Free Hellburner by C. J. Cherryh Page B

seats. Bonner gave a speech, long and winding, a tactic, Graff thought, designed to stultify the opposition. Or perhaps his own troops. Not here to fix blame, Bonner said. Here to determine what happened and what caused it.
    Introductions. Graff found himself focusing on the walls, on the topographic details of Bonner’s receding hairline, the repeating pattern in the soundproofing, on the nervous fingers of the rep from Bauerkraftwerke, which tapped out a quiet rhythm on the table.
    Statement of positions: Bauerkraftwerke insisted there was no structural flaw, that its engineers had reconstructed the accident and there was nothing to do with failure of the frame or the engines. Terme Aerospatiale agreed. Lendler said its simulation software wasn’t at fault. Staatentek, the patent holder of the local AI tetralogic, maintained that the random ordnance software, the communications, the targeting software, had not glitched. Nobody was at fault. Nothing was wrong.
    But a redesign in favor of the tetralogic control couldn’t be ruled out.
    Bangs and thumps again. “Ben?” Dekker called out. Ben had said he would be there. But he waked up in a corridor, on a gumey, with restraints he didn’t remember deserving. “Ben!”
    A nurse patted his shoulder and said, “It’s all right, your friend’s just outside.”
    He hated it when the illusions started agreeing with him.
    He lay still then, listening to the rattle and clatter. Someone said, from over his head, “We’re going to take you in, now,” and he didn’t know where. He yelled, “Ben! Ben!”
     
    And somebody said, “Better sedate him.”
     
    “No,” he yelled. “No.” And promised them, “You don’t need to.”
     
    “Are you going to be all right?” they asked him.
     
    “Yeah,” he said, and lay there getting his breath. But there was a whine of hydraulics and a clank, and they shoved him into a tube, telling him: “You have to stay absolutely still...”
     
    Like a spinner tube, it was. Like back in the belt, in the ship. He lay still the way they told him, but it got harder and harder to breathe.
     
    Flash of light. Like the sun. He heard a beeping sound that reminded him—that reminded him—
     
    “Elly—Elly, Wilhelmsen, don’t reorient, screw it, screw it, you’re past—“
    “He’s panicking,” someone said.
    He screamed, at the top of his lungs, “Wilhelmsen, you damned fool—“
    Fifteen-minute recess. Break for restrooms and the corridor and the hospitality table.
    Mitch moved close enough to say, “They’re dithering, sir.”
    Graff said, “Ease down. Not here.”
    “They’re saying it can’t be flown. That’s a damn lie.”
    “Ease down, Mitch. Nothing we can do out here.” He had Saito at his elbow. He could see Tanzer down the hall with Bonner, in hot and heavy discussion.
    Demas came back from the phone in the office. Said: “A word in private.”
    Graff said, “Mitch. Be good,” and took Saito with him, farther up the hall. “You get him?”
    “Couldn’t get hold of Pollard. Talked to Higgins. The neurosurgeon wanted to run another brain scan. Higgins and Evans agreed. Dekker went off the edge, he’s under sedation. Higgins says he remembers the accident. Nothing further. He may never be able to remember how he got in that pod.”
    “Damn.”
    “You’ve got to tell it plain, Helm.”
    “Break it wide open? We don’t know what the captain wants. We don’t know and if it were safe to use FleetCom he would.”
    Saito said, “It can’t be worse. At this point I’d advise going past protocol. Worst we can do is alienate Bonner and a few handpicked legislators who came out here with him. This is a set-up. But it has records. The contractors are here defending their systems. And there may be a few line-straddlers in the senatorial party.”
    That was a point. Bonner was already alienated. This was likely a breakaway group of legislators Bonner favored putting in here to hear what Tanzer put