Hellburner

“Come on,” Meg said, and he walked across a tilting, unstable floor, around a comer, down a short hall to a familiar door and a room that had been—images kept flashing on him out of a situation he didn’t remember—cold and empty the last time he’d left it, clothes in the lockers nobody was going to use any more….

Now it was alive with voices and faces out of a period of his life that never should have recrossed his track, except it was like a gravity well, things didn’t fly straight, they kept coming around at you again and he didn’t even know the center of mass. That should be a calculable thing. He should be able to solve that problem, with the data he had….

“Get him in bed,” Meg was saying, “he’s severely spaced,” and Ben said, “Damned fool had to walk it, where’s his head anyway?”

Ben never minced words. He could cope with Ben far better than he could Sal Aboujib, who, after Ben had got him onto his bunk, pinned him with hands on either side of him, looked him in the face so close he was cross-eyed and said, “Oh, he’s still pretty. Dek, sincerely good to see you. So good you’re in one piece—“

“Let him alone. God!” Meg shoved Sal aside. “Man’s severely had enough for a while. Go get his supper. Do you mind?”

Numb at this point. Completely numb. You hyped, and if things wouldn’t calculate, what could you do but handle the things you could? He said, “Not reg.”

Sal said, “Nyet. Lieutenant cleared it. Sandwich all right, Dek? Chips?”

‘’Yeah, I guess.” Sandwich meant fish of some kind and that nauseated him. Then he thought of what he did want. What he’d wanted in his lucid moments in the hospital. “Hamburger and fries. —“ And simultaneously remembered what happened to Belters who ventured the quick food in the cafeteria. “You watch the hamburgers, Sal. It’s real stuff—“

“Dead animals,” Ben said, and shuddered.

“Fish are animals,” Meg declared.

“No, they’re not.”

The argument went completely surreal. The noise did. He was lying here and people promising to get him a hamburger were arguing Belter sensibilities, enzymes and whether fish were intelligent. “Milkshake,” he said. But he was tired and he wanted to get under the sheets he was lying on, which took far too much effort. He just shut his eyes a moment and something warm settled over him. Blanket. And a weight pressed the mattress beside him and an arm arched over him.

He focused blearily on Meg. “Why in hell did you come here? You got no business here—“

“We’ll talk about it later.”

“We’ll talk about it while there’s still a chance, before you get into the security stuff—“ The meds would say his blood pressure was getting up again. His eyes were blurry. He made the effort to lean on one arm, the one that hadn’t been recently broken, and gathered all the detail of a face he’d never thought he’d see again. He’d wanted her once. He didn’t know if he still did—didn’t want to want her. Didn’t know if he could take another dead friend. “Damn thing’s a meatgrinder, Meg, the colonel’s an ass—“

“Yeah, so Ben said. —Are you getting out? Seems to me you got a serious excuse here. Thinking about a Medical?”

His mind went blank on that. He couldn’t see himself doing anything else. He couldn’t see himself shoving freight around, going back to pusher work. But the future he’d had before the accident was black and void in front of him, just—not do-able now. For the last year he’d chased after being the first pilot to run that course. Making it. He’d believed that, even through the funerals of those who hadn’t. And that wouldn’t happen, couldn’t happen, now, everybody was dead but him—

“You want to get out of the service?” Meg asked him.

He kept trying to look at that dark ahead. And finally he shook his head. No, he didn’t want out. He didn’t know what he was going to do, but he didn’t want out of the Fleet—didn’t know who might go with him next run, didn’t know what they could pull together into a crew that wouldn’t take another one apart—didn’t want that. Maybe that was why he couldn’t see where he was going. Crew was gone, they might well drop him back in training, let him shape up with Meg and Ben and Sal from the beginning up—granted Tanzer didn’t kill the program.

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