They’d done all the check-ins, gotten Meg and Sal scheduled for Aptitudes tomorrow—Ben had outright refused to sign up, declaring they could damned well get his Aptitudes from the UDC, or court-martial him for failure to show for tests: not an outright show of temper with the examiners, no, just a perfectly level insistence they look up his Security clearance, Ben said; turn up his assignment to Stockholm … Benjamin Pollard wasn’t taking any Fleet Aptitudes until they showed him his old ones or put him in court.
Damned mess, he reflected, sorry for Ben, truly sorry for what had seemed to a pain-hazed mind his only rescue. Ben’s talk about court-martial upset him. Ben’s situation did. And all the lieutenant would say, when he had in fact gotten a phone call through to him, was: We’ll work with that. Let me talk to the examiners, all right?
He ground at his eyes with the heels of his hands, listened to the dull buzz of conversation and rattling plates over the monotone of the vid, and wondered if there was anything unthought of he could do, any pull he personally had left to use, to get Ben back where he belonged—as much as that, if there was anything he could do to send Meg and Sal back home—no matter that Meg really wanted her chance at the program. He’d been on an emotional rollercoaster since this morning, he’d been ready to go back to routine and they’d stopped him; they’d told him the lieutenant was fighting mat, and he’d been ready to come from the bottom again—
til, God, Meg hit him with the business about flying either with him or against him.
He didn’t want her killed, he didn’t want to lose anybody else—he didn’t want to be responsible for any life he cared about. He kept seeing that fireball when he shut his eyes; in the crowd-noise, he kept hearing the static on Cory’s channel, in the tumbling and the dark—because Meg’s threat had made it imminent, and real.
The hall seemed cold this evening. Somebody had been messing with the temperature controls, or the memories brought back the constant chill of the Belt. He sat there rebreathing his own breath behind his hands, knowing (Ben had a blunt, right way of putting it) knowing he was being a spook, knowing he hadn’t any right to shove Meg around, or tell her anything—no more than he’d had any right to take Ben’s name in vain or ask for Meg and Sal to come here—he supposed he must have asked for Meg, too, since they were here, even if he couldn’t figure why the Fleet had gone to that kind of trouble—
Except the captain had wanted him to testify in that hearing Ben had told him about, the one it was too late to testify in, even if he could remember—which he couldn’t.
So he’d let the captain down, he’d let the lieutenant down—in what cause he didn’t know; he only knew he’d disrupted three lives.
So Meg hadn’t been happy where she’d been, so the Hamilton wouldn’t let her right to the top of the pilot’s list: you didn’t get into that chair just walking aboard, Meg had to have known that, Meg must have known what to expect, coming in on a working crew with its own seniorities and its own way of doing things…
So you took a little hell. So you stuck it out. Everybody took hell. He hadn’t been all that good at keeping his head down and taking it, but, God, he’d started a police record when he was thirteen: he’d been a stupid kid—and Meg had done a stupid thing or two, run contraband, something like mat, that had busted her from the Earth shuttle to the Belt; but he and Meg were both older, now, Meg ought to know better and do better—he’d made it in the Belt; so had Meg—so she had to have damn-all better sense than she was using—
“You all right?” Meg asked. They were back with the sandwiches. He took a drink of the cola, wished he hadn’t gotten an iced drink.
“Yeah,” he said, chilled. He took his sandwich and unwrapped it while they sat down with their trays. Something on the vid about the hearings. ‘Missile test,’ they called it. That was Hellburner’s cover story. They talked about hearings adjourning on Sol One…. He wished they’d change the channel. Watch the stupid rerun movies. Had to be better. The message net had to be better.