Hellburner Read Online Free PDF Page B

damn arrangement, —sir. This isn’t what I was told.”
    “There’s another shuttle out the 22 nd . 2100 hours.”
     
    Ben caught a breath. Three days. But Graff’s moves meant business and you didn’t argue a security matter on the open dock—no. Even if it was blackmail. Extortion. Kidnapping.
    Graff waited. He came ahead. He went with Graff into a freight office and Graff waved the lights on.
    “Yes, sir?” he said.
    “We need him,” Graff said. “We need him to remember.”
    “Sir, I just graduated from TI. If I’m not back there for the interviews they’re going away. They’re going to assign those slots and I’m stuck teaching j-1 programming to a class full of wide-eyed button-pushers, —sir. Excuse me, but I’ve not been in contact with any officer in my chain of command, I’ve gone along with this on the FSO’s word it had notified my CO. I’m not sure at this point I’m not AWOL.”
    “You’re not. You’re cleared.”
    “I’ve got your word on that. I haven’t seen any order but the one that had me report to the FSO on One. What have you done to me?”
    “You have my word. I’ll get a message to your CO.”
    “You mean they haven’t?”
    “I’ll double check. We’ve played poker, haven’t we, Mr. Pollard?”
    “Yes, sir.” Days of poker. Him. Dekker. Graff. No damn thing else to do on a half-built carrier.
    “This is poker,” Graff said. “For the major stakes. How is he?”
    “What does it matter? What’s he into?”
    “Say I need him sane.”
    “He’s never been sane.”
    “Don’t joke like that. In some quarters they might take you seriously.”
    “I am serious. The guy’s good, but his tether on reality’s just a little frayed.”
    “Maybe that’s what it takes to do what he does.”
    He stood there close to Graff, looking into Graff’s sober face in this very unofficial office and suddenly wondering who and what Graff was talking about and what Dekker did regularly do that had put him where he was. He said, carefully, “Dekker got lost out in the Belt. Banged around a lot. Real disoriented.”
    “We know that.”
    And how much else? Ben wondered. God, how much else? News didn’t escape the Belt. Security didn’t let anything get out. Even yet. Everything about the mining operation out there was under wrap. You didn’t know how much the Fleet might know. Or what tiny, inadvertent slip would let them guess what they’d done track there and what they might have been involved in that might screw his security clearance for good.
    “I knew this man a handful of months. I’ve seen him like this before—when he Fust got out of hospital on R2. I can’t make him make sense til he wants to make sense. I couldn’t then. Nobody can.”
    “You made a good advance on it. Three days, lieutenant. I want him to talk.”
    Bream came short. “Do I get to beat it out of him?”
    “Let’s be serious, lieutenant.”
    “What am I supposed to be asking? Have I got a clearance to hear it? Or what happens when he does talk? What am I looking for?”
    “As much as you can know—and it’s not been released yet—there was an accident. Dekker wasn’t in it. Friends of his were. Dekker’s crew was lost.”
    “Oh shit.”
    “Top command subbed in another pilot with Dekker’s crew on a test run. The test didn’t go right. Total loss. Dekker was hospitalized, treated for shock. The day he got out—he either climbed into a simulator under the influence of drugs or something else happened. It’s a matter of some interest—which.1’
    Ben chewed his Up. Missile test, they’d said on Sol One.
    Tech committee meetings. Place crawling with brass and VIPs. Hell. “So isn’t there an access record?”
    “Computers can be wrong. Can’t they?”
    Ben’s heart rate picked up: he hoped to hell there wasn’t a monitor hearing it. He tried to think of some scrap to hand Graff, for good will’s sake. He finally said, “Yes. They can be.”
    “I want him