Hellburner

“Shit.” Cold chill went down Ben’s back. “These guys ever made a run with Mama shoving you?”

“A lot of these guys have done it—if you mean the combat jocks. Yeah. That’s what it’s like. And we just run ahead and blow the sumbitches they dump out of the carrier’s path.”

“You’re kidding.”

“That’s what she does.”

“That’s the damn stupidest thing I ever heard!”

“That’s why they like us Belter types. Shipkillers and rocks—no difference. Same gut feeling for how rocks move— same thing that makes a good numbers man or keeps a Shepherd out of the Well, that’s what they want.”

“Hell if, Dekker, hell if. Not this Belt miner!”

“You a good miner?” Dekker had the nerve to ask.

“A live one! On account of I never let MamBitch boost us like a missile—except once. In which you figured, you son of a —“

Meg said, “Hell, Ben, they give you guns….”

“Yeah, and it won’t work—that’s what they’re doing in there, they’re brainwashing those poor sods, they brainwashed him, for God’s sake, blow rocks out of the way, hell! They got that on those tapes?”

“Not yet,” Dekker said, just as quiet and sober as if he was sane. “But they’d like to. Get the reactions right on one run, so they can bottle it and feed it into the techs— word is, that’s what they want to do, ultimately. Get one crew that can do it. And they’ll teach the others. Hundreds of others.”

“God,” Sal said, and hooked a thumb back at the human factory. “Like that!”’

Dekker shrugged. “That’s what they think.”

“That’s what they think,” Ben muttered. The human race was shooting at each other. Dekker said Union was building riderships, too—

“I thought the other side was where they wired you to a machine and taught you to like getting blown to hell. Not here. Not on this side, no way, Dek-boy. What the hell are we fighting for? That’s Union stuff in there!”

“They developed it, what I hear.”

“God.”

“ ‘Not yet,’ “ Meg quipped.

“Damn funny, Meg.”

Ben looked at Dekker, looked at Meg and at Sal, with this sudden sinking feeling—this moment of dislocation, that said he was surrounded by crazies, including the woman he went to bed with; including every hotshot Shepherd tight-ass in this whole establishment, and the CO, and the lieutenant.

“What’s it do to your reflexes?” Meg said.

Dekker said, “Screws ‘em to hell. Scares shit out of you. Like I said at breakfast. Hands move, you don’t know why, you threw a switch, you don’t know why. Moves are right. But you got to convince yourself they are. You can’t doubt.”

“Any chance it came around on this Wilhelmsen?”

Dekker didn’t answer that for a second or so. Ben wasn’t sure about keeping his breakfast. “Yeah,” Dekker said. ‘’But that’s the one thing you never better think. You never mink about it. Not in the sims. Especially in the real thing—“

Dekker’s voice wandered off. He stood there with his band on a door switch and looked off somewhere, just stood there a breath or two—then drew a larger breath and said,

“Worst enemy you’ve got—asking whether your moves are right. You just can’t doubt—“

“Yeah,” Ben said, with the sudden intense feeling they had to get him out of this hallway before a guard saw him or something. “Yeah, right. Why don’t we go tour somewhere else? Like what there is to do on this station?”

Dekker looked at him like he’d never thought of such a thing. “Don’t know that there is. This isn’t One.”

“What I’ve seen, it isn’t even R2. What do you do for life in this can? Play the vending machines?”

“Not much time for social life,” Dekker said faintly. Which reminded him there hadn’t been outstanding much in TI, either. Even attached to Sol One, where there was plenty.

“Not much where we’ve been,” Meg said. “Either.”

They walked down the hall in this place full of labs where human beings learned to twitch like rats, to guide ships that moved too fast to think about, and you couldn’t help thinking that helldeck on R2, for all R2’s faults, had been the good old days….

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