“Something wrong?”
She wasn’t about to explain to him here, alone. She grabbed his arm. “We just got a problem.” Her teeth rattling made it hard to talk. “Come on, Dek, for God’s sake, I’m freezing.”
“What’s going on?”
“Tell you on the way.” She made a little finger-sign that meant bug. “Bird wants you. Now.”
He disposed of the cloth he was holding. He wiped his fingers on his sweater, looking scared now.
But he dimmed the lights and followed her out of the hatch.
Message from Salvatore: We’ve got some kind of stir among the military personnel on the ‘deck— MP’s and officers going from bar to bar, spreading out. Looks as if they’re pulling their people off leave…
Payne passed the message on to Crayton’s office and grabbed the phone. “FleetCom,” he told it, and got one ring after another, then a robot.
“Input your priority please.”
“This is Payne, ASTEX Public Information Office.”
“ Your call is entered in queue. Your call will be answered…”
Priority beeped him off. Red lights spread like plague across the phone console.
“ Sir!” Salvatore said into his ear, but another priority beeped Salvatore down to autorecord.
The phone said, simultaneously with the computer, on voice: “… This is President Towney’s office. We are in receipt of an uncoded message echoed from Shepherd craft at the Well, quote:…’At 1540 hours on September 2nd, the ShepherdAthens picked up an anomalous object in the recovery zone. It proved to be human remains, carrying the identification of Corazon Salazar, a miner registered to Rl, and reported lost earlier this year during a reported bumping incident between the ‘driverIndustry and the miner ship 1-89-Z. Our calculations indicate an origin consistent with other loads fired by the aforenamed ‘driver. We are in possession of charts which indicate falsification of records. We are advising the company of these facts and we are demanding that charges immediately be filed of willful murder and attempted murder, with arrest warrants issued for the chief officers of the ‘driver ship—’ “
Sweating, heart thumping, Payne keyed to Salvatore: Whereabouts of Paul Dekker. Priority One.
CHAPTER 17
DEKKER kept his jaw clamped on questions Meg clearly wasn’t going to answer—”I don’t knowwhat the situation is right now,” was the last information thing she’d yet said, when she’d insisted on stopping on 4-deck and walking breakneck to a lift that only took cards like the one she was using—which wasn’t hers. Gold. The only card like that he’d ever seen was Shepherd Access.
He’d never seen this end of helldeck, either—where the lift let out. She led the way across the ‘deck immediately to a door next to a fancy restaurant. A card-sized gold plaque was the only sign of business: the Shepherd emblem, Jupiter and the recovery track, right above the card-lock.
“What is this?” he asked.
Meg put the card in, shoved the door as the electronic lock clicked.
He ducked inside after her, into a carpeted reception room where he knew they didn’t belong—by no right ought they to be here, except that card.
A blond man looked up from the reception desk.
Meg said, “This is Dek; Dek, Mitch.—Have we heard anything from the rest of us?”
“Neg,” Mitch said, before Dekker could say anything, and pointed to the first door down the hall. “Wait in there. Both of you.”
“I’ve got friends out there,” Meg objected, “looking for him.”
“We’re doingsomething about it, Kady. We’ll do it faster if you take care of him.”
“Maybe you’d better tell me what’s going on,” Dekker said, but Meg grabbed him by the arm, said, “Dek, come on,” and steered him down the hall.
“Dammit, Meg,—”
“Shit, I don’t know, I don’t know, come on, just awhile—sonuvabitch! I’m up to here with sons of bitches…” Meg took him back into an elegant deserted bar, left him standing while she turned on the lights and set up on her own, poured two fast, shaky drinks, one whiskey, one rum.
He came and leaned his elbows on the bar, said carefully: “We’re not getting out of here tomorrow, are we?”
She took a sip of the whiskey and shoved the rum at him. “Drink up.”
“Meg. What’s happened? What are we doing here?”
She leaned on the bar, nudged his hand with her glass. “You seriously better have a little of that, jeune rab.—They found your partner.”
Thatwas it.—But the Shepherd Access, Meg’s breathless rush—coming here… He stood bewildered. Meg came around the end of the bar and snagged him by the sleeve, pulled him to a table and set him down opposite her.
She said, “Dek, they found her at the Well. That sonuvabitch put her in a bucket and sent her a long tour of Jupiter. A Shepherd picked her up on the recovery path.”
Meg sneaked up all gentle. Then she shot for the gut. His mind went blank and black—
That huge dark machine…
“Why in hell—” Breath dammed up in his throat. He couldn’t get it out. He reached for the glass, slopped it left and right getting a drink.
Meg reached across the table, reached for his free hand as he set the glass down, squeezed his fingers til they hurt.
“Cher. Death is. Pain’s life. And there’s, above all, sons of bitches. Get your breath. You’re not the only one who knows now. You’re not alone out there. It’s the independents… the freerunners… the Shepherds they were aiming at. The old, old business.”
“But what in hell do they think they’re doing?” His voice came out higher than he intended, hardly recognizable. “What kind of a game is this? How could they ever think they could get away with it?”
“There’s crazy people. They shot us down at the company doors. News cameras everywhere. Everybody in the world saw it. How’d they get away with that, can you tell me, jeune rab? —Have your rum. The word’s out on the Shepherds’ com. They’ll be hearing it at Sol about now. The company won’t want you to talk, you understand—seriously won’t want you to talk to anybody. That’s what’s going on. But if MamBitch pushes now, the Shepherds are going to shut MamBitch down. Let the corp-rats fly the ships with their cut-rate crews. Let the company execs fly the Well.”
“I want that guy, Meg.”
“Close as we can come. You got the guys that launched him. Somebody’sjob’s gone. Best you can do with these sumbitches.”
He’s reported in the core, the last report from Salvatore’s office had said. They were still searching; and Payne, with Towney’s office requesting the Dekker file, searched screen after screen of records generated by Salvatore’s investigation.
Record score on re-certification. Cleared to retrain, shipping with the two miners who’d picked him up, plus a Kady and Aboujib, both female—
Ships both due to launch on the 18th, the sleepery owner swearing he had no idea in hell where Dekker was—Dekker has missed a supper appointment: his partners had been phoning around trying to find him. Dekker could have come and gone, the owner had no idea, he’d been watching the vid. Everybody in the bar had been watching the vid…
Aboujib and Pollard both had Shepherd parentage. Kady was a cashiered shuttle pilot. Bird had been a suspect in the Nouri affair, close friend of Pratt and Marks—
The file had gone to Towney’s desk.
And the monkey was climbing up PI’s back.
Nobody had told hisoffice that Dekker was anything but, at absolute worst, a skimmer who’d gotten caught and bumped. Nobody had told him that a ‘driver captain was going to make a gesture like this at the Shepherds.
He keyed up Industry’srecord. Windowed in the second chart.
No record of asteroid 98879 prior to the incident. Industry’stransmission logged the discovery to the company. March 7th.
God.