“I’m UDC essential personnel!”
“Show me an assignment.”
Shit!
“So you’re going.”
“What about my interview?”
“That’s not my information flow. I’ll log it as a query.”
“Look, this is important. If I miss this slot I could wait six months!”
Jackson shrugged. “We all have our hardships, lieutenant.”
“Look, this is a screw-up. It’s an absolute screw-up. God, Dekker and I don’t even like each other.”
Cold as a rock. “I don’t have that information. Transport will pick up your baggage at your quarters. Just leave it. Report to the shuttleport by 1145.”
“It’s near 1030 right now. It’s twenty minutes to quarters—“
“I’d be on that shuttle, Lt. Pollard. When you get to B • dock, report directly to the FleetOps office on the dock, give them this pass and they’ll see you get straight to the hospital. Don’t mistake that instruction.”
“Listen, —sir, you know what happened—Dekker wrote me in as a joke. He never thought they’d be using that information. It’s a damn joke!”
“If it is, I’m sure they’ll straighten it out at the other end. I’d be moving, lieutenant.” Jackson stood up and handed him the two envelopes as he rose. “Good luck.”
“Yes sir,” Ben said, took his papers and his orders, saluted the son of a bitch and left.
Collected his reader from the front desk, and made a fast, desperate consultation of the trans schedule while he was walking to the doors.
Twenty minutes to his apartment, thirty to the shuttle dock, ten to pack. If he risked a phone call to Weiter to request a rescue, it was a 90% certainty that Weiter couldn’t do a damned thing against FSO before 1145 or later and he’d be screwed with Weiter for putting him in a Position. You didn’t crack a security screen. Not if you hoped to keep your clearance in UDC computer tech.
They’d get him back in maybe six days?
Hell. Six days too late if he was on humanitarian leave on ‘ B dock when the UDC filled the Stockholm post. He’d get the scraps, the cold left-overs after Meeker got posted; and Hamid; and Pannelli— The next best choice he had was to appeal to Weiter when he got back and hang on as staff til something else came through, oh, six months, seven, eight months on, who knew?
Dekker had screwed up, the Fleet was evidently about to lose its investment in him—and, not in his most copacetic state, Dekker had asked for him?
Ben thought, with every thump of the trans on its homebound course: I’ll kill him when I get my hands on him, I’ll fuckin’ kill him.
CHAPTER 2
DEN hated institutions, hated hospital smells and institution colors and most of all he didn’t look forward to this, in his first hour on B dock. He felt like hell, he’d slept in a damn cubbyhole of a berth hardly larger than a miner-ship spinner, his feet had swelled, he’d had sinus all the way: he’d spent too long in the null-g hi his life and his body had a spiteful overreaction to the condition. They didn’t issue pills and stimsuits for a three-day shuttle trip, no, that prescription’s not on your records, lieutenant, sorry… If you’d just checked with medical—
It was damned well going to be on the record when he left Sol Two. Talk to the doctors in this hospital, get some damn good out of this end of the trip… because he meant to be on that shuttle on its turnaround tonight. Six hours was plenty of time to see Dekker, and get out of here.
after three days of floating in a three-berth passenger module on a cargo shuttle, ahead of a load of sanitation chemicals and spare parts. He’d had no one to talk to but a couple of machinists who were into some vegetarian religion and hooked on some damn VR game they wanted to explain to him; and he had had ample time to drift weightless in the dark and think—too much time to imagine this meeting, and what kind of damage a pilot could take in an accident. Missing limbs. Blood. He hated blood. He really got sick at his stomach if there was blood…