Didn’t care. That was the operative word, that was the danger word she was hearing from him—but she didn’t know what to say on the instant but to punch him on the leg and say, “I’m damn well here, jeune rab. Shut up.”

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 that 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—”

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.”