“Do I understand this as blackmail? Is that what you want? My signature, and Dekker’s back in?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way. But let’s say it might signal a salutary change of attitude.”

“No deal. No deal, colonel. And you can stand by for FleetCom to be in use in fifteen minutes.”

“Good. About time you woke up your upper echelons. Tell them they’ve got a problem with Dekker. A serious problem.”

Trays were still sitting. They came into the mess hall and guys stopped and stared in that distant way people had when they were trying to spy on somebody else’s trouble. Talk stopped, mostly, and started again, and Dek didn’t look at anybody, didn’t talk to anybody, just sat down at his place at table and put the straw in his orange juice.

Ben gave her a tight-jawed look. Table was still all theirs. Pauli and the guys had gone off toward the breakfast line, but they hadn’t made it: they’d gotten snagged, talking to guys over by the wall, all Shepherd. There were UDC guys on the fringes—tables were either UDC or they were Shepherd, Meg marked that suddenly: there wasn’t another mixed table in the whole damned hall.

She didn’t like the quiet. Didn’t like the feeling around them. Dek was having his eggs. Ben was having toast. Sal gave her a look that said she was right, everybody else was crazy but them.

Young woman, blond hair in a shave-strip, came up, set her tray down, said, “You mind, Dek?”

Dek shrugged. That one sat down. “Trace,” the interloper said, looking her way, and offered her hand across the tray as a dark-skinned Shepherd kid took the seat next to Sal: “Aimarshad. Friends of friends.”

Pauli sat down, him with no tray, and said, “It’s us Tanzer’s after. —Pollard, you mind to answer whose side you’re on?”

Hell of a question, Meg thought. She watched Ben frown and think, then say, with a cold sweet smile on his face: “Hell, I’m not in Tanzer’s command. I’m Security-cleared. I’m Computer Technical, out of TI. I’m due somewhere else, and if I get there, frying Tanzer’s ass’d be ever so little effort. So why doesn’t somebody get me out of here?”

“Hear you were a good numbers man,” Pauli said.

The frown came back. “Damned good,” Ben said. Ben wasn’t lying. “But I’m not flying with him. I’m not flying with you guys. I’m not friggin’ going near combat...”

“Small chance you’ll have in my company,” Dek said under his breath. “If they get this mess cleared, it’ll just be one more thing they find. Dammit, Pete and Elly—what in hell is it with me that—”

Pauli’s hand came down on Dek’s wrist and shut him up. Thank God, Meg thought. She didn’t know the danger spots here, but her personal radar was getting back severe oncomings.

Hadn’t even gotten back to the office before he had a hail from behind and a “Lieutenant, we’ve got to talk to you—”

No doubt what it was before Mitch and Benavides overtook him. Graff said, “Dekker’s banned from the sims, is that what this is about?”

“Tanzer’s doing?” Mitch asked—and didn’t ask was it his.

“Col. Tanzer,” he reminded them. “In the office, Mitch. Let’s keep it out of the corridors—”

“It’s in the corridors, sir, it’s all over the messhall. The UdamnDC doesn’t care where it drops its—”

“Mitch. In the office.”

“Yessir,” Mitch said meekly; and the delegation trailed him down the corridor and around the corner to his own door. He could hear the phone beeping before he even got the door open. He got to his desk, picked up the handset.

“Graff here.”

Saito’s voice. “J-G, we have a problem. Paul Dekker’s been restricted.”

“I’m aware, I assure you. Word to the captain. FleetCom. Stat. Code but don’t scramble. Tell the captain we’d urgently like to hear from him.”

“Aye.”

He hung up. He looked at Mitch. “Where is Dekker right now?”

“Messhall,” Mitch said. “Granted Pauli and Kady could catch him.”

“Catch him.”

“He wasn’t damned happy, and he was headed spinward.”

“You catch him. You sit on him if you’ve got any concern about this program.”

Quiet from the other side. Then: “We enlisted. We signed your contract. We’ve got plenty of concern about this program, lieutenant, we’re damned worried about this program, —we’re damned worried about a lot of things.”

“First time I’ve asked this, Mitchell, Follow orders. Blind. Just do it.”

Mitch looked at him a long time. So did the others. Finally Mitch said, “We’ll follow orders. But what the hell are they doing, lieutenant? D’ you hear from the captain? Do we know anything? What’s happening at Sol?”

“You want it flat on the table—I don’t know what the situation is, I don’t know whether (he captain’s tied up in the hearings or what. I’m asking you, I need you to go back to your labs, follow your orders, show up for sims—get everybody back to routine. Like nothing’s going on. Like nothing’s ever gone on.”

Long silence then. Long silence. And finally Mitch broke contact.

“Yeah,” Mitch said. “You got it. You got it. But Dek’s damned upset.”

“Tell Dekker my door’s open, I know what happened and I’m on it. May take a bit. But he’s going back in there.”

Opened his mouth on that one. If you made a promise like that to these men, you’d better plan to keep it.

Like dropping into system, he thought; sometimes you had to call one fast. He thought it over two and three times, fee way you didn’t have time to reflect on a high-v decision— bat the fallout from this one was scattered all though the future, and he didn’t know whether he was right to promise a showdown—for one man.

Damned if not, he decided. You could count casualties by the shipload—in an engagement. But if it was your own service taking aim—damned right one man mattered.

Whole roomful of tranked-out fools sitting at consoles, making unison reaches after switches, unison keystrokes, as far as Ben could tell. “Damn spacecases,” he said, with a severe case of the willies. Deepteach, they called it, VR with drugs and specific behaviors involved; and hearing about it wasn’t seeing thirty, forty people all sitting there with patches on their arms and faces and elsewhere and in private places, for all he knew: forty grown people making identical rapid moves like the parts of some factory machine. “Talk about Unionside clones.,..”

“Just basic stuff,” Dekker said. They were in the observation room, looking out through Spex that reflected their disturbed faces—disturbed, in his case, and Meg’s and Sal’s. Dekker, professional space-out, tried to tell them it was just norm.

“Spooky,” was Sal’s word too. “Seriously spooky.”

Ben asked uneasily, “They do computer work that way?”

“Basic functions,” Dekker said. “Basic stuff. For all I know, they do; armscomp, longscan—’motor skills/ they call it. They teach the boards that way. Some of the sims are like that, when there’s one right answer to a problem. Anything you can set up like that—they can cut a tape. It’s real while you’re seeing it. Damned real. But you move right. You do it over and over till you always jump right.”

Wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear. He said, “I’m not taking any damn pill. I’m already right. Righter than any guy this halfass staff has got, I’ll tell you. You let them muck with your head?”

“Just for the boards,” Dekker said, and cut the lights as they left. “Just to set the reactions. ‘Direct Neural Input,’ they call it. You do the polish in sims, and you do that awake—at least you’re supposed to...”

Two years he’d known the guy and he realized he’d never actually heard Dekker’s sense of humor. He decided that was a joke. A damned bad one.

Meg asked, “So what if it sets a bias that’s not right, once upon some time?”

“You aren’t the only one to worry about that. Yeah. It’s a question.”

“So what are they doing? Set us up to jump on the average we’re right?”

“That’s part of what they call ‘documentation’—meaning there’s nobody who’s flown the ship.”