Meanwhile some other crew would make that first run; and the second; and the third—he’d take the controls after someone else had flown the ship and it was documented and tame enough for the second line to try.
And maybe that was sanity. Forget his notions: maybe it wasn’t what he’d trained for, wasn’t what he’d wanted, but it was a way back into the cockpit, forget the naive confidence he’d had in his invincibility. He wasn’t a kid any more. God hope he wasn’t a fool any more, who had to have that number one status or kill himself and everyone with him.
He gave up the prop of his arm, fell back again and gathered the bedspread and pillow under his head. He looked in Meg’s eyes and didn’t see a woman who was young and mind-fried with love—just a friend, a sane, brave friend, who was older than he was, and whose reasons he didn’t honestly know.
“Meg, I’m serious, don’t want to offend you. Good to see you. Good you came. But if you’ve got any loophole out of enlisting, any way in hell back to the berth you had, you should go back….”
“Five hundred-odd million ft, I come for this man. What about those letters you wrote? ‘Getting along fine, a real chance at something, the first thing in my life I know I want to do—‘ “
“That was bullshit. It’s like anywhere else. We got a fool in charge.”
“Yeah, well, we dealt with fools before. Got no shortage of ‘em in the Belt. Some have even got seniority.”
“They got plenty of it here. —Too damn many funerals, Meg. I’m sick to death of funerals—“
“Death is, jeune rab. Better to burn than rot.”
Plasma spreading against the dark. Whiteout on the cameras. He said, urgently, “Meg, go back where you’ve got a life, for God’s sake. You’ve got a berth—“
“—without shit-worth of seniority.”
“Well, you won’t get any here. They won’t count your hours, just give you a flat 200. Spend your whole life out in the Belt and that’s all it’s worth. They’ll screw you any way they can.”
“Mmmnn. Yeah. Sal’s seriously pissed about that—but she’s computers anyway. Straight quantifiable skills stuff. / was an EC shuttle pilot, remember? Earth to orbit. LEO to Sol One. You name it, I ran it, four years riding the gravity slopes. And it’s all in the EC’s own infallible records. Here, I got seniority.”
“Shit,” he said, cold inside, he didn’t know why, except Meg was hell to stop when she had an idea, and Tanzer was a damned fool. It’d be like the UDC, to look at just that record of Meg’s hours and do something seriously stupid. Like put a shuttle jock on the combat line. “Meg, you don’t know. We got innate stupidity here, serious innate stupidity. The equipment’s a real stress generator, you understand me? They made the sims realtime to start, but the UDC guys won’t spend four, five hours in the sims, hell, no, we’re too short on sim-time for that, and we got guys too experienced to need that, so what do we do? We pitch the sims down to be do-able. Comfortable. Spread the time around. You read that?” His head ached. His voice was going. The capacity to care was. “They’re killing us. Take guys with reflexes to do the job, and then they fuck with the sims till you got no confidence in them. That’s a killer, Meg, that’s a damn killer, ship’s so sensitive you can screw the thing if you twitch—“
“You fly it?”
A memory chased through his nerves, oxygen high and an adrenaline rush, hyper-focused—
“Yeah,” he said, voice gone shaky with memory. “Yeah. Mostly the sims. But twice in the ship.” And he knew why he wasn’t going to take a Medical. Better to burn, Meg had said. And he did that. He did burn.
Door opened. “Mustard or ketchup?” Sal’s voice. “Got one each way….”
“Mustard,” he said, grasping after mundane sanity. The smell ought to make him sicker than hell, the hospital food hadn’t smelled of grease and he’d all but heaved eating it. But maybe it was the company: maybe it was the smell that conjured the cafeteria and the sounds and shoptalk over coffee: he suddenly wanted the burger. He took a real chance with his stomach and his head and hitched his shoulders around against the wall so he could sit up to eat, and handle the milkshake. A sugar hit, carbohydrates and salt, a guaranteed messhall greaseburger with dill pickles, chili sauce, tomatoes and mustard—