But his mama had never written him a letter like this one, and in that cold little spot marked Who’s left to care, he guessed why Dekker might have written him as next-of-kin: Meg with her letters about how she was working into the crew and everything was going fine for her-Dekker wouldn’t risk having another woman writing him, saying, Get out of my life, you skuz. Dekker already knew what Ben Pollard thought. And if Dekker was in trouble that needed a next-of-kin—whose life was he going to interrupt, who might remotely even know him?

He cut the reader off. He sat there in a cardboard cubby of a room with no damn baggage and for a moment or two had remorseful thoughts about Paul Dekker. Wished maybe he’d written a line or two more, back then, like—hell, he didn’t know. Something polite.

What friggin’ time is it?

Two months in a miner-ship with Dekker off his head asking him the time every few minutes. So here he was back there again—locked into a hospital with Dekker. One part of him felt sorry for Dekker and the other panicked part of him still wanted to beat hell out of the fool and get out of here....

Dammit, what am I supposed to do with this damn card? Why didn’t Graff give this stuff to the psych?

Sub in another pilot, did they? Why, if not Dekker’s attitude? And who did it, if not the CO who’s supposed to want this stuff from Dekker? Real brand-new ship, Dekker said once. That’s why the Fleet had wanted him. He’d been real excited about it—wanted it more than anything in his life—

And a crew’s dead and Dekker’s screwed like that?

He sat there on the side of the bed desperately, urgently, wanting off Sol Two, he didn’t at the moment care where. This whole deal had the stink of death about it.

Serious death, Sal would say.

No shit. Sal. What do I do with the guy?

CHAPTER 3

MR. Graff, urgent word with you. Down the hall. Sir. Please.” 0645 and the breakfast line in the green room was backed up to the door. Hardly time for coffee in the fifteen minutes before he was due in Tanzer’s office and Jurgen Albrecht Graff punched white coffee instead of Mack for his stomach’s sake. “Can it wait?” he asked without looking at Mitch, and caught the cup that tilted sideways and straightened it in time. Held it while it filled. “No, sir. A number of us want to talk, sir. Urgent business.”

Spit and polish. From Mitch. There was no one else in the rec nook of the mess hall and no reasonable chance of being overheard in the clatter of trays. “Tanzer wants to talk, too. I have an appointment in fifteen.”

“Hell.” Mitch was Shepherd, aggressively Shepherd, shaved up the sides, couple of earrings. Bracelet. “I swore you’d be there. Sir.”

Graff lifted out the cup, said, “All right, five,” and stole a sip as he walked with Mitch out the main door and down the hall to the conference rooms. Door to 6a was open. Mitch’s tech crew was there, Pauli and Jacoby, Jamil and his long scanner, Trace. Graff recognized a delegation when he saw it. Tanzer had said, Don’t discuss the hearings. Patently that was not the intention here.

Mitch shut the door. “Sir. We’re asking you to get one of us in front of the committee.”

“Won’t happen,” Graff said. “No chance. You want to get a haircut, Mitch?”

“Hell if.”

“That’s an Earth committee. Blue-sky as they come. They won’t communicate.”

“Yeah,” Jacoby said. “Is that why Tanzer killed Pete and Elly? Couldn’t let a Belter pull it off?”

“Ease off, Jacoby.”

“They won’t let us in hospital. You seen Dekker? You seen him, lieutenant?”

Pauli muttered: “Wouldn’t be surprised if Tanzer ordered him put in that machine. Didn’t want him at the hearings.”

“Shut that down,” Graff said. “Right now.”

Mitch folded his arms, set a foot on a chair, and said, “Somebody better hear it. They didn’t want any Belter son of a bitch in front of the cameras. Dekker couldn’t fly it? Then why didn’t they sub the crew, ask them that!”

“Mitch, I hope somebody does have the brains to ask it. But there’s nothing I can do. They’re not going to ask me that.”

“Hell if, sir! Tanzer’s pets are killing us. You want me to shave up like a—” Mitch looked at him—him and his regulation trim, and shut the epithet off unsaid. “You get me in front of that hearing and I’ll look like a UDC accountant.”

“Mitch, I’m in a position.”

“You’re in a position. You’re running safe behind shields— sir. We’re the ones with our ass on the line.”

Pauli said: “And they can’t automate these sumbitches any further. Why don’t they ask somebody who knows?”

“The designers will. Staatentek’s here. They’ll ask. That much I’ll get a chance to tell them.”

“Ask ‘em about the sim!”

Female voice: Trace. “They’re not interested. This is going to be a whitewash start to finish.”

“The designers have to talk to us, Trace. We’ll get our word in.”

Mitch said: “The engineers have to talk to us. The execs and the politicrats won’t and they have the say.”

“Mitch, I can’t listen to this.”

“Tanzer is a hidebound blue-skyer son of a bitch who thinks because he grew up with a rulebook up his ass is a reason to try to tell any spacer his business or to think that the salute-the-logo dumbasses they’ve pulled in off the Guard and the system test programs could do the job with these ships—”

“They can fly, Mitch.”

“Yeah, they can fly. Like Wilhelmsen.”

“Nothing wrong with Wilhelmsen. Listen to me— Shut it down, and listen: if we have a technical at work, we want to find it, we don’t want to whitewash that either. We have something more at issue here than Wilhelmsen.”

“Yeah,” Pauli muttered. “Tanzer.”

Mitch said, “Nothing wrong with that ship. Everything wrong with the pilot. And they aren’t going to find the solution to what happened to Wilhelmsen in Tanzer’s fuckin’ rulebook. Sir.”

“Let’s just find out, shall we?”

“Just make the point with them, lieutenant: Wilhelmsen wasn’t set with the crew. Wilhelmsen should have said not ready, he was the pilot, he had the final say-so, demo be damned. It was his responsibility to do that.”

“Yes, it was his responsibility, but it wasn’t in his judgment to do it, or he would have done it—the guy’s dead. He got it the same as the rest, Mitch. Let’s give the experts a chance to figure out what.”

“What chance have they got, if they’re not getting the information? Their experts are blue-sky as Tanzer is!”

Jacoby said: “It’s the At-ti-tude in the UDC brass. They murdered Wilhelmsen and Wilhelmsen murdered that crew, that’s what they need to hear!”

“All right! All right! But there’s nothing I can do to get you in there right now, and if you act the fools and screw this, they’ll pull those design changes and you’ll be flying targets. Now leave it! Get off my tail! Give me a chance! That’s the order. I’ve got a meeting.”

There was quiet. It wasn’t a happy quiet. Graff handed the coffee to Mitch. “You drink it.” He started for the door in a dead silence and looked back. “It’s my life too, guys. You shit me, a carrier’s gone. Program’s gone. You understand that?”

They weren’t used to hearing Helm Two talk, like that. Not at all. There were sober faces.

Mitch said, “No offense, lieutenant.”

Graff passed a hand over his close-cropped hair. Said, “Hey, I have to deal with ‘em, guys,” and ducked out, with an uncomfortable feeling of being square in the middle— merchanter and neither Shepherd nor regular UDC. Not part of the rab the EC had exiled to the Belt, not part of the EC, either, in the sense the rab had resisted it—didn’t even understand the politics in the ‘15, but he was getting to.

Fast.

They’d hauled the Shepherd pilots into the Program for their expertise. They weren’t eighteen-year-olds, and they damned sure weren’t anybody’s boys. You didn’t use that word with them. Didn’t lead them, no way in hell. You fed them the situation and showed them where it was different from what they knew. You showed them the feel of it, and let it sink into their bones and they showed the interactive systems new ways to conceptualize. They designed a whole new set of controls around the Shepherds, and software to display what they saw in their insystem-trained heads.