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

the signals had gotten fuzzed.
    Villanueva went over to a table with his own men. Sat down. Graff walked over to the other side, where a couple of the Fleet’s own gray heads inclined together. Demas and Saito. Nav One and Com One—no credence at all to the Equivalencies that the Fleet had had settled on them. Commdr. Demas, as happened. But Nav One meant it was Demas did the major share of the course plots, with the backing of eighteen techs interfacing with scan and longscan at any given instant, which meant that a prototype carrier on a test run knew so precisely where it was and where everything else was that a Lt. j-g at Helm couldn’t screw up if he worked at it.
    Except with a wrong word to the UDC R&D chief.
    “Think I just picked a wrong word with Villy. Does ‘cut and dried’ describe what they’re going to ask at the hearings?”
    Com One said, her almond eyes half-lidded, “Probably. ‘Rigged’ might too. On, is the man?”
    Demas said, “A lot On. Deep in. Drink your coffee, Helm. Present for you.” Demas laid a bolt on the table. Fat one.
    Damn. “What is that?”
    “That, J-G, is a bolt. It was lying next the wall in a dark little recess in the carrier’s main corridor. Where the construction crew just installed the number eighteen pressure seal.”
    Thing was good as a bullet lying there. “I want to see the count sheet. I want the last crew that worked in there. Damn those fools!”
    “Station labor. Gravitied brains. What do you ask?”
    Ben said, “You remember Graff?”
    “Yeah,” Dekker said.
    “What do you remember?”
    “The trip out from the Belt. Here.”
    “Good boy. Where are we?”
    “Sol Two,” he said. Ben told him so. He had to believe what Ben told him: Ben was the check he had asked for. Ben was what he got and he had to believe everything Ben told him—he told himself that, this morning. Ben showed him pictures and showed him letters in the reader, that he remembered reading. The ones from Meg, the note from Falcone, the morning—
    The morning they pulled him off the demo and put somebody else in.
    Nothing you can do, Falcone had written. Left the note on the system. Came back like a ghost—after the accident. After—
    “You remember where the sims are?”
    “Which ones?”
    “You tell me.”
    He felt tired, wrung out. He lay back in the pillows and said, “Couple downside. They’re all the procedurals.” Tried to think of exact words and remembered Ben was a licensed pilot too. “Ops stuff—stuff you need your reflexes for—it’s in the core.”
    “Null-g stuff.”
    “Null-g and high-g.” His eyes wanted to drift shut. His mind went around that place as if it were a pit. He could see the chamber in the null-g core, the sims like so many eggs on mag-lev tracks, blurring in motion. Lot of g’s when they were working. . ..
    “When’s the last time you remember using the sims in the core?”
    Difficult question for a moment. Then not so hard. “Watch before the test. Wilhelmsen and I—“
    “Wilhelmsen.”
    “He was my backup.”
    “friend of yours?”
    Difficult to say. “Chad...”
    “Wilhelmsen?”
    He nodded, eyes shut. “Son of a bitch, but he was all right. Didn’t dislike him. We got along.”
    “So they subbed him in. You watch the test?”
    He didn’t know. Completely numb now. But the monitor on the shelf was showing higher points to the green line.
    “You went into shock. They put you in hospital.”
    Wasn’t the way he remembered. Wasn’t sure what he did remember, but not that shock was the reason. No. He hadn’t seen it.
    “They give you drugs in the hospital?”
    He nodded. He was relatively sure of that.
    “Give you a prescription when you left?”
    “Dunno.”
    “They say they did.”
    “Then I guess they did.”
    “You guess. Were you still high when you left the hospital? Did you have drugs with you?”
    “I don’t remember.”
    “What time of day was it?”
    “Don’t remember, Ben, I don’t remember.”