Peacemaker. Gordon Kent
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had never mentioned his Navy career to her. It irritated him that she knew something like that without his having told her. “How’d you know that?” he said.
“My husband.”
Of course! That shithead Craik had told her all about him. He could picture the letters Craik had written home from the boat, full of self-pity and bitterness. He felt better. “I can imagine what he said about me,” Suter said with a smile.
“Really?” She had been writing, finished, looked up. “Actually, he didn’t say anything. I was the one who mentioned your name, and he put two and two together and guessed you were his old boss.”
“And then what’d he say about me?”
“Nothing.” She seemed surprised that he’d ask.
Well, of course he couldn’t believe that. Craik must have given her an earful. That was okay; bad press was better than no press. Maybe she found her husband just a bit of a shithead, too? “At least you mentioned my name to him,” he said with a grin.
“Valdez!” she shouted. She had a hell of a voice when she needed it; Suter resisted jumping out of his chair at her sudden bellow. Somebody had passed behind him out in the corridor. What the hell? he thought. A male voice behind him said, “Yeah,” and Rose called over and through Suter, “Show me how to acquire the Orbit Adjustment file out of White Sands, will you? I keep getting some message saying I’m committing an illegal act and I get closed down. It hurts my feelings.”
“Yeah, ma’am, I told you twice already.” He came in, a compact, dark, near-teenager in blue jeans. “Hey, how ya doin’?” he said to Suter without looking at him. He went right to Rose’s computer.
“Valdez is my resident geek,” she said. The words had a final tone to them, as if she had said something like, Oh, look how late it’s getting, meaning it was time for Suter to go. She turned away from him and toward Valdez, who was leaning over her computer.
“Uh—” Suter was annoyed. He didn’t like being dismissed. He liked even less being dismissed in favor of a Latino kid who had barely finished high school. “Maybe I’ll stick around and learn something,” he said.
She gave him a dazzling smile. “Valdez is the smartest computer jock in LantFleet. He’s got Silicon Valley after him—don’t you, Billie?”
“They jus’ want me for my body,” the kid said. His head was close to hers over the keyboard. Suter saw that he had a tiny tattoo behind his ear. Suter hated him.
Late in the day, Rose and Valdez caught a flight out of BWI to Houston. She was starting to ride herd on the thousands of details that affected the ship and the launch hardware; from Houston, they would go to Newport News to pick up the civilian ship for her week’s orientation. Go and go and go.
It was not enough for Rose to be assured by somebody else that things were going well. She had to see it for herself. She had to see the drawings, the mockups, the prototype. That first launch was not going off without her understanding everything about it. Valdez went along because he was her personal computer whiz—requested by name from her old squadron, where she had learned almost everything she knew about computers from him.
“How come you know so much, anyway?” she said as they flew over West Virginia, for once not using the flight to press her nose against the screen of her laptop. This was not a sudden desire to relax; Valdez was showing signs of unhappiness, and if her computer geek was unhappy, she knew she was going to be unhappy somewhere down the line.
“I’m a genius.” He meant it as a joke, but it was literally true, if you went by IQ scores.
“You weren’t born a computer geek, Valdez.”
“No, ma’am, I was born a spic. I was goin’ to be a criminal mastermind, but Mister Carvarlho got to me first.”
“Okay,” she said, “I’ll ask—who was Mister Carvarlho?”
“We called him ‘Mister Horse,’ because caballo means horse. You say ‘Carvarlho’ fast, it sounds like caballo—horse, okay? I hated him. He was PR, half black, he always wore suits, he was a born-again Christian with an attitude.”
“Not your ideal.”
Valdez laughed. “My nightmare! That guy was the opposite of everything I was gonna be. I was a gangbanger at eleven; at twelve, I was carrying a gun. No kiddin’! I had this Rossi .38 special, nickel, real shiny—I thought I was cool. I shot it once—I’m runnin’ the street at two a.m., just for the hell of it I shot it. Blam! I only had five bullets, that’s what it held—like a Chief’s Special, right, only a Rossi?—it was light, nice, but a lotta recoil for a little kid. Anyway, I carried that; I had a place I put it outside the school, I’d leave it in the morning, pick it up as soon as I got out. I was bad.”
The Navy didn’t like people who had been ba-a-a-d, she thought. He must have got awfully good awfully quick. “You never got caught?”
Valdez hesitated. He was slumped down in his seat, his left knee and calf pressed against the back of the seat in front. He was frowning. “My dad caught me. Him and me didn’t get along then. My dad—” Valdez squirmed upright. “He was workin’ two jobs, sendin’ money home, didn’t speak English—I came in drunk one night, he was comin’ home from his night job—I’m twelve years old, remember—and the gun drops out on the floor. He just looks at it, and then he starts to cry. I thought he was a jerk. I di’n’t know, you know? I see it now—the guy was worn out, beat down. But Jeez, to be a hotshit gangbanger and see your old man cry—! I thought I was so cool, man.”
Valdez plucked at a little packet of salted peanuts that had been put in front of him. “You understand about bein’ Latino?” he said. “In Cleveland?”
“Probably not.”
Valdez sniffed, like a bull inhaling. “Couple days later, I’m walking down the hall in school—I’m in junior high, seventh grade through ten are all together—and this hand comes outa nowhere and grabs my shoulder. I was gonna deck the guy. Nobody touched me—tough guy, huh? That’s when I found Mister Horse was one strong born-again Christian. One hand, he held me, I couldn’t move. ‘Come in here, young man,’ he says. Whoosh! I’m in his room. He holds me like a frigging vise! When I’m quiet, he says, ‘You are the newest member of the Computer Club. Welcome to the Club.’ I think he’s loco—I think he’s lost something up under his hair. Later, I find him and my father are in a Bible-reading thing together. My father has told him about the gun. Mister Horse sits me down in front of my first computer and puts a joystick in my hand and he turns on a simulation game.
“I’m hooked.”
He chewed on his peanuts. He shrugged. “Couple months later, I was doing simple programming.”
“How’s your father now?” she said.
“He died.” Valdez chewed. “He took my gun, he threw it in the river. I hated him. Then he was dead, I understood him a little better. Too late. Sad story, huh?”
“Well, yeah.”
“Lotsa sad stories. World is full of sad stories. Let’s change the subject.” Valdez squirmed again, shot a glance at her. “I’m not real happy with this job,” he said.
That was a surprise. A shock, in fact. “It’s a great job!” she said.
“Great for you, maybe.” He shook his head. “They’re not giving me stuff.”
“Who?”
“Them. Whoever.” He waved a hand. “In computers, what difference is who? Difference is what, Commander. Lemme put it in Navy: ‘Insufficient data are being provided to Petty Officer Valdez.’ See? No who.”
“Insufficient data about what?”
“If I knew that, I’d