Passage at Arms Read online

  “You prime son of a bitch.”

  “Now, now. You said you wanted to see it all.” He’s still grinning. I want to crack him one and push that grin around sideways. Bet they pull this one on all the new meat. He explains that the cable system is a carryover from TerVeen’s industrial days. Back then the cables carried high-speed freight capsules.

  I can’t pop a superior in the snot locker, so I try stomping angrily instead. The result is predictable. There is no gravity. Of course. I flail around for a handhold, which only makes matters worse. In seconds I put on an admirable combination of pitch, roll, and yaw.

  “Thought you said he was a veteran,” Yanevich observes laconically. Embarrassed, I get hold of myself.

  “See, you haven’t forgotten everything,” the Commander says.

  “I’ll get it back. Am I in for the whole new-fish routine?” “Not after we’re aboard. There’s no horseplay aboard a

  Climber.” He’s dreadfully serious. Almost comically so.

  There’ll be no chance to get even. Grimacing, I let him tug me down so we can begin the next phase of our odyssey.

  Westhause continues to explain. “What they did was drill the tunnels parallel to TerVeen’s long axis. They were cutting the third one when the war started. They were supposed to mine outward from the middle when that was finished. The living quarters were tapped in back then, too. For the miners. It was all big news when I was a kid. Eventually they would’ve mined the thing hollow and put some spin on for gravity. They didn’t make it. This tunnel became a wetdock. A Climber returns from patrol, they bring her inside for inspections and repairs. They build the new ones in the other tunnel. Some regular ships too. It has a bigger diameter.”

  In Navy parlance a wetdock is any place where a ship can be taken out of vacuum and surrounded by atmosphere so repair people don’t have to work in suits. A wetdock allows faster, more efficient, and more reliable repairwork.

  “Uhm.” I’m more interested in looking than listening.

  “Takes a month to run a Climber through the inspections and preventive maintenance. These guys do a right job.”

  Which is why the crews get so much leave between missions. They aren’t permitted to make their own repairs, even when so inclined.

  Westhause divines my thoughts. “We can stretch a leave if we work it right. Command always deploys the whole squadron at once. But we can come in as soon as we’ve used our missiles, if we have the fuel. So we get our month plus however long it takes the last ship to get home.”

  Within limits, I’m sure. Command wouldn’t keep eleven ships out of action waiting for a twelfth making a prolonged patrol. “Incentive?”

  “It helps.”

  The Old Man says, ‘Too much incentive, sometimes.” For a minute it seems he’s finished. Then he decides to go ahead. ‘Take Talmidge’s Climber. Gone now. Tried to fight the hunter-killers so he could use his missiles and be first ship back. No law against it, of course.” He falls silent again. Yanevich picks up the thread when it becomes obvious he’ll say nothing more.

  “Good encounter, too. He got three confirmed. But the rest crawled all over him. Kept him up so long half his people came back with baked brains. They set the record for staying up.”

  The story sounds exaggerated. I don’t pursue it. They don’t want to talk about it. Even Westhause observes a moment of silence.

  We climb aboard an electric bus. It takes its power from a whip running on a track clinging to the tunnel wall.

  “Only the finest for the heroes of the Climber Fleet,” the Old Man says, taking the control seat.

  The bus surges forward. I try to watch the work going on out in the big tunnel. So many ships! Most of them are not Climbers at all. Half the defense force seems to be in for repairs. A hundred workers on tethers float around every vessel. No lie-in-the-comer refugees up here. Everybody works. And the Pits keep firing away, sending up the supplies.

  I think of the Lilliputians binding Gulliver, looking at all those people on lines. And of baby Krohler’s spiders playing at little trial flights around Mom. Said creature is a vaguely arachnidian beast native to New Earth. It nests and nurses its young on its back. It’s warm-blooded, endoskeletal, and mammalian, a pseudo-marsupial, really, but it has a lot of legs and a magnificently extrudable whip of a tail, so the spider image sticks.

  Sparks fly in mayfly swarms as people cut and weld and rivet. Machines pound out a thunderous industrial symphony. Several vessels are so far dismantled that they scarcely resemble ships. One has its belly laid open and half its skin gone. A carcass about ready for the retail butcher. What sort of creature feeds on roasts off the flanks of attack destroyers?

  Gnatlike clouds of little gas-jet tugs nudge machinery and hull sections here and there. How the devil do they keep track of what they’re doing? Why don’t they get mixed up and start shoving destroyer parts into Climbers?

  A Climber appears. It looks clean. Very little micrometeorite scoring, even. “Doesn’t look like there’s anything wrong with that one.”

  “Those are the tricky bastards,” the Old Man muses. I assume he’ll award me another cautionary tale. Instead, he resumes staring straight ahead, playing the vehicle’s controls, leaving the talking to Westhause.

  “The critical heat-sensitive stuff gets replaced after every patrol. The laser weaponry, too. Takes too long to break it down and scan each part. Somebody back down the tube will get ours. We’ll get something that belonged to somebody who’s on patrol already.”

  “Pass them around like the clap,” Yanevich says.

  The Old Man snorts. He doesn’t approve of officers’ displaying crudity in public.

  Westhause says, “Everything has to be perfect.”

  I reflect on what I’ve seen of Climber people and ask myself, What about the crew? It looks like Command’s attitude toward personnel is the opposite of its attitude toward ships. If they can still say their names and crawl, and don’t scream too much going through the hatch, send them out again.

  The bus suddenly wrenches itself off the main track. The passengers howl. The Old Man ignores them. He wants to see something. For several minutes we study a Climber with the hull number 8. The Commander stares as if trying to divine some critical secret.

  Hull number 8. Eight without an alphabetical suffix, meaning she’s the original Climber Number 8, not a replacement for a ship lost in action. The Eight Ball. I’ve heard some of the legends. Lucky Eight. Over forty missions. Nearly two hundred confirmed kills, mainly back at the beginning. Never lost a man. Any spacer in the Climbers will sell his soul to get on her crew. She’s had a good run of Commanders.

  Westhause whispers, “She was his first duty assignment in Climbers.”

  I wonder if he’s trying to steal her luck.

  “Living on borrowed time,” the Old Man declares, and slams the bus into movement. Full speed ahead now, and pedestrians be ready to jump.

  The odds against a Climber’s surviving forty patrols are astronomical. No pun intended. There are just too many things that can go wrong. Most don’t survive a quarter that many. Only a few Climber people make their ten-mission limit. They drift from ship to ship, in accordance with billet requirements, and hope the big computer is shuffling them along a magical pathway. I think the odds would improve if the crews stayed together.

  Climber duty is a guaranteed path to advancement. Survivors move up fast. There’re always ships to be replaced, and new vessels need cadres.

  “Isn’t there a morale problem, the way people get shuffled?”

  Westhause has to think about that one, as though he’s familiar with emotion and morale only from textbook examples. “Some. The jobs are the same in every ship, though.”

  “I wouldn’t like getting moved every time I made new friends.”

  “I suppose. It’s not so bad for officers. Especially Engineers. But they only take people who can handle it. Loners.”

  “Sociopaths,” the Commander says softly. Onl
y I hear him. He makes a habit of commenting without elucidating.

  “You’re a call-up, aren’t you?”

  “Only to the Fleet. I volunteered for Climbers.”

  “How are Engineers different?” Navy is a conservative organization. Engineers don’t do much engineering. They don’t have engines to tinker with. Aboard line ships they still have boatswains. There’s no logical continuity from old-time surface navies.

  “They stay with one ship after three apprentice missions. They’re all physicists. A ship always has an apprentice aboard.”

  “The more I hear, the more I wish I’d kept my mouth shut. This looks bleaker all the time.”

  “One mission? With the Old Man? With CliRon Six? Shit. A cakewalk.” He’s whispering. The Commander isn’t supposed to hear. The set of the Old Man’s shoulders says he has. “You can do it standing on your head. You’re in the ace survivor squadron. We graduate more people than anybody. Hell, we’ll be back groundside before the end of the month.”

  “Graduate?”

  “Make ten. Guys make their ten with us. Hell, we’re at the bay already. There she is. In the nine spot.”

  A whole, combat-ready Climber looks like an antique spoked automobile wheel and tire with a ten-liter cylindrical canister where the hub belongs. Its exterior is fletched with antennae, humps, bumps, tubes, turrets, and one huge globe riding high on a tall, leaning vane reminiscent of the vertical stabilizer on supersonic atmosphere craft. Every surface is anodized a Stygian black.

  There are twelve Climbers in the squadron. They cling to a larger vessel like a bunch of ticks. The larger vessel looks like the frame and plumbing of a skyscraper after the walls and floors are removed. This is the mother, the command and control ship. She’ll carry her chicks into the patrol sector and scatter them, then pick up any patrolling vessels that have expended their missiles and need rides home.

  Though a Climber can space for half a year and few patrols last longer than a month, Command wants no range sacrificed getting to the zone, nor any stores expended. Stores are a Climber’s biggest headache, her Achilles’ heel. By their nature the vessels pack a lot of hardware into tightly limited space. There’s little room left for crew or consumables.

  “Awful lot of ornamentation,” I say.

  The Commander snorts. “And most of it useless. They’re always tinkering. Always adding something. Always upping our dead mass and cutting our comforts. Patrols are getting shorter and shorter, aren’t they? This time it’s a goddamned magnetic cannon that shoots ball bearings. Just a test run, they say. Shit. Six months from now every ship in the Fleet will have one. Can’t think of a damned thing more useless, can you?”

  He’s steamed. He hasn’t said this much, in one lump, since I arrived. I’d better prod while the prodding is good. “Maybe there’s a use. Might find it in the mission orders. Something new to try.”

  “Shit.” He folds up again. I know better than to go after him. That just makes him stay closed longer.

  I study the mother and Climbers. Nine slot. That one will be my home.... For how long? Quick patrol? I hope so. These men would be hard to endure over a prolonged mission.

  2 Canaan

  I stepped off the courier ship, dropped my gear, looked around. “This is a world at war?”

  The courier had dropped us in the middle of a grassy plain that stretched unbroken to every horizon. That vista would have scared the shit out of someone less accustomed to open spaces. I confess to mild wobblies of my own. Service people don’t spend much time out of doors.

  In the near distance, a vast herd of beef cattle decided we f were harmless and resumed grazing. Shadowing them were a few outriders. Kick out cattle and horsemen and there’d have been no evidence that this was an inhabited world.

  “Cowboys? For Christ’s sake.” They weren’t Wild West cowboys, but not that different, either. The nature of a profession often defines its garb and gear.

  The courier joined me. “Picturesque, isn’t it?”

  “After that ride coming in... What the hell was all the jumping about?” A courier boat has no room for observers on its bridge. I’d gone through the approach blind.

  “Destroyer. Old scow.” He snapped his fingers and grinned. “Shook her like that.”

  “How come you’re such a pale shade, then?” My shipmate of the past few weeks was a black sub-Lieutenant whose main pleasure was the witty ethnic insult. He didn’t argue that one. It’d been a tight squeeze.

  “They’ll be along any minute. Said they were sending somebody.”

  “Why out here? Why not straight into Turbeyville?” He hadn’t revealed his landing plan beforehand.

  “We’d have got smoked. Planetary Defense doesn’t waste time shitting around with Fleet couriers. They’re busy covering the lifter pipe from the Pits. They don’t want to hear from home anyhow.” He patted the case chained to his wrist. Odd, I thought, that it should be so huge. Suitcase size. Big suitcase. “They’ll cuss me for two weeks.”

  I studied the chain. “Damn. I’ll have to cut your hand off now.”

  “That isn’t funny.” The poor bastards. They get so paranoid they won’t turn their backs on their own mothers.

  The chain was long. He put the case down and sat on it. He said, “Just open them baby blues and turn yourself a slow circle, Lieutenant.”

  I did. The plains. The grass. The cowboys, who showed no interest in the boat.

  “What do you see?”

  “Not a whole lot.”

  “You’ve seen it all. Change your plans. Come on home with me.”

  “There’s more to it than this.”

  “Well, sure. Trees, mountains, some busted-up cities. Big deal. Look, at those bastards. Hunking around on horses. And they’re the lucky ones. They don’t live in caves. No boomer drops on cows.”

  “I fought too hard to get here. I’ll see it through.”

  “Fool.” He grinned. “Climbers, yet. Here it comes.” He pointed. A skimmer wove a sinuous path across the green, a small, dark boat chopping through a breezy sea.

  It rumbled up to us, down wash whipping torn grass against our legs. “Still not too late, Lieutenant. Go hide in the boat.”

  I smiled my holo-hero smile. “Let’s go.”

  It’s easy to grin when the fiercest monster in sight is a cow. I’d ridden the killer bulls of Tregorgarth. I was ready for anything.

  The skimmer driver waved impatiently. “Not the wide-open-spaces type,” the courier guessed.

  We boarded. Our steed surged forward, arcing past the herd, leaving a long, dull snail track of smashed grass. Cows and cowboys watched with equally indifferent eyes. Our driver had little to say. She was the surly type. You know, “My feelings are hurt just by being here with you.”

  The sub-Lieutenant stage-whispered, “You’re an offworlder, they figure you’re a High Command spy. They hate High Command.”

  “Can’t blame them.” Canaan had been under soft blockade for years. It made life difficult.

  Back when, the other side hadn’t thought Canaan worth occupation. Big mistake. It was a tough nut now. The senior officer in the region, Admiral Tannian, had assembled scattered, defeated, ragtag units for a dramatic last stand. The Ulantonids disappointed him. So he dug in and began gnawing on their supply lines. Now they are too heavily committed elsewhere to give him the squashing he wanted.

  Great stuff, Fortress Canaan, High Command decided. They sent Tannian the first Climber squadron into service. He saw their potential instantly. He created his own industrial base.

  You couldn’t question the Admiral’s energy, dedication, or tenacity. Canaan, an agricultural world sparsely settled, overnight became a feisty fortress and shipbuilding center. A loose frontier society became a tight warfare state with a solitary purpose: the construction and manning of Climbers. All Tannian demanded of the Inner Worlds was a trickle of trained personnel to cadre his locally raised legions. A bargain. High Command gladly obliged. To the sorrow of ma
ny ranking officers with ambitions or personal axes to grind.

  Admiral Frederick Minh-Tannian became proconsul of Canaan’s system and absolute master of humanity’s last bastion in this end of space. Down the line, on the Inner Worlds, he was considered one of the great heroes of the war.

  It was an hour’s run to the nearest Guards’ outpost. The place fit the Wild West image. Adobe walls surrounded scores of hump-backed bunkers. Most of those boasted obsolete but effective detection antennae. There were barracks for several hundred soldiers, and a dozen armed floaters.

  My companion said, “I usually put down here. One company. It patrols more area than France on Old Earth. Six regular soldiers. The Captain, a Lieutenant, and four sergeants. The rest are locals. Serve three months a year and chase cows the rest. Or dig turnips. They bring their families if they have them.”

  “I was wondering about the kids.” It was the most unmilitary installation I’d ever seen. Looked like a way station three years into a Volkerwanderung. It would’ve given Marine sergeants apoplexy.

  The Captain wasted little time on us. He spoke with the courier briefly. The courier opened that huge case and passed over a kilo canister. The Captain handed him some greasy Conmarks. They were old bills, pre-war pink instead of today’s lilac gray. The courier shoved them inside his tunic, grinned at me, and went outside.

  “Coffee,” he explained. And, “A man has to make hay while the sun shines. A local proverb.”

  My glimpse inside the case had shown me maybe forty more canisters.

  It was an old, old game with Fleet couriers. The brass knew about it. Only their pets received courier assignment. Sometimes there were kickbacks. My companion didn’t look like a man whose business was that big.

  “I see.”

  “Sometimes tobacco, too. They don’t raise it here. And chocolate, when I can make the contacts back home.”

  “You should’ve loaded the boat.” I didn’t resent his running luxuries. Guess I’m a laissez-faire capitalist at heart.