Hellburner by C. J. Cherryh Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    Explain that to Col. Glenn Evan Tanzer, of UDC R&D. God, he wished the captain were back here, that one of the captains would turn up; Kreshov hadn’t shown insystem for weeks; and exactly how it happened that one of the captains wasn’t here at B Dock, at the same time a stray investigative subcommittee had outflanked Keu at Sol and gotten here unchecked—he didn’t know. He couldn’t even swear FteetCom was secure from the UDC code experts. Shepherds thought so, but he wouldn’t commit any more to it man he had.
    Not now. Not lately, in Sol System, where the enemy was mindsets that wouldn’t understand the realities in the Beyond. The Belt was closer to The Beyond than it was to Earth.
    And closer to it than Tanzer by a far shot. Always Tanzer—who’d been sitting here in R&D so long they dusted him.
    0657. By the clock on the wall. He walked down the ^corridor, he walked into Tanzer’s office, and Tanzer’s aide said, “Go right in.”
    He did mat. He saluted, by the book. Tanzer saluted, they stared at each other, and Tanzer said, “Lt. Benjamin J. Pollard. Does that name evoke memory?”
    Shot across the bow. Graff kept all expression off his face. “Yes, sir. Friend of Dekker’s. Listed next-of-kin on his card.”
    “Is that your justification for releasing those records to Sol?”
    “Captain Keu’s orders, sir. He sees all the accident reports.”
    “Is this your justification for issuing a travel voucher?”
    “I didn’t issue the travel voucher. Mr. Pollard’s presence here isn’t at my request.”
    “Lt. Graff, you’re a hair-splitting liar, you’re a trouble-t. maker and I resent your attitude.”
      “On the record,   sir,   I hardly think I can be held ‘•r. accountable—“
    “That’s what you think. You’re sabotaging us, you’re playing politics with my boys’ lives, and you have no authorization to bring in any outsider or to be passing unauthorized messages outside this facility to other commands.”
    “That is my chain of command, sir. Dekker is my personnel, and Keu is my commanding officer. Sir. I notify him on all the casualties. What Captain Keu does is not in my control. And if the question arises, I will testify that in my opinion Dekker was not in that simulator by choice. Sir.”
    Tanzer’s fist came down on the desk. “I’m in command of this