He hated being sneaked up on, hated the office-sitters that would blindside a man and made him look around to see where they were—or whether they were there and not a phonecall. He turned and saw three of them in ASTEX Security green, sailing his way down the hand-line.

“Yessir,” he said, before they got there. “Details have already gone to BM. Any problem?”

“Just a few questions,” Wills said. Before he got there.

CHAPTER 5

YOU have any theories to explain what happened?” Wills asked. The cops hung face to face with him, all of them maintaining position with holds on the safety-lines, and you about needed the earpiece to hear at the moment over the thundering racket from a series of loads going down the spinning core. Bird, mindful of the Optex Wills was wearing, shrugged, shook his head and said, mostly honestly: “Could’ve caught a rock. Helluva bash on one side. On the other hand, the bash could’ve been secondary. Maybe he was working real close in and just didn’t see another one coming, dunno, really, dunno if it’s going to be easy to tell. We didn’t go outside, just got a look on vid. We did make a tape.”

“We’ll want that. Also your log. Did you remove anything from the wreck?”

“We took out the rescuee and the clothes he was wearing. Nothing else. We washed ‘em and he’s still wearing ‘em. He had his watch, and nothing in his pockets. He’s still wearing the watch. Anything else we left aboard, even his clothes and his Personals. You wouldn’t want to open up without a decon squad. It’s a real mess in that ship.”

“Any idea where the partner is?”

“Evidently she was outside when the accident happened. He kept trying to call her, kept trying when he was off his head, I guess he tried til he couldn’t think of anything else. They’re from Rl. Her name was Cory. That’s all we ever figured out. His life systems were near gone, ship was tumbling pretty bad. He’d taken a lot of knocks.” He hoped to hell that would cover Ben’s ass about the bruises. He felt dirty doing it, but he would have felt dirtier not to. “Kid was pretty sick from breathing that stuff, kept hallucinating about having to call his partner—evidently did everything he could to find her, sick as he was.” He tried to put Dekker in the best light he could, too, fair being fair. “When we got to him, I guess he just finally realized she was gone. Fever set in—he’s been off his head a lot, just keeps asking over and over for his partner, that’s all.”

“What would he say?”

“Just her name. Sometimes he’d yell Look out, like he was warning someone. Kid’s exhausted. Like when you give up and then the adrenaline runs out.”

“Yeah,” Wills said. “Didn’t happen to say why they were out of their zone?”

“He didn’t know they were out of their zone.”

“So he did say something else.”

“We had to explain we were taking him to R2. It upset him. He was lost, disoriented. The accident must’ve happened the other side of the line.”

Cops never told you a thing. Wills grunted, monkeyed along the lines toward the hatch as if he was going inside. The other officers followed. But one of the blue-suited meds was outbound, towing a stretcher with Dekker aboard, and the other meds were close behind. The cops stopped them at the lines just outside the hatch, delayed to look Dekker over, talk to the meds, evidently asked Dekker something: there was a lot of machinery noise on the dock—they must be loading or offloading—and he couldn’t hear what they said or what Dekker answered. They only let the meds take him away, and that course came past him.

They had wrapped Dekker up in blankets, had him strapped into the stretcher, and Dekker looked wasted and sick as hell. But his eyes were open, looking around. The meds brought the stretcher to a drifting stop and said, “You want to say goodbye?”

It was one of those faces that could haunt a man, Dekker’s lost, distracted expression—but Dekker seemed to track on him then.

“Bird,” he said faintly through the noise and the banging overhead. “Where’re they taking me?”

Dekker looked scared. Bird wanted it over with, wanted to forget Dekker and Dekker’s nightmares and the stink and the cold of that ship, not even caring right now if they got anything for their trouble but their refit paid. He sure didn’t want an ongoing attachment; but that question latched on to him and he found himself reaching out and putting a hand against Dekker’s shoulder. “Hospital. That’s all, son. You’re on R2 dock. You’ll be all right.”

Bird looked at the meds, then gave a shrug, wanting them to go, now, before Dekker got himself worked up to a scene. They started away.

“Bird?” Dekker said as they went. And called out louder, a voice that cut right to the nerves, even over the racket: “ Bird?”

He exhaled a shaky breath and shook his head, wanting a go at the bar real bad right now.

Ben came out of the hatch with their Personals kits. The police stopped him and insisted on taking the kits one by one and turning them this way and that. They were asking Ben questions when he drifted up, and Ben was saying, in answer to those questions, “The guy was off his head. Didn’t know what he’d do next. Screaming out all the time. Thinking it was his ship he was on. We had to worry he’d go after controls or something.”

He scowled a warning at Ben, but not a plain one: there was the Optex Wills was making of every twitch they made. Ben was looking only at the officers. He said, to explain the scowl, “You’d be off your head too if you’d been banged around like that.”

“In the accident,” Wills said, fishing.

“Ship tumbling like that,” he said. “The wonder is he lived through it. Couldn’thave helped his partner. All he looked to have left was his emergency beeper, and when that tank blew, it didn’t go straight—you got this center of mass here, see, and you get this tank back here—”

You got too technical and the docksiders wanted another topic in a hurry.

Wills said, interrupting him, “Go into that with the Court of Inquiry. We’ll want to log those kits. Leave them with us and we’ll send them on to your residence. What’s your ID?”

“On the tag there.” Ben indicated his kit. “1347-283-689 is mine. Bird here’s 688-687-257. Ship’s open. Look all you like.”

“You can go now.”

You never got thanks out of a company cop either. Bird scowled, looked at Ben, and the two of them handed their way up lines toward the hand-line. A beep meant a boom was moving. Red light stained the walls. But the alarm was from the other end of the big conduit- and chute-centered tunnel that was the cargo mast. You could get dizzy if you looked at the core itself, if you let yourself just for a moment think about up and down or where you were. Bird focused on the inbound gripper-handle coming toward him, ignored the moving surface in the backfield of his vision—caught it and felt the first all-over stretch he’d had in months as it hauled him along. Ben had caught the one immediately behind him—he looked back to see.

“Customs,” he remarked to Ben, in a lull in the racket from the chutes. “I hope they’ve talked to the cops.”

“No trouble. We haven’t even got our Personals. Cops’ve got ‘em. Cops have got everything. They gave me this receipt, see?” He used his free hand to tap his pocket. “Hell, we’re just little guys. What are we going to have? We’ll get a wave-through. You watch.”

“They’ll give us hell.”

“So don’t tell ‘em it was out-zone. We reported it where the rules say. We got rights. Meanwhile we’re gone into a public contact area and there’s no use for them to check us, is there?”

“Rights,” he muttered. “We got whatever rights Mama decides to give us, is what we got.—What did you tell that cop about Dekker? Did you tell them he was crazy?”

“Hey, they don’t need my help to figure that. The meds belted him in good and tight when they took him away.”