Passage at Arms Page 5

  “Ah, let h go,” someone replied. “He wasn’t going to do us any good.”

  I withdrew into myself, drank some, and rolled the camera behind my eyes. When in shock, record. I remained only vaguely aware that the Commander was sitting out the squadron’s diminution. Like me, he was a seated statue with folded arms. I tried to remember “Ozymandias.” I came up with some lines about rose red cities and then couldn’t decide if I had the right piece. Why “Ozymandias,” anyway? I couldn’t remember that, either. Must have been a reason, though. I ordered another drink.

  He was observing, too, our silent, gallant Ship’s Commander. Back when, that had always been his excuse for not partaking of our clique’s conversational buffet.

  It grew late. The mob thinned considerably. I shipped a bigger cargo than I thought. The room began to rock a little, and I to wonder if our friends upstairs had a drop on tonight. The Commander touched my elbow gently. “Eh?” At the moment that was the most intelligent thing I could say.

  “Somebody you might remember.” He nodded toward a tall, lean blonde doing a slow strip atop a nearby table.

  I stared through misty eyes. At first I only wondered about her age. She looked older than most of the women.

  “Got her own ship,” the Commander said.

  Fascination and horror, lust and loathing, gusted through my sodden soul. I recognized her.

  She looked so old!

  Sharon Parker. The Virgin Goddess. The Bitch Queen of Academy Battalion Tango Romeo. How I’d loved and lusted after her at a tender seventeen. How many nights had I lain with my good right hand and imagined those creamy thighs clamping me?

  The memories were embarrassing. I’d been so much a fool that I’d declared my undying passion....

  She’d been as cold and remote as the dark side of Old Earth’s moon. She’d teased, taunted, promised forever afterward, and never had delivered. For me or anyone else, as far as I knew.

  Torturing me became her pet project. I was more obvious and vulnerable than my classmates.

  “No. Let it be.”

  Too late. The Commander waved. She recognized him. She left her little stage and came over. The Old Man kicked out an empty chair. She seemed slightly embarrassed as she settled into it. The Commander can have that effect. He seems so competent and solid, sometimes, that everyone around will feel second-rate and clumsy. I always do.

  She gave me one indifferent glance while crossing the room. Just another Lieutenant. Navy is infested with Lieutenants.

  “Good patrol?” the Commander asked.

  “Shit. Two old tubs that belonged in a transport museum. One escort destroyer. Only one tub confirmed. One lousy baby convoy. Twelve ships. We got off our missile flight, then the hunter-killers hit us. Thought it was the Executioner for a while. Took us nine days to shake them.”

  “Rough?” I asked.

  She shrugged, gave me another of those indifferent glances.

  I watched the light dawn. She turned bright red, shed the drunken table-dancer avatar like a snake sloughs skin. For one long moment she looked like she had a hot steel splinter under her fingernail.

  “You.” Another moment of silence. “You’ve changed.”

  “Haven’t we all?”

  She wanted to run so bad I could smell it. But it was too late. She’d been seen. She’d been caught. She had to face the consequences.

  I was both pleased and a little frightened. Could she value my good opinion that much?

  “Civilian influence,” I said. “I was out for a while. You’ve changed too.” I wanted to bite my tongue immediately. Not only was that the wrong thing to say, it slipped out sounding bitter. My brain was on vacation. My hands had made too many connections with my mouth, carrying too many drinks.

  “I heard about the accident.” Bravely bearing up, that was her attitude. “You making it okay now?”

  “Good enough,” I lied. Twelve years of Academy had done nothing to ready me for a sudden shift to civilian life. I could have gone on, I suppose, in a desk job, buried in Luna Command, but my pride hadn’t permitted it. I was Line, and by damn that was what I’d stay, or nothing. “I like the freedom. To bed when I want, up when I want. Go where I want. You know. Like that.”

  “Yeah. I know.” She didn’t believe a word.

  “So. What’ve you been doing?”

  “Climbing the ladder. Got my own ship now. Forty-seven Cee. Bravo Flight, Five Squadron. Seven patrols.” I couldn’t think of anything to say. After an embarrassed silence, she added, “And finding out what it’s like to be on the dirty end.”

  The conversation lay there awhile, like a beached whale too exhausted to struggle.

  “I’m sorry. For everything I did. I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know what you could do to somebody.”

  “Long ago and far away. Like it happened to somebody else. All forgotten now. We were just kids.”

  “No.”

  I’d lied again. And again she’d read me. It didn’t hurt as much now, but the pain was still there. There’re those small places where you never grow up.

  “Can we go someplace?”

  The thrill again. My libido recalled antediluvian fantasies. “I don’t think...”

  “Just to talk. You were always the best listener in the battalion.”

  Yes. I’d listened a lot. To problems. Everybody had come to me. Especially Sharon.

  It had been a way to be near her. Always, back then, there’d been the Plan. Move after carefully calculated move, to seduction. I hadn’t found the nerve to make the most critical, daring end-game maneuvers.

  There’d been nobody for me to cry on. Who confesses the confessor?

  “I’ll only be gone a minute.” She scrambled after discarded clothing. I watched and was more baffled by her behavior than by anything else I’d seen.

  “She’s aged.”

  The Commander nodded. “It*s an eight year millennium since we graduated. Nothing left of those wide-eyed kids now. Except for you, most of them died the first year of the war.”

  I needed a moment to realize he meant figurative death. The lift of the alcohol had peaked long since. I was headed down the rough side.

  Sharon returned trailing a belligerent Lieutenant. He was sober enough to remain civil during the introductions, drunk enough to contemplate violence when he learned she was leaving with me.

  The Commander rose, scowled. The younger man backed down. The Old Man can intimidate anybody when he puts his mind to it.

  The Lieutenant faded away. The Commander resumed his seat. He filled the pipe that, in deference to the rest of us, he’d ignored all evening. He was alone now.

  I glanced back once. He sat there with his legs sprawled beneath the table, observing, and for an instant I sensed his loneliness.

  Ours is a lonely profession. The pressures of war only exaggerate the alienation.

  Sharon and I did more than talk. Of course. There was never any doubt of it. She tried to expiate the cruelties of the past. I stumbled, but managed my part.

  There was really little point to it.

  The dream had died. There was no magic left. Just a man and a woman, both frightened, sharing a brief communion, a feeble escape from thought.

  Only I didn’t escape. Not entirely. Not for one second did I forget the mission.

  The incident taught me why there were places like the Pregnant Dragon. In liquor, drugs, sex, or self-loathing, it provided surcease from the endless fear. Fear those people knew far better than I, who knew Climbers only by what I’d read, heard, and seen on holovision.

  I have this reflection on the incident. One of life’s crudest pranks is to yield heart’s desire only when the desire has been replaced by another. Rare is the man who recognizes and seizes the precise instant, like a perfectly ripened fruit, and enjoys it at its moment of ultimate fulfillment.

  At least we parted friends.

  The dawn came, and with it a message from the Commander saying it was time
we moved on to the Pits. We were to lift for TerVeen in eighteen hours.

  I looked at her one last time, as she slept, and I wondered, What drew me to this world where they execute dreams?

  3 Departure

  Our Climber is a Class IX vessel: 910 gross tonnes combat-loaded at bay of departure; 720 tonnes without crew, fuel, stores, or expendable weaponry. There are few hyper-capable vessels smaller. Deep probe and attack singleships run 500 to 600 tonnes, boasting a crew of one man.

  The 910-tonne limit is an absolute. If the vessel goes over, she has to cut her contra-terrene tonnage. Nine-twenty-five is the established book absolute over which Command won’t permit a Climb attempt. There’s a granite-hard barrier somewhere in the low 930s. Massing above it, a vessel will just sit and hum while the enemy knocks her apart.

  The mass limit is why the Commander is displeased with the experimental cannon. The system, with its munitions, masses two tons. That means an equal reduction in fuel or stores. Hardware can’t be touched. And Command would squeal like a hog with its balls in a vise if anyone suggested cutting missile inventory.

  A Climber is a self-contained weapons system. People are aboard only because the system can’t operate itself. Concessions to human needs are kept to a minimum.

  You don’t know what you can live without, don’t know what agonizing decisions are, till you have to pick and choose what to take on patrol.

  The other day, watching the Commander pack, I decided I was in for a ripe fly. One change of uniform. One kilo of tobacco, illegal. One thick, old-style book, by Gibbon. Who gives a good goddamn about the Roman Empire? One grim black revolver of equally ancient vintage, quasi-legal. A curious weapon to carry aboard a vessel with a skin little thicker than mine. Two kilos of genuine New Earth coffee, the cheap stuff, probably smuggled to Canaan by a friend on a Fleet courier. A liter of brandy, in violation of regs. Fill in the cracks and make up fifteen kilos with fresh fruit. No razor. No comb. None of the amenities expected of a civilized travel kit.

  I thought his choices strange. I packed up an almost standard kit, leaving out the dinner jacket and such. He made certain my ten extra kilos were strictly cameras, stilltape, notebooks, and pencils. Pencils because they’re lighter man pens.

  I see all the old hands conform to the kit pattern set by the Old Man. We’ll be up to our ears in fruit.

  Our mother ship is one of several floating in a vast bay. The others have only a few Climbers suckered on. Each is kept stationary by a spiderweb of common rope. The ropes are the only access to the vessel. “They don’t waste much on fancy hardware.” Tractors and pressors would stabilize a vessel in wetdock anywhere else in the Fleet. Vast mechanical brows would provide access.

  “Don’t have the resources,” Westhause says. “‘Task-effective technological focus,’” he says, and I can hear the quotes. “They’d put oars on these damned hulks if they could figure out how to make them work. Make the scows more fuel-effective.”

  I want to hang back and look at the mother, to work out a nice inventory of poetic images. I’ve seen holoportrayals, but there’s never anything like the real thing. I want to catch the flavors of watching hundreds of upright apes hand-over-handing it along with their duffel bags neatly tucked between their legs, as if they were riding very small, limp, limbless ponies. I want to capture the lack of color. Spacers in black uniform. Ships anodized black. The surface of the tunnel itself mostly a dark black-brown, with streaks of rust. The ropes are a sandy tan. Against all that darkness, in the low-level lighting, without gravity, those lines take on a flat two-dimensionality, so all of them seem equally near or far away.

  The Commander beckons. “Come along, then. Too late to back out now.” He’s impatient to get to the ship. That doesn’t jibe with his landside attitude, when he wanted nothing to do with another patrol. He’s hurrying me because I’m lagging, and his custom is to be the last man to board his ship.

  A mother-locked Climber can be entered only through a hatch in the “top” of its central cylinder. The hatch isn’t an airlock. It’ll remain sealed through the vessel’s stay in vacuum. The ship’s only true airlock is at its bottom. That’s connected to the mother now. Surrounding it is a sucker ring through which the Climber draws its sustenance till it’s released for patrol. Power and water. And oxygen. Through the hatch itself will come our meals, though not prepared. Through that hatch, too, will come our orders, moments before we’re weaned.

  We linger round the outside of the top hatch while reluctant enlisted men go popping through like corks too small for the neck of a bottle. Some go feet first, some head first, diving behind their duffel. The hatch is a mere half meter in diameter. The men have to scrunch their shoulders to fit. Westhause is explaining the airlock system. “The only reverse flow consists of wastes,” he concludes.

  “And you give that any significance you want,” the Commander mutters. “Shit for shit, I say. Down the hatch, men.”

  “Whatever happened to your youthful enthusiasm?”

  The Commander refuses the bait. He has said too much already. A wrong word falling on an unfriendly ear can flatten a career trajectory. Climber Reel One operates on a primitive level. is a long, long way from Luna Command. The Admiral enjoys near dictatorial powers. The proconsular setup derives logically from the communications lag between Canaan and the centers of power. It’s hard to like, but even harder to refute.

  Fleet personnel can wish they had a more palatable overlord.

  They call the central cylinder the Can. The Can is incredibly cramped, especially in parasite mode, while attached to the mother. Then, artificial gravity runs parallel to the cylinder’s axis. In operational mode, when the Climber provides its own gravity, the Can’s walls become floors.

  Even then there’ll be very little room if everyone is awake at once.

  I take one long look around and ask, “How do you keep from trampling each other?”

  “Some of the men are in their hammocks all the time. Unless we’re in business. Then everybody is on station.”

  The Can is fifteen meters in diameter and forty meters tall. Doubled pressure partitions separate it into four unequal compartments. Operations Division, the brains of the ship, occupies the topmost level. Immediately below is Weapons. The two divisions share their computation and defection capacity. The third level is Ship’s Services. It’s the smallest. It contains galley, toilet, primitive laundry and medical facilities, recycling sections, and most importantly, the central controls by which internal temperature is sustained. Below Ship’s Services is Engineering. Engineering’s main task is to make the ship go from point A to point B. Their equipment, systems, and responsibilities often overlap with Ship’s Services’.

  A central structural member, called the keel, runs the length of the cylinder. When the ship is in operational mode the crew will take turns sleeping in hammocks attached to it. That’s something to think about. I’ve never tried extremely low gravity sleep. I hear that it’s hard to get a good rest, and dreams become a little crazy.

  In parasite mode sleeping arrangements are catch-as-catch-can, with the quickest men hanging hammocks from available cross-members, then negotiating sharing deals with slower shipmates. Some of the places hammocks get slung seem almost too small for mice.

  The luxury quarters of any ship, the Ship’s Commander’s stateroom, here consists of a screened-off section of beam near the entry hatch. He’ll share his hammock with the First Watch Officer and Chief Quartermaster. Every hammock will be shared. It takes no imagination to see the potential for havoc in that. It takes some complex shuffling to put three men in one hammock and allow each a reasonable day’s ration of sleep. I suspect Command would prefer android crews who need no sleep at all.

  There’s little open space inside the cylinder. The curved inner hull supports most of the consoles and working stations, with little separation between them. Two meters off the hull the inner circle begins. There’re a few duty stations on that level, but most o
f the space is occupied by the ship’s nervous and circulatory systems, and those parts of her organs which don’t need to be instantly accessible. With the exception of a few holes providing access to the two-meter tunnel around the keel, the central eleven meters of the Can are an impenetrable maze of piping, conduit, wiring, junctions, humming boxes of a thousand shapes and sizes, structural beams, and ductwork.

  I have to ask. “How the hell can human beings work in this jungle gym?”

  Westhause smiles. “Looks better on holo, doesn’t it?” Clambering around like a baboon in pants, he leads me to an abbreviated astrogator’s console. Flanking it are a pair of input/output consoles for the ship’s main computation battery. Nudging up in front, like a calf to its mother, is the tiniest spatial display tank I’ve ever seen. I’ve see cheap children’s battle games with bigger tanks. With a perfectly straight face, Wethause reminds me, “It won’t be as nasty after we go on ship’s gravity.”

  “Any way is up when you can’t get any farther down.”

  An argument breaks out in the keel passageway. Wanting to appear conscientious, I move toward the nearest access way.

  “Never mind. They’ll settle it. That’s Rose and Throdahl. They’re always fussing about something.”

  “If you say so. Where’re the lockers, Waldo?”

  “Lockers?” He grins. It’s a mean grin. A sadist’s grin. Your basic got-you-by-the-balls-and-never-going-to-let-go grin. “You are fresh meat, aren’t you? What lockers?”

  “Gear lockers.” Why am I going on? I have one foot poised over an abyss now. “For personal gear.” I didn’t expect the comforts of Officer’s Country aboard a Main Battle, but I did figure on lockers. I can’t leave my cameras lying around. Too much chance they’ll walk away.

  “You use your hammock. Your bunkmates sleep with it.”

  Comes the dawn. “No wonder nobody brings anything with them.”

  “Just one of the luxuries they’ve taken away. That’s why the limited modifieds, like the Eight Ball, are so popular. Rumor is, they’ve still got a shower on old Number Eight.”