the huge sim chamber, where a solitary pod was working. There was a safety stand-down in effect. Lendler Corp techs were doing an inspection on this shift, remoting the pod from the number two access. You could see the light on, far across the chamber.
Easy ways to get hurt out there. Pods pulled a lot of g’s,positive and negative. Graff touched the cold plastics of the dead panel, drifting in the zero g, antagonizing an already upset stomach, and watched the pod, figuring how hard a body could hit, repeatedly, doing that gyrating course. Dekker was strong for his slight frame. Only thing that had saved him. God only knew how conscious he’d been, but enough he’d protected his head somehow. And his neck and his back and the rest of his bones. The meds who hadn’t seen the inside of the pod had said the belts must have come loose. But the belts had been locked together under Dekker, deliberately to fool the safety interlocks, by somebody who hadn’t left prints—unless it was the last man to use the pod, and that was Jamil, who hadn’t a motive that he knew. Belts locked underneath Dekker—otherwise the pod wouldn’t have moved. The MP’s report had said, Suicide is not ruled out.
Suicide, to have a MarsCorp councilor on your case?
Suicide, to call Tanzer a bastard?
Don’t let it get to you, Saito had said, when he’d called the carrier to tell them the hearing was over. Midge had hand-carried his report to the ship and a long transmission had gone out to the captain by now. Tanzer was going to rebound off the walls tomorrow.
But the report was at Sol One by now. So far as what he dared send the captain, the most urgent matter was one name, of everything related to the accident: Salazar. The rest was in Dekker’s file. Beyond that, Keu needed to know how Bonner and Tanzer had run the hearing; needed to know how his Helm Two had answered the questions, right or wrong.
Helm Two had underestimated Tanzer, that was the fact, Tanzer had thrown him a last-minute set of choices in which his refusal to go against Keu’s orders, and a lone lieutenant’s blind run through a mine-field, Tanzer had said it, might just have lost the program tonight, lost the war for the whole human race, literally, right in that hearing room this evening—if somebody wiser and better at politics couldn’t somehow take the pieces and put them together with more skill than he had mustered in front of that committee.
He was tired, God, he was tired, and he had had no business coming here. He wasn’t doing entirely rational things now, he’d sent word with Midge where he was going and put com on alert, but he hadn’t come to the Number Ones for aid and comfort and he was refusing to, knowing nothing they could tell him was of any use, since they didn’t know any more than he did what was going on. He’d made some critical judgments left and right of the course he’d hoped to hold in the hearing and in his dealings with Tanzer, and he was avoiding their input til he’d mapped out the sequence and sense of those judgment calls, mat was what he suddenly realized was pushing his buttons right now—he wanted to know the answers; and if he could shove Bonner and Tanzer into a move of some kind, even an assassination attempt, he’d know, all right; he’d have proof: more than mat, the senators might have it, before they left here at maindawn: Explain that one, cover another attempted murder, Bonner, while the committee’s still on station…
Otherwise, if Tanzer was only tracking him and more innocent than he judged, let Tanzer sweat what he was up to—looking for clues, maybe, trying to find something to prove Dekker’s case, something politically explosive. Legal troubles in Dekker’s past—it was all backgrounded, solved, just one of the connections Dekker had had and left when he left the Belt. He didn’t go off Sol Two, he took no leaves, but there had been no particular reason for Dekker’s name to rouse any anxieties in Defense—certainly no reason to fear him getting to the media. Dekker was allergic to cameras and microphones, Dekker certainly didn’t want publicity bringing his name up again, any more than Defense did; and evidently there’d been a decision to take Hellburner public if the test succeeded. So someone high in the Defense Department had said pull him.