“Grits,” Dek said.

“Was it alive?”

“It wasn’t alive.” Dek slid his tray to the end of the line and drew his coffee.

“You want me to carry that?” Meg asked.

“I’m fine,” Dek said, and stuck his card in the slot. “That’s present and accounted for. Laser scans the bottom of the containers, figures your calories and your allotments— dietician’s worse than—hell.” Reader’s read-line was blinking.

“You have a message,” the checkout robot said, as if Dek couldn’t read.

“Scuse.” Dek carried his tray over to a corner table, quiet spot, Meg was glad to note, following him, while Ben waited for Sal to check through—a skosh too many Shepherd eyes in this place for her personal comfort, all picking up every move they made. Hi, Dek, they’d say soberly, sounding friendly enough. Giving her and Sal the eye, that was a natural—women being severely scarce here; and sort of glossing Ben.

But me UDC boys looked at Ben and looked at them and heads sort of leaned together at tables, she could see it going on all over that other corner of the hall, thick with UDC uniforms.

Dek set his tray down. “I’ll check that message blinker. Probably your stuff. Hope it’s your stuff.”

As Sal and Ben showed up with their trays and set them down.

“What’s he doing?” Ben asked with a glance over his shoulder. “You don’t ask what a message is before breakfast, you never ask what a message is before breakfast—”

“Thinks it could be our accesses.” Meg set her tray down and cast a glance at Dek over by the phone, a skosh anxious, she couldn’t even tell why, except Dek had had this edge in his voice: he was On about something, she read it in his stance and his moves, and she hadn’t been able to read all the codes that had popped up. She said, still on her feet, “Ben? You capish the code on that blinker?”

“Accesses stuff,” Ben said, sitting down.

“Uh-oh,” Sal said.

Understatement. Serious understatement. Dek hit the phone with his open hand. “Scuze,” Meg said, and went that direction.

Dek snatched out his card, and ricocheted into her path. “What is?” she asked, catching at his arm. “Dek?”

“They clipped me, Tanzer’s fuckin’ clipped me, the son of a bitch.” Dek shoved her and she didn’t know whether to hang on or not—her hand stung as he blazed past her. But that didn’t matter. Dek going for the door like a crazy man—that seriously mattered. Dek knocking into guys inbound—

Mitch, for God’s sake—

Dek got past. Hot on his track she hit the same obstacle, who didn’t give way a second time. Neither did the other guys. “Kady,” Mitch said, not friendly. “I heard they’d gotten desperate.”

“I got a seriously upset partner—out of my way, dammit!”

“So what’s with Dekker?”

“Something about getting clipped.”

“Shit!” Mitch said, and: “Pauli,” to the big guy behind him, Shepherd from the hall yesterday. She remembered. “Haul his ass back here. Fast.”

“What’s going on?” Sal asked as she and Ben showed up with a handful of other curious.

“Dekker’s been clipped,” Mitch said. “Just calm down, we’re going to see what the lieutenant says about this.”

Hell if she understood ‘clipped,’ she didn’t know Pauli from trouble, she knew Mitch too damn well, but Mitch’s outrage at least sounded to be on Dek’s side and stopping Dek seemed to be a priority on their side too. Pauli-whoever took out in the direction Dek had gone, and she went with, at a fast walk.

First comer showed an empty hall; but Pauli broke into a jog for a side corridor as if he knew where he was going, she caught up, and spotted Dek, all right, traveling at a fair clip himself.

“Dek!” she called out; and he stopped, took a damn-you stance and stared at them cold as cold.

All right. That was the surly young sumbitch she knew. She panted, “You got friends, chelovek, capish? Slow down. Deal with people.”

Dek looked half poised to walk off. Pauli said, “Is it true? They pulled you?”

“Yeah.” Dek’s mouth didn’t look to be working real well, he clearly didn’t want to talk; but about that time Ben and Sal showed up with some of the other Shepherds from the messhall, Ben with:

“What’s going on? —Dekker, are you being a spook?”

“Ben,” Meg exclaimed. Sal said the same. But Dek made a disgusted wave of his hand and managed to unlock his jaw.

“Nothing’s wrong, nothing’s the hell wrong. Sorry I got you here. Sorry I got you into this.”

A sane woman had to get things off personals. Fast. “Ben, Sal, this is Pauli, friend of Mitch’s; Pauli: Ben Pollard, Sal Aboujib. Say how-do, and somebody answer a straight question, f God’s sake. What’s going on here?”

“The damn UDC,” Dek said, “that’s what’s going on. Tanzer’s just tossed me out of the program.”

“He can’t do that,” Pauli said. “Screw him. He can’t do that.”

Somebody else said, “No way, Dek.” And another one:

“Mitch is on his way to talk to the lieutenant right now. No way that’s going to stick.”

Dek wasn’t highly verbal. He was white, and sweating. Sal said, quietly, with her arm in Dek’s: “You want to go back to the room, Dek?”

Ben said: “Screw it, he’s got a breakfast sitting back there, we all got breakfast back there, if nobody’s grabbed h.”

Leave it to Ben. Sal had a crazy man halfway turned around and stopped from strangling the colonel and Ben wanted his effin’ breakfast. Dek was looking at Ben like he was some eetee dropped by for directions.

“You mind?” Ben asked him impatiently.

“Yeah. All right,” Dek muttered. And went with him.

God, both of them were spooks.

“I’m looking at Dekker’s record,” Tanzer said, tapping a card on his desk, “right here: the medical report and his disciplinary record—including his violent behavior here in hospital, his defiance of regulations in the sims—”

“His behavior, colonel, was thoroughly reasonable, considering the level of drugs in his system. Drugs with possible negative psychological impact considering his history— which is in that file. That from my medical experts. He has grounds for malpractice.”

“This is the accident report.” Tanzer shoved a paper form across the desk at him. “Sign it or don’t, as you please. I’ll spare you the detail. I’m not calling the hospital records into question, I’m not charging him with flagrant violations of security with that tape, I’m not charging him for disregard of safety regulations. I am concluding there was no other person involved in the sims accident but Ens. Dekker.”

He kept every vestige of emotion from his face. “How ate you proposing he got into that pod?”

“I’m supposing he got in there the ordinary way, lieutenant, the same as any fool can climb in there. He just happened to be on trank. These are the records of his admission—he was flying before he got in there.”

“Was put in there.”

“He was in illegal possession of a tape that should have been back in library—”

“He had license to possess that tape, colonel. He’d been in hospital, he’d just been released, in condition your medics knew when they let him out with a prescription drug in his system—”

“Whatever drugs were in his system, he put there, before he decided to go on a sim ride.”

“Pardon me if I don’t rely on those doctors’ word, colonel, or their records.”

“Rely on whatever you like. I’ll tell you one thing: Dekker’s barred from the sims.”

“He’s going in there on my orders, colonel.”

“Check your rules, lieutenant. The sim facility and its accesses are under UDC direction.”

“You restrict one of my people from the sims, colonel, and the case is going clear to the Defense Department.”

“Then you better start the papers moving, lieutenant, because he’s barred. And if you give a damn for your program you won’t fife—that’s my unsolicited advice, because you don’t want him in public. Take my word for it you don’t want him in public. But until I get cooperation out of your office, you don’t get cooperation out of mine.”