Passage at Arms Page 12

  “I want music piped into the basement,” Lieutenant Varese says.

  “We went through this last patrol,” Yanevich replies.

  “We’ll keep going through it. I stick by my arguments. It’ll help morale.”

  “And generate heat.”

  “So secure it in Climb.”

  “No point discussing it this trip,” the Old Man says. “We don’t have the tapes.”

  Varese slaps the table, glares at the First Watch Officer. “Why the hell not?” His voice cracks.

  “We had to reduce mass to accommodate eighty-two kilos of writer. The library had to go.”

  “Everything?”

  “All but the study materials. Maybe that’ll speed up the cross-rate training.”

  I shrink from Varese’s venomous glare. I’m at the head of his shit list for sure.

  “I’ll get something from the mother,” Yanevich offers. “We’ve used most of the personal mass.”

  Varese isn’t to be mollified. He wants to fight. “No music?”

  “Sorry.”

  “A magnetic cannon and a goddamned useless extra body. Fucking shitheaded Command.”

  “Mister Varese,” the Commander says. The Lieutenant shifts his glare to his taut, pallid hands.

  “How about personnel?” I ask, shoving my fingers into the dragon’s mouth. “Fisherman... Junghaus looked like he might crack under pressure.”

  “So did you,” Yanevich says.

  Psych Bureau screens to the nth degree, but no test is perfect. People get past. They change under stress. There’s no follow-up testing of people assigned to Climber duty.

  Four men make the observation list. Junghaus isn’t one of them. I am.

  My ego has big bruises.

  I am an unknown quantity. I haven’t had Climber training. I haven’t been through the Psych test battery. I would’ve made the list had I gone through the exercises like a rock.

  Chief Nicastro makes the list because this is his last patrol, because he got married, because he’ll want so badly to make it home. The stress on him will be severe.

  The others are enlisted first patrollers who showed spooky. Jon Baake and Fehrenbach Cinderella. They’re Piniaz’s men. He made his own judgments, so it’s possible they were considered by harsher standards. Piniaz is a perfectionist.

  The nascent hostility between Varese and myself receives no mention. We’re like flint and steel, that man and I. He flat doesn’t like me. We’ll strike sparks no matter what I do to avoid it.

  The Old Man detains me when the meeting breaks up. He stares into nothing till I grow nervous, fearing he may be worried enough to leave me aboard the mother when the ship commences her patrol. Finally, “What do you think?”

  “It isn’t like the holo shows it.”

  “You’ve said that before. You’ve also said there’s got to be a better way.” He smiles that pale smile.

  “It’s true!”

  “Nothing is like it is on holo.”

  “I know that. I just didn’t expect it to be this different.”

  He slides away somewhere behind his eyes. Has he returned to Canaan? What is it? Marie? Navy as a whole? Something unrelated? He isn’t the sort to lay his soul out on a dissecting table. He’s a human singularity. You have to figure him out by inference and his effect on the orbits of others.

  “I’m going to put you in Weapons for a while. Don’t mind Piniaz. He’s a good man. Just playing an Old Earther role. Learn the magnetic cannon. You were good at ballistics.” He fiddles with his pipe, acting as if he wants to light up. I haven’t seen him smoke since we came aboard. In fact, this is the first I’ve seen that nasty little instrument since then. “And do some of your famous observing.”

  “What am I looking for? Personal problems? Like Jung-haus?”

  “Don’t worry about Fisherman. He’ll be all right. He’s found his way to cope. Ito is the man worrying me. Something’s eating him. Something more than usual.”

  “You just said...”

  “I know. It’s the Commander’s prerogative to contradict himself.”

  “There’s always something eating Old Earthers. They’re born with chips on their shoulders. What about Varese? I’m scared to turn my back on him.”

  “Bah! Nothing to worry about. He’s a culture nut. A pseudo. Wants to enlighten his philistines. He goes through the same routine every patrol. He’ll come out of it after we make contact.”

  “And you?” “Eh?”

  “I thought maybe something was bothering you.” “Me? No. All systems go. Raring to get into competition.” His face belies his words. I’ll watch him closer than Piniaz. He’s my friend... Is that why he wants me out of Ops?

  5 On Patrol

  It’s a twelve-day passage to the squadron’s patrol sector. As the days drift away, the men become quieter and more reserved. They have a crude, seldom reliable formula. A day’s travel outward bound translates to three days’ travel coming back. We’ve been aboard the Climber seventeen days.

  Fifty-one days to go? That seems unlikely. Few patrols last more than a month. There’s so much enemy traffic.... Hell, we could run into a convoy tomorrow, scramble, clear our missile elevators, and be home before the mother.

  Eventless travel leaves a lot of free time, despite the depressing frequency of drills. I’m spending a lot of time with Chief Energy Gunner Holtsnider. He of girder-clinging fame. He’s refreshing my knowledge of ballistic gunnery.

  “This’s your basic GFCS Mark Forty-six system,” he tells me. I guess this is the fifth time we’ve been through this. “You got your basic Mark Thirty gun order converter, and your basic gyros, stabile element, tracking, and drive motor units. Straight off a corvette secondary mount. You just got your minor modifications, what they call your One-A conversions, for spherical projectiles.”

  Yeah? Those are killing me. My poor senile brain keeps harking futilely after my Academy gunnery training.

  Half the problem is my sneaking suspicion that the Chief

  On Patrol 107 is learning while I am, staying a few pages ahead in the crisp new manual.

  “Now, off your radar, and your neutrino and tachyon detectors if you have to, and even your visuals if it comes to that, and your transiting missiles in norm, you get your B, your R, your dR, your Zs, your dE, and your dBs. You feed them all to your Mark Thirty-two. Then you get your Gf....”

  I keep getting lost in the symbols. I can’t remember which is relative motion in line of sight, angular elevation rate, angular bearing rate, gravity correction, relativity correction, light velocity lag time?”

  “And send your RdBs over V and your RdE over V to your Mark Thirty...”

  I could strangle the man. He has a too-ample store of that most essential of instructor’s virtues: patience. I don’t. I never had enough. Many a project and study have I abandoned for lack of patience to follow through.

  “... which brings your B prime gr and E prime g to your cannon train and elevation pump motors.” For all his patience, the Chief is ready to give me up.

  “Cheer up, Chief. We could be trying to program a twenty-meter ahburst in tandem quad with the co-battery in nadir.”

  “You did time in the bombards?”

  “Second Gunnery Officer on Falconier. Before this.” I tap the bad leg. “Thought everybody knew.”

  “I was in Howitzer before I cross-rated Energy.”

  We exchanged reminiscences about the difficulties of putting unguided projectiles onto surface targets from orbit. Tandem quads are the worst. Two (or more) vessels each fire four projectiles, over each pole and round each equatorial horizon, so that they all arrive on target simultaneously. Theory says the ground position can’t duck it all because it’s coming from everywhere at once.

  The bombards, or planetary assault artillery ships, are a poor man’s way of softening ground defenses. A way which, in my opinion, is a little insane and a whole lot optimistic. Budget people find the system attractive. It’s cheap. A soph
isticated missile delivering the same payload costs a hundred times as much.

  Once a world’s orbital defenses are reduced, bombards are supposed to blast away, creating neutralized drop zones for the Fleet Marines. The main weapon is a 50-cm magnetic cannon. It launches concussion projectiles of the “smart” type. The bomb packs a hell of a wallop but has to be on target to do its job.

  Bombard tactics were theoretical till the war. I was involved in just one live operation, against a base used by commerce raiders. I did most of my shooting in practice.

  The system was worthless. In practice on planetary ranges we found the ballistic ranges so long, and so plagued by variables, that precision bombardment proved impossible. My First Gunnery Officer claimed we couldn’t hit a continent using “dumb” projectiles.

  The other firm uses bombards, too. For harassment. For accuracy they rely on dropships, or use a missile barrage.

  “Ever shoot the range at Kincaid? Holtsnider asks.

  “That’s where I screwed up the leg.” Kincaid is a Mars-sized hunk of rock in Sol System’s cometary halo. Its orbit is perpendicular to the ecliptic. It’s so far out Sol is just another star.

  “I wondered. Didn’t think it would be polite to ask.”

  “Doesn’t bother me anymore,” I lie. “Except when I remember that it was my own fault.”

  Holtsnider says nothing. He just looks expectant.

  I have mixed feelings about telling the tale. The man shouldn’t give a damn, and probably doesn’t want me to bore him with the whole dreary story. On the other hand, there’s a pressure within me. I want to cry on somebody’s shoulder.

  “Remember the Munitions Scandals? With the Mod Twelve Phosphors for the Fifties?”

  “Bribes to government quality-control inspectors.”

  “Yes. Flaking in the ablation shields. Normal routine was to blow a cleaning wad every twentieth shot during prolonged firing. With the Jenkins projectiles we were getting flakes instead of dust. We had orders from topside to use them up practicing. The Old Man had us blowing a wad after every shot.”

  “Royal pain in the ass, what?”

  “In the kneecap, actually.” It’s easy to recall the frustration, the aggravation, and the sudden agony. They’re with me still. “We’d been at it watch and watch for three days. Trick shooting. Everything but over the shoulder with mirrors. We were all tired and pissed. I made the mistake. I blew the tube without making sure my trainee had opened the outer door.”

  “Recoil.”

  “In spades. Those outer doors can take a lot more pressure than the inner ones. So the inner door blew back while I was climbing up to reset for live ammo.”

  Holtsnider nods sympathetically. “Saw a guy lose his fingers that way. Our magnetics went out. We had a live time shell in the tube. He tried to blow it like it was a wad. Worked, too. But the inner door locks snapped. Lost two-thirds of our atmosphere before we got the outer door sealed.” He glances at my leg. “Medics had him good as new in a couple months.”

  “Wasn’t my day, Chief. We were alone out there. Nearest medship was in orbit at Luna Command. And the reason we were screwing around out there in the first place was because our number two hyper generator was down.

  “The medship hypered in fast, but by the time she arrived my knee was beyond salvation, more through the agency of an overzealous medical corpsman than from the initial injury.

  “Falconier was so old she wasn’t fit for training Reserves anymore, which’s what we were doing.”

  Funny. This sharing of an unpleasant past is loosening me up. I’m more relaxed. My mind works better. I feel the old data coming back. “Chief, let’s try it from the top.”

  I haven’t spent all my time in Weapons. I’ve tried, with limited success, to visit with each crewman. Other than the officers I met on Canaan, only Holtsnider, Junghaus, and Diekereide have cooperated. Varese’s Engineers barely remain civil. The men in Ship’s Services tolerate me only because they have to live with me. I hear they’ve convinced themselves that I’m the dreaded eido. My sessions with Holtsnider have eased the situation in Weapons. But only in Ops do I have much chance to ask questions.

  The Ops gang considers itself the ship’s elite. That pretense demands more empathy with the problems of another “intellectual.”

  I’m worried. Seventeen days gone, and no headway made. I still don’t know half the names. Climber missions don’t last long once the ship reaches its patrol zone. It’s in, make a couple of attacks, and get out fast. The other firm is sending so much traffic through that quick contact is inevitable.

  Westhause says it takes about a week to get home once the missiles are gone. Meaning I can’t count on more than another ten days to find my story.

  I mention it to the Commander during a lonely lunch in the wardroom. The others are preparing the shift to operational mode. I figure he has similar problems acclimating new men each patrol.

  “One thing to remember. No matter how much alike they act, they’re all different. When you get to the bottom line, the only thing they have in common is that they stand on their hind legs. You have to find the right approach for each man. You have to be a different person to every one.”

  “I can see that. From your viewpoint...”

  “You and me, we’re crippled by our jobs. What have they got to judge you by? The news nosies they’ve seen on holo. You have to break that image.”

  I nod. Those people are the pushiest, most obnoxious ever spawned. I understand their Tartar style, but I don’t like it and don’t want to be lumped with them.

  “Guess my best chance is a long patrol.”

  The Old Man doesn’t say anything. His face speaks for him. He’s ready to go home now.

  A Climber is, I’m convinced, our most primitive warship. Cheap, quickly built, and highly cost-effective if the combat statistics are valid. Balancing the statistics against the reality of Climber life, I develop a conviction that High Command considers our ships as expendable as the missiles they carry.

  We’re almost ready. The tension began building yesterday. We’re tottering at the brink. This fly, deep into the patrol zone, is sandpapering nerve ends. It’s about to climax. Action and death may be no more than an hour away.

  As senior ship, even though we don’t carry the squadron flag, we rate first separation. This is a tradition of Tannian’s Fleet. To the proven survivors go the small perks. Will the head start be worth anything in the long run?

  Suddenly, we’re beyond the moment of peak tension. The sealed orders have come through. The mother is about to drop hyper. We’ll be operational soon.

  The Old Man’s face is stiff and pale when he leaves his stateroom. His upper lip is lifted to the right in a faint sneer. He gathers Westhause, the First Watch Officer, our two Ops Chief Petty Officers, and myself. He whispers, “It doesn’t look good. Figure on being out a while. It’s beacon to beacon. Observation patrol. We start at Beacon Nineteen, Mr. Westhause. I’ll give you the progression data after I’ve gone over it myself.”

  Well. I may get time to break the ice after all. Running beacon to beacon means there’s been no enemy contact for a while. If they’re out there, they’re slipping through unnoticed. Because nothing is happening, the squadron will roam carefully programmed patterns till a contact occurs.

  I begin to comprehend the significance of our being on our own. We’ll be out of contact completely, unless we touch the rare instelled beacon. No comforting mother ship under our feet. No pretty ladies in a sister ship to taunt and tease when Throdahl isn’t using the radio more professionally. Alone! And without the slightest notion how near we are others of our kind.

  This could get rough, emotionally. These men aren’t the sort I’d choose as cellmates.

  Some three hundred observation/support beacons are scattered around Climber Fleet One’s operations zone. On beacon-to-beacon patrol a Climber pursues a semi-random progression, making a rendezvous each twelve hours. Ours is to be an observation pa
trol initially, meaning we’re supposed to watch, not shoot.

  The Commander shuffles order flimsies. “I’ll tell you what we’re looking for when I get this crap straight.”

  “What’re observation pauses?” I ask the First Watch Officer. The Old Man says we have to program several into our beacon progression.

  “Just go norm to see who did what last week.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  “Okay. If we’re not looking for something specific, we’ll make equally spaced pauses. Say each four hours. If Command is looking for something, we’ll drop hyper at exact times in specified places. Usually that means double-checking a kill. Ours or theirs.”

  “I see.”

  The beacons are refitted hulks. They form a vast irregular three-dimensional grid. When a Climber makes rendezvous, it discharges its Mission Recorder. In turn the beacon plays back any important news left by previous callers. The progress of a patrolling squadron is calculated so no news should be more than twenty-four hours old. It doesn’t work that well in practice, though.

  One in twenty beacons is instel-equipped, communing continuously with beacons elsewhere and with Climber Command. Supposedly, a vessel can receive emergency directives within a day and news from another squadron in two. On the scale of this war, that should be fast enough.

  Sometimes it does work, when the human factor doesn’t intrude too much.

  The other firm occasionally stumbles onto a beacon and sets an ambush. The beacons are manned but have small crews and few weapons. Climbers approach them carefully.

  Fortune has smiled on us in a small way. The competition hasn’t broken our computer key codes. If ever they do, Climber Fleet Tannian is in the soup. One beacon captured and emptied of information would destroy us all.

  The other firm wastes no time hunting beacons. It takes monumental luck to find one. Space is big.

  We’re operational now. Past our first beacon.

  Operational. Operational. I make an incantation of it, to exorcise my fear. Instead it has the opposite effect.

  The web between the beacons. The spider’s game. The vastness of space can neither be described nor overstated. When there’s no known contact the Climber’s hunt becomes analogous to catching mites with a spider’s web as loosely woven as a deep-sea fishing seine. There are too many gaps, and they’re too big. Though Command keeps the holes moving, ships still slip through unnoticed. Climbers often vanish without trace.