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"Why'd you do it, Ben?"
Late. Third shift on the carrier. Window screens showed the usual view of space and nothing else. They were playing cards in the lounge; the girls were in bed. Should probably be there too, but life on a carrier tended to screw hell out of your sleep schedule. It was weeks of nothing and then scramble in five minutes, and it never failed, they would scramble you right in the middle of a sleep shift. Growing up on a station, Ben didn't have that solid a circadian rhythm anyway; Earth types complained to holy hell about it, but he didn't mind that much. Still, sometimes it meant bumping around the carrier at odd hours, feeling dry-eyed and tired and annoyed by all and sundry.
Which of course was the sort of night Dekker would pick to ask that kind of question.
"Why'd I do what?" he asked tetchily, shuffling the cards. "Take the last sweet bun in the chow line? Swap that duty shift with Khatri's team? Leave hair in the shower?"
"No, I meant ..." Dekker hesitated, collecting his cards as Ben dealt them out, and when he spoke again, it was to the cards, not to Ben. "Why'd you take the Aptitudes? Test into Fleet? You were dead set against it, flat not going to do it, and then you changed your mind. Why?"
Ben gazed across the table at his partner, who was sorting the cards with single-minded laser focus, eyes locked on and definitely not looking back. Dek looked like less of a space case these days than he used to. Still a skinny little sucker, looked like you could break him in half -- deceptively, as anyone knew who'd ever been on the receiving end of his fists. But he'd filled out these days, put on muscle, didn't have that lost-kid look in his eyes as much as he once did. Knowing Dekker's thoughts were jumping back to those days unsettled Ben. Like he'd told Sal once, time was a dimension Dekker couldn't be trusted with. Give that boy "now" and he was fine. Past or future, that's where you ran into trouble with a capital T.
Still, Ben had always been better at figuring Dekker than anyone else, even Meg. He wasn't really sure how it worked that way; it just did. But then, he was pretty good at figuring people, generally. He might not know why people did things, but knowing which way they were going to jump -- that was just numbers, and numbers were what he was good at.
Except sometimes Dekker would jump in a completely random direction and leave everybody around him scrambling to keep up. Some of it, Ben put down to Sol System, inner system kind of crazy. But a lot of it was just Dekker being Dekker, and not just to do with 70 days adrift in deep space with nothing but the ghost of his murdered partner to keep him company. He was pretty sure Dekker had always been a little bit that way.
Which didn't make it -- not to mention him -- any less of an effing pain in the ass.
"Got a reason for asking this now, Moonbeam? If I screwed something on the last run, just say."
"What? No!" That stung Dekker, made him look up and gave Ben a good look at his eyes, which was some kind of a relief. He didn't have that spaced-out look, just looked thoughtful and, now, upset. "You didn't do anything. You're doing great. All of you are."
"Thanks for the performance evals, Captain, be sure to take that into account --"
"No, it's just something that I was ..." Dek shrugged a shoulder and looked back down at his cards. "You know what? Never mind."
Just like Dek, backing down from a confrontation now that he'd got Ben's thoughts all riled up about it, spinning back to Sol Two and Porey and that first Hellburner run ... "Oh, first you want to talk about it and then you don't, that's how it works?"
"I said forget I asked. Asshole," Dekker muttered, reaching to draw a card from the discard pile. Son of a bitch, Ben had thought he was safe discarding that ace ...
"Okay, no, fine, you want to talk about this? You want to know why? Why do you think? Your old girlfriend's mama and her high-powered lawyers were after us, UDC cut us loose, Fleet as likely as not to court-martial us if we step out of line -- what was I supposed to do? You get ahead by playing the game, Dek-boy, until you can turn the rules your way; you toe every last line, not that you'd know anything about that, you sign the forms and dot the i's and cross the t's. You go where the situation looks best, not that the options were that great given all the shit you dragged us into back then, it was mostly just a case of finding a higher platform to stand on in the shit so not quite as much of it hit your head ..." That made Dek flinch. Good, Ben thought savagely, and discarded another goddamn ace because he wasn't thinking. Dekker wasn't too distracted to snap it up. Fucker.
"So you signed up to get shot at because you were afraid of Alyse Salazar's lawyers? That doesn't sound like you, Ben."
For all that "forget I asked", "oh no just ignore it" bullshit, Dekker sure could go for the throat when he wanted to.
"It wasn't being scared, you dipshit, it was seeing an elevator going up and jumping on it. No future in UDC, at least not a sure one -- you screwed that for me good and hard. But UDC's a clusterfuck anyway. Fleet's the up and coming thing, and Fleet's not just carriers and riders, not by a long shot -- it's offices and computers, it's guys writing the software that runs the carriers and riders, it's nice office blocks on a nice safe station and cushy assignments at HQ back on Earth. There's chances for promotion all up the line --"
"That's what you wanted? A nice good-paying office job back on Earth?"
"Well, that's what I had," Ben said, "til you fucked it up for me." Wasn't going to get that run of diamonds, might as well put down the seven ... let's see the asshole do something with that ...
"I'm sorry about that," Dekker said, contrite, but not too contrite to pick up the seven. God damn it, what was he building over there? Or was he just messing with Ben's head on that one? He was too good at that, picking up cards he didn't need, screwing up Ben's strategy ...
"I know, you said so, and it was a long time ago and I don't sit around holding grudges about it, unless some shithead brings it up."
"Just making conversation," Dek said, laying down a deuce. Clubs, same as the last ace, so he wasn't building a run off that ... might as well stop holding onto the three, then ...
"Yeah, the hell you were. Anyway, I'd think you'd know me well enough by now to figure it out yourself."
"So if you were going for a nice safe office job," Dekker said casually, as he ignored the three (ha, gotcha) and drew from the deck, "what are you doing here, then?"
Ben deliberately chose to misunderstand. "Little thing called orders, Dek-me-lad. Not that you'd know what those are, seeing how you only follow 'em when it's convenient ..."
"We were Hellburner 1," Dekker said, voice calm. "And we have a hell of a kill record. Someone who wanted to, someone who was going places, could spin that into a lot of pull for that office tower block, that nice safe Earth assignment."
"Are you," Ben said, deliberating carefully over his next play, because Dekker was very clearly putting something together that would not need an up-close acquaintance with this eight of diamonds, "... are you asking me if I'm leaving, Dekker?"
Dekker took a breath, in the way of someone who'd been braced for a hit and then found out it wasn't as bad as he was expecting. "More like I'm asking when you're leaving. You're right, Ben, I do know you, and I know manning a rider in a battle zone isn't any part of what you want. I also know there's never a time when you don't have five things going on in the background -- that was some hell of a coup you pulled off against MarsCorp, by the way, and thanks again for that --"
Ben preened. That had been a good piece of work if he did say so.
"... but you aren't a soldier, that's not you, we both know it. You're good on the boards, damn good, but you didn't want this, and I know you're good enough to get out if you want to. I'm just looking for a heads up, is all. You don't have to tell me what strings you're pulling on or where they lead, just tell me, maybe, what the timeline is. For Sal's sake if nothing else."
Low blow, that. Ben laid his cards facedown on the table. Dekker looked wary.
"I'm not going to hit you," Ben said. Threateningly.
"... good?"
"-- because you're sleeping with Meg, and she'd take offense to me messing up your face, and Sal would take her side like usual, and I'll be sleeping out here in the lounge for the next week. And I don't need that kind of trouble."
In the hole in the conversation that followed, Dekker quietly, and somewhat absently, drew another card. He didn't take his eyes off Ben, though.
"You're right," Ben said eventually. "All I want out of life is a comfortable desk chair, some computers to run numbers on, a fat load of cash in the bank, and most importantly, nobody shooting at me. I don't give a fuck about the war. Some might say that makes me a selfish son of a bitch; I say it makes me the only sane one out here. But there is one thing I don't do, Dekker, and I guess you can't calc this, not really, because you didn't grow up in the Belt, but I do not fucking screw over my partners."
He leaned forward, punctuating his words by tapping the table. A sleepy-looking bridge tech wandered in with a cup of coffee, took one look at them over by the window screens, and wandered out again.
"You're right, I'm pulling on strings. Damn straight I'm pulling on strings. But it's not one comfy desk chair on Earth I'm pulling strings for, you copy that, Captain Moonbeam? And one's not what I'm going to settle for. No, the bait on the hook that's gonna reel me in is four of 'em -- that, plus some kind of sweetener that's going to make it worth it to a couple of crazed adrenaline junkies like you and Kady, to drag you out of this shithole meat grinder of a war and back to somewhere sensible. And if we catch a stray shot before that happens -- if we do, or the carrier does -- then hell, que fuckin' sera, that's life."
Dek was staring at him, looking a little dazed, some of that space-cadet look back in his eyes.
"Am I making sense over here? Are we clear, or do I have to knock some of your teeth out after all, and get Meg and Sal on my case?"
"Crystal," Dekker said quietly. "Oh ..." He laid down his cards. "Gin, by the way. I think that's, what, forty-five bucks you owe me now?"
"Fuck you, Dekker, you piece of shit."
Dekker grinned.