Hellburner

She said, “Higgins is severely pissed. He’s on the phone.

But the nurse is all right. Nurse asked if you wanted a chair.”

Nurse was the one he’d hit. More than once. He shook his head, with some remorse for that—and regret for missing his chance at Higgins. Meg tucked the blanket around him, and under his bare feet, and sat down and offered him a warmer place to lean. They’d never been to bed together, had just been letter writers, at 830 million k remote from each other. They’d discovered they were attracted to each other too late to do anything about it, except that goodbye kiss. And now a hello one, a hug and a place to lean on, when he’d gotten to the absolute bottom of his strength. Meg never found him but what he was a mess. And here she was, he’d no idea how. She hadn’t come straight with him. And maybe sitting here with her like this was all another hallucination. If he was hallucinating this time he didn’t want to come back again, didn’t want to fight them, didn’t want to get even, didn’t want to prove anything to anybody. Just sit, long as he could, long as he could hold himself awake.

Meg said, “Well, well, blue uniforms, this time. That us?”

He focused stupidly on figures the other side of the glass. On one young, fair-haired.. .Graff, for God’s sake. With Fleet Security.

He bit his lip til it hurt enough. He said, “Don’t let me fall, Meg,” and stood up, letting go the blanket, as Graff came through the Perspex doors. “Lt. Graff, sir.”

Graff looked at him, up and down, Graff frowned—you could never tell what Graff was thinking. Could have been of skinning him alive, for all he could read.

Meg said, “They’ve been drugging him to the gills, sir. He never did do well with that.”

Graff said to the MPs, “Take him to the ship.”

“Barracks,” Dekker said, then was sorry he’d objected. He’d take anywhere but here. But he didn’t know the ship.

He wanted somewhere he knew. He wanted people he knew, namely Meg, and Sal, and Ben.

“Just long enough for a check-up,” Graff said. “I want you on record, Dekker. From the outside in. You behave yourself, hear? No nonsense.”

“Yessir,” he said. He let Security take hold of him, he sat down and they said they were going to borrow a chair; he heard Graff tell Meg Welcome in; and: “Hereafter, don’t start a war. Wait for the UN to declare it.”

“Yessir,” Meg said. Which wasn’t a word he ever recalled from Meg Kady. But Meg had enlisted. The fool. The absolute fool, if that was the price of Meg’s ticket here. He felt tears in his eyes, thinking about that.

But damned if he could figure out how she’d managed it, all in all.

Time had gotten away from him again. It kept doing that. So maybe he was, the way Ben said, crazy.

Chapter 6

WELCOME back,” they said, “welcome back, Dek.” Jamil and Trace, Pauli and Almarshad and Hap Vasquez—they intercepted him at the door when he was only calculating how much strength he had to get to his own quarters and fall into bed. Jamil warned the rest about grabbing hold of him, thank God, most of all thank God for Ben and Meg and Sal Aboujib showing up out of the depth of the room to rescue him from too much input too fast… he was tracking on too much: he knew and didn’t know in any detail what he’d said to the guys or what they’d said to him, and for one dislocated moment he really thought Pete or Elly or Falcone was going to turn up in the barracks; they always had… But they weren’t going to do that ever again, dammit, end report, o-mega; he was here on this wave of time, and by a break of bad luck they weren’t, and he was going to fall on his face if the guys didn’t let him get to his quarters. He’d spent hours out in a null g sickbay, been prodded and probed and sampled and vid-taped from angles and in a condition he didn’t want on the evening news, and his imagination until now had only extended to lying down in quiet, not running an emotional gauntlet of friends of dead friends— who could see how absolutely he’d been screwed over, dammit, when he should at least have gotten some of theirs back. He didn’t know what had happened to him in hospital, not all of it; he didn’t know what he’d admitted to, most of all he couldn’t remember what had put him there, and by that, he’d evidently let the lieutenant down, too, in some major way…

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