Demas looked thoughtful. “I’ll look up the schedule.”
“Due in at 0900h on the 27th, out at 2030h the 29th, we’ve got a service hold for scheduled maintenance. They’re claiming it’s booked full outbound. There’s always some contractor holding seats. If we’ve got any pull—get one.”
He’d gotten used to being handled like a piece of meat. He’d gotten used to cameras and doctors and cops. They made a vid record of the new skin on his shoulder and the finger-marks on his arm. They asked him who’d hit him, he just shook his head, didn’t even have to come out of his haze to talk to them. They took samples of his hair, his skin, his blood, and whatever fluid they could wring out of his body; “Pulse rate just won’t go down,” one of them said. “That’s on his hospital records.”
“What do you expect!” he asked, only time he’d opened his mouth except for a tongue depressor, and one of them said he should calm down.
“Yeah,” he said. His stomach was upset from the poking around they were doing. He tried to go on timing out, just go away and blind himself with the lights and not to let his heart flutter, the way it felt it was doing. Couldn’t think about anything if you wanted to fake out the meds. Think of—
Sol One. His mother’s apartment. But that was no good. His mother was in trouble, thanks to him…
Way Out. But that ship was dead. Like Cory.
Think of stupid stuff. Name the moons of Saturn. Jupiter had used to work, but he’d learned that real estate too intimately.
Docking fire sequence for a miner ship. Range and rate of closing.
Finally one said, “Name’s Parton. Fleet Medical. How are you doing, Lt. Dekker?”
Fleet. He said, “The lieutenant agree with this?”
“The lieutenant doesn’t agree with fighting.”
So he was in trouble. With everybody. He slid a glance over to the wall, where he didn’t have to look at Parton or get in an argument, and wondered distractedly if he could get a word out of the news channel if he could just get permission to make a phone call. …
But the medic, Parton, was talking with the other medics— said, of the blood pressure, “Yeah, he does that. Doesn’t like hospitals. Doesn’t like UDC medics, if you want the plain truth….”
Not real fond of any meds right now, —sir. Can I get up?
But he didn’t ask that, he didn’t think it was smart to ask, at this point. He got an elbow under him—they had him lying on a table freezing his ass off, and he only wanted to relieve the ache in his back. But a hand landed on his shoulder: it had a UDC uniform cuff. MP. He lay back and stared at the lights and froze in silence until the Fleet medic came back and stood over him.
“Lieutenant’s orders: you go where you’re told to go, you don’t argue, you don’t say anything about the incident to anybody but our legal staff, you understand?”
He said, burning with embarrassment, “Something about my mother on the news, can anybody for God’s sake find out what happened to my mother?”
“Lieutenant’s aware of that. He’s making inquiries.”
“What about the other guys? Pollard and Kady and Aboujib—“
“They’re fine.”
“They arrest them too?”
“Riot and assault.” Parton looked across him, over his head. “Lieutenant wants him with his unit. The three he named.”
“Kady and Aboujib are women.”
“They’re his unit, sergeant.”
Long silence. Then: ‘I’ll have to ask the major.”
Age-old answer. Dekker shut his eyes. Figured they’d be a while asking and getting no. “It’s protecting me from Kady you better worry about,” he told them. Bad joke. Nobody was laughing. He wasn’t amused either. Meg had a record of some kind. Meg had just gotten it cleared, got a chance to fly again. Ben had his assignment in Stockholm….
His mother used to say, You damned kid, everything you touch you break—
You messed up my whole life, you self-centered little brat—why can’t you do right, why can’t you once in your life do something right, you damned screw-up?