“How can you eat that?” Ben asked. “God!”
Meg said, “Shut up, Ben,” and took the ketchup burger herself.
Earth system, Meg had to be, then. Rab, rad, and, Meg had said it once, falling behind the wave of change on Earth: go out into the Belt and you stepped back a century at least—old equipment, a hodgepodge of antique fads and fashion—rab-rad gone to Shepherd flash and miner Attitude. But Meg was old genuine rab, he believed it, the rab they’d gunned down at the Company doors when he was a kid. So Meg had come home to hamburgers and ideas she was so far out of the current of, he hurt for her. And he was scared for her.
Damn right she was a pilot. The Fleet was raking up all the recruits they could beg or bribe away from the Shepherds, and they’d evidently made her an offer, given her her hours—a fool friend, an almost-lover near young enough to be her son, cracked up in hospital, needn’t have been any part of it. Couldn’t go by what Meg said. Couldn’t. She had a lot of virtues, but strict accounts wasn’t one of them. It was enough she’d come to the hospital to get him. It was enough she’d stand there and risk arrest and losing everything to get him out. Meg was like that. Might go, might stay. But if she stayed—
if she stayed—
He got most of the hamburger down. He got down half the shake and half the fries. He sat there in a room with Ben and Sal talking about computers and the UDC, and Meg wolfing down the first hamburger she must have had in years, and looking not a bit changed—a few more lines around the eyes, maybe. And when he had to put the rest of his shake aside, he shut his eyes for just a moment and sat there, and thought about Cory. He thought about Bird, and the Belt. He thought he was there for the moment, but it wasn’t a serious drift, just remembering. Safe.
Want to break his damn neck, Ben thought. Skuz ate the mess and went out cold, no wonder. Poor dead cow. Fish weren’t intelligent. Thank you.
Sal leaned on his arm and whispered a thoroughly indecent proposal, which reminded him what he hadn’t gotten in the last year, what with the course work and the computer time and all—a proposal that didn’t make a man think all that clearly about the value of his life and the necessity of getting out of this hellhole …
“Yeah,” he said thickly, directing thoughts to getting his ass out of here and snagging Sal into the TI—and down to Stockholm. Sal was damned good. In several senses. “Yeah. —Meg, hate to leave you with the skuz there, —d’ you mind sitting on him?”
“Any way he can make it,” Meg said smugly. “Us freefallers are adaptable—how’s yourself, Ben?”
He was out of practice. Polite society did that. He actually felt his face warm. “Hell, ask Sal in a while.”
Sal hooked her arm in his and said, “Details later. Serious interpersonal relations. —You got a notion where, mate?”
“Whole damn room to ourselves,” he said. And elbowed the door open.
Dek said, “You want to dispose that?” and handed Meg the remnant of the milkshake. She went to the bath to dump it and came back to find Dek on his feet rummaging a locker—his, she figured, and hoped he wasn’t thinking of getting dressed. Her own back ached with the g-shift off the shuttle—she’d gotten soft, living on the Hamilton’s c-forced decks. It was the little muscles that hurt, the ones you used pulling your body around in freefall, a lot of them in unusual places, and she seriously didn’t want to face the guys outside….
“You’re not going to walk,” she said; he ignored the question, lifted a stack of folders in the top of the locker and said, sounding upset, “The tape’s gone.”
“What tape?”
“Sim tape. I guess they took it back to library. Damn sure they’ve been through here.”
“They?”
“MPs. Crash investigators. Whatever.”
“They already had the hearing, Dek. VIPs left this morning.”