Struck him funny, somehow. Didn’t recall as she’d ever seen him laugh like that, and there wasn’t much healthy about it; but he sort of snuggled down then, hugging her close, said, “Anything you want, Meg, whatever you like,” and started drifting out, little at a time.
Murmured, finally, “Cory, —“ But she didn’t take offense. Man’d busted his ass trying to save Cory Salazar, done everything for his partner a man could do and then some, and what would you want in a man—that he’d forget, now, and switch Cory off like a light?
Not any partner she’d ever give a damn for.
So she ruffled his hair, said, “Hush, it’s Meg,” and he said, with his eyes shut, “Meg, for God’s sake get out, go back, don’t get mixed up in this, dammit, you had a berth—“
“Yeah. They were going to make me senior captain. You got my knee pinned, you want to move over, Dek?”
Bed with Aboujib was a long, long experience. You didn’t get away easy—technique, Sal called it; and he didn’t know—he was here, where the competition back at TI couldn’t eavesdrop; and Sal wasn’t a critic, Sal just took what was—Sal was all over you and kink as hell, maybe. You couldn’t be ice with Sal, maybe that was why he was thinking suddenly, amid his attentions to Sal, that he truly didn’t want Stockholm to see this side of Ben Pollard— that wasn’t real sincerely in his right mind, feeling as he did for the moment that he’d actually missed R2’s sleaze and neon, that he’d missed Mike Arezzo’s synth-egg breakfasts and the noise of helldeck—
Stockholm was a VR image, Stockholm was special effects, there wasn’t an Earth and you couldn’t get to it, the Company only made it up to explain the universe—got its Earth-luxuries out of fancy tanks, it was all synth for all he knew, what the hell difference whether it was a cow or a tank culture, he wasn’t going to eat what had blood running through it—hell, Earth was full of eetees no less than Pell, and what was Ben Pollard doing trying to fit in with people who ate hamburgers and ran a department that bought a damned EIDAT?
Ben Pollard was trying to stay alive and stay out of the war, that was what he’d been doing. Ben Pollard was back on helldeck, the bubble had burst, and what turned up but Sal Aboujib, the Fleet’s own damnable doing, screw the bastard who was responsible for this—
Hell, when it came down to it, Dekker was responsible for it, it didn’t matter the UDC and the Fleet had gotten their shot in, Dekker could reach out from the hereafter and screw his life up with one little touch, the way he’d screwed Cory Salazar’s—way he’d screwed the program up—
Off chance that part wasn’t his fault, but you didn’t protect yourself by figuring a mess of this magnitude that Dekker just happened to be in the middle of—didn’t have Dekker’s fingerprints all over it. Wasn’t mat the guy necessarily did anything, he didn’t have to do it, he just was. Like gravity and infall, things went wrong in his vicinity… .
Sal cut off his air, and lights went off a while. When he came down he was halfway tranquil, catching his bream, and said—it still bothered him: “You know, you could’ve written once.”
Sal didn’t answer that one right off. She came over on top of him and made a cage out of her elbows beside his head. Her braids hit him in the face. Her lips brushed his nose.
“That’s no answer.”
“Didn’t figure you wanted one,” Sal said.
Fair answer, one he hadn’t thought of. Fact was, when he was trying to settle in with inner-system pets and sorting the threats from the bottom-enders he hadn’t had but a few twinges of regret for helldeck—tried to clean the Belt out of his language, tried not to dream about it, just wanted to see those clean green numbers in his head, different life, Aboujib. Different aims… .
So he didn’t answer that. He just said, “Here’s seriously screwed. Dekker’s involved. Thought you had better sense. Thought Meg had. I can understand her, maybe, got to be hell getting seniority out there, but you’re Shepherd, you got the connections, you didn’t have to dump and come—“