Sal slid down, slid over, rolled onto one elbow, all shadow, braid-clips a-wink in the dim light. Eyes eclipsed and looked at him again.
“Weren’t treating her right, Ben. She took it. But, tell the truth, she wasn’t seriously happy on the Hamilton.”
“Personalities?”
Sal traced something with a long fingernail on the sheet between them. Second eclipse. And glanced up. “Could say. Guys put the push on her. Guys said—“ Shift of the eyes toward the door and a lowered voice. “Said it was damned good she’d got shot, it put Dek at the controls….”
“Shit.”
Sal shrugged. “Probably true. She says it is. But that’s the Attitude, you understand? She took the jokers. She took the shit. But they said she’d got an affinity for gravity wells, didn’t want her flying in Jupiter’s pull—big joke, right?”
Severely big joke. The idea of infalling a gravity well made him nervous as hell. Going down to Stockholm, if he got mere, as happened, he intended to drink a lot of cocktails before the dive—because he was Shepherd—a Shepherd orphan, as happened, thank God he’d been on R2 when the ship went. But sometimes, on his worst nights, he dreamed of metal groaning, bolts fracturing, the sounds a ship would make when compression began— pop, and bang and metal shrieking—
Yeah, Shepherds made jokes. Shepherds defended the perks and prerogatives they got from the Company for flying where others couldn’t. And Meg was insystemer, inner systemer, even blue-sky; and there on Sal’s ticket….
So Dekker got the credit with the Shepherds, for one hell of a flight; and Meg, who’d nearly got her arm blown off for the cause—got the shit: Dekker hadn’t asked for a post with the Shepherds, that was the Attitudinal difference….
“She wanted to come,” Sal said. And gave a long breath. “Couldn’t let her go alone.”
“To find Dekker? She didn’t effin’ know him. She didn’t—“
Pilot, he thought then. Meg was a pilot same as Dekker, didn’t care about anything but to fly. And the Shepherds didn’t want her at controls?
Double shit. But things the other side of the wall still didn’t make sense in that light.
“So she’s in bed with the guy?”
A movement of sheet, shrug of Sal’s shoulders. Silence a moment. Then: “Hormones.”
“What kind? That’s the question.”
“Like he’s the best, you know what I mean? Beating him’d—I dunno, it’d prove a lot of things.”
“God.” He fell onto his back to think about that a tick.
“I mean/’ Sal said, “if even the Fleet had offered her back then what they’d offered Dekker—if they’d just offered, she’d have been gone. But she was lying in pieces and patches, as was—couldn’t blame them, really, but it severely did hurt….”
Up on his elbow again. He was hearing craziness he might have to fly with. “She’s not any damn twenty-year-old, Sal, if you want to talk hormones, here, you got to have a whole different wiring. Reactions aren’t there. They’re not going to be there for any sane human, Sal, the guy’s flat crazy, it seems to be a pre-rec on this ship—“
Silence a moment. Sal was all shadow and maybe anger, you couldn’t know when you were talking to a cutout in the dark. Finally Sal said, with a definite edge to her voice, “She’s not any twenty-year-old, but she was damned good, Ben, you weren’t out there with us, you didn’t see how she’d finesse a rock—and we got shit, Ben, the Company gave us shit assignments, because we were worse than freerunners, we were freerunner lease crew, and they were trying to run us broke, to crack the ship-owners, that was what they were up to. We never got one good draw from that ‘random assignment procedure’—Meg had a record on Sol, Meg was on the Company’s hit list because Meg was rab, Meg didn’t dress by the codes, Meg didn’t think by the codes, Meg wouldn’t kiss ass and they screwed her, Ben, same as B.M. screwed her, same as the Hamilton screwed her— So here the damn Fleet comes in and says, By the way, will you come in and haul Dek out of his mess? —Didn’t even say, You want to fly for us? Said, You want to come haul this chelovek out of his funk and we’ll cover your record? That’s all, that’s all they promised, Ben. And she got this look—shit, what was I going to do? She’d stuck by me. Maybe it’s time somebody went with her.”