Passage at Arms Read online

  I can understand the reasons. They don’t help me like it any better.

  I met Commander Johnson and her officers in Turbeyville. They taught me that, under like pressures, women are as morally destitute as the worst of men, judged by peacetime standards.

  What are peacetime standards worth these days? With them and a half-dozen Conmarks you can buy a cup of genuine Old Earth coffee. Price six Conmarks on the black market.

  The first dropship whips in along the carrier’s backtrail, taking us by surprise. Her sonic wake seizes the vehicle, gives it one tremendous shake, and deafens me momentarily. Somehow the others get their hands to their ears in time. The dropper becomes a glowing deltoid moth depositing her eggs in the sea.

  “There’s some new lifters that’ll need to be built,” Westhause says. “Let’s hope what we lost were Citron Fours.”

  My harness is suddenly a trap. Panic hits me. How can I get away if I’m strapped down?

  The Commander touches me gently. His touch has a surprisingly calming effect. “Almost there. A few hundred meters.”

  The carrier stops almost immediately. “You’re a prophet.” It’s a strain, trying to sound settled. That damned open sky mocks our human vulnerability, throwing down great bolts of laughter at our puniness.

  A second dropper cracks overhead and leaves her greetings. A lucky ground weapon has bitten a neat round hole from her flank. She trails smoke and glowing fragments. She wobbles. I missed covering my ears again. Yanevich and Bradley help me out of the carrier.

  Bradley says, “Bad shields on that one.” He sounds about two kilometers away. Yanevich nods.

  “Wonder if they’ll ever get her back up.” The First Watch! Officer commiserates with fellow professionals.

  I stumble several times clambering through the ruins. The boom must have scrambled my equilibrium.

  The entrance to the Pits is well hidden. It’s just another shadow among the piles, a man-sized hole leading into one of war’s middens. The rubble isn’t camouflage. Guards in full | combat gear loaf inside, waiting to clear new debris when the last dropship finishes her run, hoping there’ll be no work to do.

  We trudge through the poorly lit halls of a deep subbasement. Below them lie the Pits, a mix of limestone cavern and wartime construction far beneath the old city. We have to walk down four long, dead escalators before we find one still working. The constant pounding takes its toll. A series of escalators carries us another three hundred meters into Canaan’s skin.

  My duffel, all my worldly possessions, is stuffed into one canvas bag. It masses exactly twenty-five kilos. I had to moan and whine and beg to get the extra ten for cameras and notebooks. The crew, including the Old Man, are allowed only fifteen.

  The last escalator dumps us on a catwalk overlooking a cavern vaster than any dozen stadia.

  “This is chamber six,” Westhause says. “They call it the I Big House. There are ten all told, and two more being excavated.”

  The place is as warm with frenetic activity. There are people everywhere, although most of them are doing nothing. The majority are sleeping, despite the industrial din. Housing remains a low priority in the war effort.

  “I thought Luna Command was crowded.”

  “Almost a million people down here. They can’t get them to move to the country.”

  Half a hundred production and packaging lines chug along below us. Their operators work on a dozen tiers of steel grate. The cavern is one vast, insanely huge jungle gym, or perhaps the nest of a species of technological ant. The rattle, clatter, and clang are as dense as the ringing round the anvils of hell. Maybe it was in a place like this that the dwarfs of Norse mythology hammered out their magical weapons and armor.

  Jury-rigged from salvaged machinery, ages obsolete, the plant is the least sophisticated one I’ve ever seen. Canaan became a fortress world by circumstance, not design. It suffered from a malady known as strategic location. It still hasn’t gotten the hang of the stronghold business.

  “They make small metal and plastic parts here,” Westhause explains. “Machined parts, extrusion moldings, castings. Some microchip assemblies. Stuff that can’t be manufactured on TerVeen.”

  “This way,” the Commander says. “We’re running late. No time for sight-seeing.”

  The balcony enters a tunnel. The tunnel leads toward the sea, if I have my bearings. It debouches in a smaller, quieter cavern. “Red tape city,” Westhause says. The natives apparently don’t mind the epithet. There’s a big new sign proclaiming:

  WELCOME TO

  REDTAPECITY

  PLEASE DO NOT

  EAT THE NATIVES

  There’s a list of department titles, each with its pointing arrow. The Commander heads toward Outbound Personnel Processing.

  Westhause says, “The caverns you didn’t see are mainly warehouses, or lifter repair and assembly, or loading facilities. Have to replace our losses.” He grins. Why do I get the feeling he’s setting me up? “The next phase is the dangerous one. No defenses on a lifter but energy screens. Can’t even dodge. Shoots out of the silo like a bullet, right to TerVeen. The other firm always takes a couple potshots.”

  “Then why have planetside leave? Why not stay on TerVeen?” The shuttling to and fro claims lives. It makes no military sense.

  “Remember how crazy the Pregnant Dragon was? And that place was just for officers. TerVeen isn’t big enough to take that from three or four squadrons. It’s psychological. After a patrol people need room to wind down.”

  ‘To get rid of soul pollution?”

  “You religious? You’ll get along with Fisherman, sure.”

  “No, I’m not.” Who is, these days?

  The check-in procedure is pleasantly abbreviated. The woman in charge is puzzled by me. She putzes through my orders, points with her pen. I follow the others toward our launch silo where a crowd of men and women are waiting to board the lifter. The presence of officers does nothing to soften the exchange of insults and frank propositions.

  The lifter is a dismal thing. One of the old, small ones. The Citron Four type Westhause wants scrubbed. The passenger compartment is starkly functional. It contains nothing but a bio-support system and a hundred acceleration cocoons, each hanging like a sausage in some weird smoking frame, or a new variety of banana that loops between stalks. I prefer couches myself, but that luxury is not to be found aboard a troop transport.

  “Go-powered coffin,” the Commander says. “That’s what ground people call the Citron Four.”

  “Shitron Four,” Yanevich says.

  Westhause explains. Explaining seems to be his purpose in life. Or maybe I’m the only man he knows who listens, and he’s cashing in while his chips are hot. “Planetary Defense gives all the cover they can, but losses still run one percent. They get their share of personnel lifters. Some months we lose more people here than on patrol.”

  I consider the obsolete bio-support system, glance at the fitting they implanted in my forearm back in Academy, a thousand years ago. Can this antique really keep my system cleansed and healthy?

  “You and the support system make prayer look attractive.”

  The Commander chuckles. “The Big Man wouldn’t be listening. Why should he worry about a gimp-legged war correspondent making a scat fly from one pimple on the universe’s ass to another? He’s got a big crapshoot going on over in the Sombrero.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You asked for it.”

  “One of these days I’ll learn to keep my balls from overloading my brain.”

  For the others the launch is routine. Even the first mission people have been up this ladder before, during training. They jack in and turn off. I live out several little eternities. It doesn’t get any easier when our pilot says, “We punched up through a dropship pair, boys and girls. Should have seen them tap dancing to get out of the way.”

  My laugh must sound crazy. A dozen nearby cocoons twist. Disembodied faces give me strange, almost compassionate looks.
Then their eyes begin closing. What’s happening?

  The bio-support system, into which we have jacked for the journey, is slipping us mickeys. Curious. Coming in to Canaan I didn’t need a thing.

  My lights go out.

  I have trouble understanding these people. They’ve reduced their language to euphemism and their lives to ritual. Their superstitions are marvelous. Their cant is unique. They are so silent and unresponsive that at first glance they appear insensitive.

  The opposite is true. The peculiar nature of their service oversensitizes them. They refuse to show it. They are afraid to do so because caring opens chinks in the armor they have forged so their selves can survive.

  The boomer drop was rough for me. I could see and hear Death on my backtrail. It was personal. Those droppers were after me.

  Navy people seldom see the whites of enemy eyes. Line ships are toe to toe at 100,000 klicks. These men are extending the psychology of distancing.

  Climbers sometimes do go in to hand-to-hand range. Close enough to blaze away with small arms if anyone wanted to step outside.

  The Climber lexicon is adapted to depersonification, and to de-emotionalizing contact with the enemy. Language often substitutes for physical distance.

  These people never fight the enemy. Instead, they compete with the other firm, or any of several similar euphemisms. Common euphemisms for enemy are the boys upstairs (when on Canaan), the gentlemen of the other firm, the traveling salesmen (I suppose because they’re going from world to world knocking on our doors), and a family of related notions. Nobody gets killed here. They leave the company, do any number of variations on a theme of early retirement, or borrow Hecate’s Horse. Nobody knows the etymology of the latter expression.

  I’m trying to adopt the cant myself. Protective coloration. I try to be a colloquial chameleon. In a few days I’ll sound like a native and become as nervous as they do when someone speaks without circumlocution.

  The Commander says the TerVeen go was a holiday junket. Like taking a ferry across a river. The gentlemen of the other firm were busy covering their dropships.

  TerVeen isn’t a genuine moon. It’s a captive asteroid that has been pushed into a more circular orbit. It’s 283 kilometers long and an average 100 in diameter. Its shape is roughly that of a fat sausage. It isn’t that huge as asteroids go.

  The support system wakened us when the lifter entered TerVeen’s defensive umbrella. There’re no viewscreens in our compartment, but I’ve seen tapes. The lifter will enter one of the access ports which give the little moon’s surface a Swiss cheese look. The planetoid serves not only as a Climber fleet base, but also as a factory and mine. The human worms inside are devouring its substance. One great big space apple, infested at the heart.

  The process began before the war. Someone had the bright idea of hollowing TerVeen and using it as an industrial habitat. When completed, it was supposed to cruise the Canaan system preying on other asteroids. One more dream down the tubes.

  The address system begins hurrying us up before everyone is completely awake. I spill out of my cocoon and windmill around, banging into a half-dozen people before I grab something solid. Almost zero gravity. There’s no spin on the asteroid. They didn’t warn me.

  I don’t get a chance to complain. Yanevich tows me outside, down a ladder, and into an alcove separated from the docking bay by its own airlock. Yanevich will be our First Watch Officer. He checks names against an assignment roster as our people join us. There are a lot of obscene exchanges between our men and the ladies mustering along the way. These boys’ mothers would be shocked by their sons’ behavior. The mothers of the girls would disown their daughters.

  I’m amazed by how young they all look. Especially the women. They shouldn’t know what men are for, yet... Christ! Are they that young or am I getting that old?

  I ask one of my questions. “Why doesn’t the other firm bring in a Main Battle Fleet? It shouldn’t be that hard to scrub Canaan and a couple of moons.”

  Yanevich ignores me. The Commander is studying faces and showing his own. Bradley is scooting around like a kid during his first day on a new playground. Westhause has the volunteer mouth again.

  “They’re stretched too thin trying to blitz the Inner Worlds. The guys bothering us are trainees. They hang out here a couple of months, getting blooded, before they take on the big time. When we get out there it’ll be a different story. The reps on those routes are pros. There’s one Squadron Leader they call the Executioner. He’s the worst news since the Black Death.”

  I’m getting tired of Westhause’s voice. It takes on a pedantic note when he knows you’re listening.

  “Suppose they committed that MBF? It would have to come from inside. That would stall their offensive. If we carved it up, they’d lose the initiative. And we might cut them good.

  Climbers get mean when they’re cornered.” A hint of pride has crept in here.

  “Meaning they can’t afford to take time out to knock us off, but they can’t afford to leave us alone, either?”

  The Commander scowls my way. I’m not using approved phraseology.

  “Yeah. Containment. That’s the name of their game.”

  “The holonets say we’re hurting them.”

  “Damned right we are. We’re the only reason the Inner

  Worlds are holding out. They’re going to do something...”

  Westhause reddens under the Commander’s stony gaze. He has become too direct, too frank, and too enthusiastic. The Commander doesn’t approve of enthusiasm in the broader sense, only in enthusiasm for one’s job. And there it should be a subtle, low-key competence, not a rodeo holler.

  “The statistics. They’re learning. Making it harder and harder. The easy days are over. The glory days. But we’re still building Climbers faster than they’re retiring them. New squadron gets commissioned next month.”

  He leaves me to go exchange greetings with a small, very dark Lieutenant. There are few non-Causcasians in our crew. That would be because so many are native Canaanites. “Ito Piniaz,” Westhause says after the man departs. “Weapons Officer and Second Watch Officer. Good man. Doesn’t get along well, but very competent.” Just what the Old Man had to say. “Where was I?”

  I hear Yanevich murmur, “Flushing the tunnel with hot air.” Westhause doesn’t catch his remark.

  “Oh. Yeah. Time. That’s what it’s all about. We’re all racing the hourglass of attrition.”

  “Jesus,” the Commander mutters. “You write speeches for Fearless Fred?” I glance at him. He’s pretending an intense interest in the women down the way. “Enough is enough.”

  “Our firm is starting to pull ahead,” Westhause declares. The Commander looks dubious. We’ve all heard it before. High Command started seeing the light at the end of the tunnel the second week of the war. The glimmer hasn’t shone my way yet.

  “You guys coming? Or should we pick you up on our way home?” Only Yanevich, who is speaking, and the Commander remain. The rest of our lot have disappeared.

  “Yes sir.” Westhause glides into a naked shaft. It seems to plunge toward the planetoids’ heart. He floats upon nothing and grabs a descending cable. He controls his duffel with his other hand. He vanishes with the down-pop of a fast prairie dog. Yanevich follows him.

  “Your turn.”

  I take one look and say, “Not even without gravity.”

  The Commander grins. It’s the nastiest damned grin I’ve ever seen. He sticks me with a straight-arm. “Grab the cable.”

  I stop flailing and grab. The cable jerks me down the narrow, polished tube. There isn’t enough light to see much but an oily sheen as the walls speed by. The cable itself has optical fiber wound in. That sheds what little light there is.

  This is a claustrophobic setting. The shaft is only slightly more than a meter in diameter.

  I can just make out Yanevich below me. If I look up I can see the Commander’s grin coming after me. He has rolled so he’s coming along f
acedown. He’s laughing at some hilarious joke, and I’m afraid the joke is me. He shouts, “You puke in here and I’ll make you walk home from three lights out. Get ready to change cables. Damn it! Don’t look at me. Watch where you’re going.”

  I look down as Yanevich begins heaving himself along. He pumps the cable, falls free, pumps the cable again, gaining speed. He seizes the faster cable and pulls away into the darkness.

  I survive the exchange through the intercession of a tapered idiot fitting. It strips my death grip from the slow cable and transfers it to the faster one. The faster cable gives me a big yank and nearly turns me facedown. Now I know why Yanevich speeded himself up.

  “Damned dangerous,” I shout up the shaft. The Commander grins.

  From below, the First Watch Officer shouts, “Grab your balls. We’ll be hauling ass in a couple minutes.”

  I picture myself hurtling down this tube like a too-small ball in an ancient muzzle-loader, rickety-rackety from wall to wall. I feel an intense urge to scream, but I’m not going to satisfy their sadism. I have a suspicion that’s what they’re waiting for. It would make their day.

  I suddenly realize that getting tangled in the cable is the real danger here. Envisioning that peril helps silence the howling ape’s instinctive fear of falling.

  “Shift coming up.”

  I try to imitate Yanevich this time. My effort earns its inevitable reward: I manage to get myself turned sideways. I can’t find the cable again.

  “Whoa!” the Commander shouts. “Don’t flail around.” He shoves down on the top of my head, mashing my cap. Yanevich slides up out of the darkness and snags my right ankle. They turn me. “Get a hold. Carefully.”

  The real trick is to avoid getting excited. I feel cocky when we hit bottom. I’ve figured it out. I can keep up with die best of them. “There must be a better way.”

  The Commander’s grin is bigger than ever. “There is. But it’s no fun. All you do is climb onto a bus and ride down. And I that’s so boring.” He indicated cars unloading passengers along a wall a hundred meters away. People and bags are floating around like drunken pigeons. Some are our men, some the women who shared our lifter.