Suicide, to have a MarsCorp councilor on your case?

Suicide, to call Tanzer a bastard?

Don’t let it get to you, Saito had said, when he’d called the carrier to tell them the hearing was over. Midge had hand-carried his report to the ship and a long transmission had gone out to the captain by now. Tanzer was going to rebound off the walls tomorrow.

But the report was at Sol One by now. So far as what he dared send the captain, the most urgent matter was one name, of everything related to the accident: Salazar. The rest was in Dekker’s file. Beyond that, Keu needed to know how Bonner and Tanzer had run the hearing; needed to know how his Helm Two had answered the questions, right or wrong.

Helm Two had underestimated Tanzer, that was the fact, Tanzer had thrown him a last-minute set of choices in which his refusal to go against Keu’s orders, and a lone lieutenant’s blind run through a mine-field, Tanzer had said it, might just have lost the program tonight, lost the war for the whole human race, literally, right in that hearing room this evening—if somebody wiser and better at politics couldn’t somehow take the pieces and put them together with more skill than he had mustered in front of that committee.

He was tired, God, he was tired, and he had had no business coming here. He wasn’t doing entirely rational things now, he’d sent word with Midge where he was going and put com on alert, but he hadn’t come to the Number Ones for aid and comfort and he was refusing to, knowing nothing they could tell him was of any use, since they didn’t know any more than he did what was going on. He’d made some critical judgments left and right of the course he’d hoped to hold in the hearing and in his dealings with Tanzer, and he was avoiding their input til he’d mapped out the sequence and sense of those judgment calls, that was what he suddenly realized was pushing his buttons right now—he wanted to know the answers; and if he could shove Bonner and Tanzer into a move of some kind, even an assassination attempt, he’d know, all right; he’d have proof: more than that, the senators might have it, before they left here at maindawn: Explain that one, cover another attempted murder, Bonner, while the committee’s still on station...

Otherwise, if Tanzer was only tracking him and more innocent than he judged, let Tanzer sweat what he was up to—looking for clues, maybe, trying to find something to prove Dekker’s case, something politically explosive. Legal troubles in Dekker’s past—it was all backgrounded, solved, just one of the connections Dekker had had and left when he left the Belt. He didn’t go off Sol Two, he took no leaves, but there had been no particular reason for Dekker’s name to rouse any anxieties in Defense—certainly no reason to fear him getting to the media. Dekker was allergic to cameras and microphones, Dekker certainly didn’t want publicity bringing his name up again, any more than Defense did; and evidently there’d been a decision to take Hellburner public if the test succeeded. So someone high in the Defense Department had said pull him.

That being the case—the line certainly led to Salazar; and Salazar lived behind the EC security wall, the same EC that they were fighting for. That was a worry, and a real one, if the woman had penetrated security channels and found out what Dekker was working on, and where he was.

There was—top of the list regarding Dekker’s injuries— Wilhelmsen’s crew. Dekker hadn’t been tactful. Dekker was, Pollard had said it, volatile. There was a lot of that in the crews they’d recruited—including the UDC test pilots. You could begin to wonder was it a pathology or a necessary qualification for this ship—or was it the result of ramming crews together in a handful of years, the few with the reflexes, the mental quickness—the top of the above-average in reaction time, who didn’t, even on a family ship, necessarily understand slower processers, or understand that such slower minds vastly outnumbered them in the population? He’d told Tanzer, You can’t train what we need ... he hoped he’d gotten that across at least to one of the committee, but there was no knowing—he’d never excelled, himself, at figuring people: he’d certainly failed to realize how very savvy Tanzer could be in an argument.

He had his pocket com. The captain might send him word at any hour, please God, and give him specific instructions, either for a bare-ass space walk or a steady-on as he was bearing and he’d rather either right now than chasing might-have-beens in circles. After a jump you got a solid Yes, you’d survived it. But right now he could wonder whether the FSO was still operating on Sol One, or whether something might have gone wrong at levels so high the shockwave had yet to hit Sol Two. For all he knew the committee had been the shockwave of a UDC power grab and he’d just self-destructed in it.

Or why else hadn’t they heard anything? Or why, according to the news that he had heard before he’d left the office, was Mazian still smiling his way from council to council in the European Union, and making no comment about the accident, except that a ‘routine missile test’ had had a problem.

The pod flashed by, unexpectedly, filling the view port.

His heart jumped. He watched the pod whip across the far side and felt queasy after the visual shock. Dekker’s pod had been running on the mission tape. Dekker had seen the accident. They’d treated him for shock, he’d gotten out of hospital and turned up here, at shift-change, in a pod repeating the exact accident set-up. On loop. Was there anything in that, but vindictiveness?

Higgins said only that Dekker had lucid moments. No recollection, most times no awareness even where he was. Cory Salazar had died out in the Belt. Dekker was back in that crack-up. Over and over and over.

Check-in records had listed no UDC personnel as in the area. The mission sims tape was checked out to Dekker—as mission commander, he’d had one in his possession. Dekker had been in hospital. One would have expected that that tape had been with his effects. Security should have collected it, with the tapes in all crews’ possession, living and dead. But Library hadn’t checked Dekker’s in: Dekker was alive, and unable to respond to requests for the tape, Security said, they’d decided not to seek an order to get it from his effects—which would have had the Provost Marshal’s staff going into Dekker’s locker while Dekker was alive, a violation of policy in the absence of charges.

A hatch door crashed and echoed at the distant end of the access tube. The lift had just let someone in. The Lendler Corp techs, maybe, moving up to this bay. But the light was still on over there. And the pod was still running, the mag-levs whiting out anything but the loudest sounds.

Damn, he thought, Tanzer might be a fool after all. He might have his answer, all right: and if he and his didn’t make the right moves now, he might become the answer. He’d gotten colder, standing here, and he had a sudden weak-kneed wish to be wrong about Tanzer—he hadn’t thought through what he’d done in the hearing yet, he wasn’t ready or willing to make gut-level choices in a physical confrontation. He closed his fist around the bolt in his pocket—he’d collected that from the desk; he drifted free and took out the pocket com he’d collected too. “D-g, this is 7-A11, sim bay 2. QE, C-2-6, copy?”

“7-All, this is Snowball, C-2-6, on it, that’s 03 to you, dammit, seat that door!”

Saito was on com. Saito must be lurking over Dan Washington’s shoulder and the pocket com was wide open now and logging to files on the carrier. Saito wasn’t as accepting of harebrained excursions as Dan was, Saito must have gotten uneasy, and, onto Helm Two’s side excursion, was probably calling Demas in, besides having Security closer than he’d set them. But they would or wouldn’t come in, depending on what Saito heard. Meanwhile he watched the hand-line quiver along the side of the lighted tube. Someone was on it, now, below the curve of the tube. Several someones, by the feel as he touched it.