Passage at Arms Page 8

  There’s a hand on my shoulder. I look up into Chief Nicastro’s weak smile. “Welcome to the Climbers, sir.”

  No suits? One breach in the hull and we’re done. Welcome to the Climbers indeed!

  Some quick impressions.

  Officers: generally cool. Those I traveled with cool to medium-friendly. Of the others, only sub-Lieutenant Diekereide has shown any warmth. Not too much resentment, considering. I suppose most of it has been transferred to the Admiral. They assume my presence is Tannian’s idea. Only the Commander has any inkling of how hard I fought to get aboard. I wonder if he has an inkling of how sorry I am already?

  Crew: so far neutral to cool, with the possible exception of Chief Nicastro.

  Of the others, only the tachyon man has spoken to me. I’ll have to be patient. Even in the Line the men are wary of new officers. This go they have three to break in.

  This is Diekereide’s third patrol, but his first with this Climber. They shuffle hell out of Engineers before they give them their own ship. Then they become part of the power plant. The sub-Lieutenant strikes me as the type eager to be friends with everybody, at least till he settles in. He comes on a little too strong. I presume he’s a solid Engineer. He wouldn’t be here otherwise. The propaganda is right in one respect. Climber people are the best of the best, the Fleet elite.

  However competent he may be, I can’t picture Diekereide’s becoming a good officer in the leadership sense. Maybe that goes with his territory.

  It took no genius to discover that Lieutenant Varese isn’t popular. I didn’t have to observe his men behind his back to guess it. He’s the perpetual fussbudget, never satisfied with anyone’s work. He can’t keep his mouth shut when that’s the wisest course. And if he has a choice of a positive and a negative comment, he’ll choose the latter every time.

  I’ve only had glimpses of Lieutenant Piniaz. He’s somewhat like Varese, though quieter, yet more belligerent and bitter. There’s a huge chip on his shoulder. I understand he came up through the ranks.

  Bradley appears to be standard Academy product. He’s self-sufficient, competent, and confident. He’s efficient and soft-spoken. He seems to have won his men already. He’ll get ahead if he survives his ten missions.

  He’s a child today. In two years he’ll be a clone of the Commander. There’ll be lines in his face. He’ll have hollow eyes. He’ll look ten years older than he is. And his men will have complete confidence in him, and none at all in Command. They’ll follow him in a strike on the gates of hell, confident the Old Man can pull it off. And they’ll curse the idiots who formulated the mission all the while.

  I’ve had little real opportunity to gauge the enlisted men. Here in Operations the outstanding characters seem to be Junghaus (the tachyon man, commonly called Fisherman), Carmon (occasionally called the Patriot), Rose, Throdahl, and Chief Nicastro. They’re all old hands, and they’ve all spaced with the Commander before.

  Rose and Throdahl are prototypical noncoms. Struck from the original mold, designed by Sargon I. They have one-track minds. They seem to know nothing but sex. Their banter, though probably old at the time of the fall of Nineveh, has its entertaining moments.

  Carmon is a silent patriot, thank heaven. He doesn’t irritate us with speeches. He reminds me of a lizard quietly awaiting the approach of prey. He has that patient, “the day is going to come” air. His intensity makes the others nervous.

  As advertised, Fisherman is the resident evangelist. Every ship has one. It seems to be an unofficial billet, generated by some need in the group subconscious. I was surprised to find one on a vessel this small. Ours is a Christian, with a definite charismatic bent.

  Since we have a Preacher, it seems likely we’ll also have a Loan Shark, a Moonshiner, a Peddler (the man who always has something to sell, and who can get you anything you want), a Bookmaker, a Thief, and a Gritch. The latter is the man everyone loves to hate, and the most important character in any small, closed social system. A closed group always seems to create one. He becomes a walking catharsis, a small-time Jesus who involuntarily takes our sins upon himself.

  He’s always that one man who’s a little more different, a little more strange. The body politic alienates and hates him, and as a consequence everyone else gets along a little better.

  Chief Nicastro may be our coward, simply by circumstance. He’s scared to death of this mission. I suspect it would be that way for any man making his final patrol. I have a touch of it myself. When there’s nothing but another mission ahead, a man can look forward to nothing but another mission. He knows better than to plan the rest of his life. The short-time shakes set in during the magical final run. There’s a chance there might be a tomorrow. You don’t want to jinx it by thinking about it. And you can’t help thinking.

  There are seven more men in Ops: Laramie, Berberian, Brown, Scarlatella, Canzoneri, Picraux, and Zia. They’re less obvious, less flamboyant, less loud, either by nature or because this is their first patrol aboard the Climber.

  “Got to piss, better do it now,” Yanevich says. “Compartment hatches seal at GQ.”

  The hatches are massive, one on each side of the double inter-compartmental bulkhead. They’ll keep a breach from claiming the entire ship. Each compartment is its own lifeboat. The Can is held together by explosive bolts. We can blow the four sections out of the hole in the donut if we have to.

  I want to ask about that. Has anyone ever actually tried it? Is there any point? I can’t see it. Again the First Watch Officer has disappeared before I can formulate my questions.

  How do they cut the keel? The keel is a single piece of steel running the height of the Can. Some way has to exist to sever it between compartments. And how do we drift apart? There has to be a thruster to drive the compartments away from the doomed donut.

  I can see that, I think. There’s a big, wide lump around the keel in the bulkhead facing Weapons. A lot of tubing runs into it from small tanks slung around the compartment. Conduit too. Must be a small chemical thruster, just enough to kick the compartment away. Five or ten seconds of burn time, just a pittance of delta-v...

  The Tachyon-Detection Technician volunteers, “I was in Sixty-seven Dee.” His attitude says that means something. Maybe it does to veteran Climber people. It rings no bells with me. Maybe if he told me her Commander’s name-----A few successful patrols can make a Commander famous. The Old Man is one of the current crop. No one knows from hull numbers. A ship has to be big and have a name before it becomes famous. I’d barely heard of the Eight Ball before reaching TerVeen. But I know Carolingian and Marseilles and Honan well, and all they ever did was get skragged. Dramatically, of course. Very damned dramatically, with the holonets beating the drums all the while.

  Fisherman wants priming. He’s like a brand-new acquaintance who hands you a holo of the kids, then, embarrassed by his own temerity, bites his lips and awaits your comment. “What happened?”

  “Not that great a story, I guess.” He manages to look both sorry he’s spoken and mildly disappointed in me. Sixty-seven Dee must be one of the legends of the Fleet.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t heard it.”

  Junghaus doesn’t look old enough to be a veteran. He can’t be more than nineteen. Just a pimply-faced, confused kid who looks two sizes too small for his uniform. Yet he has four little red mission stars tattooed on the back of his left hand, over the knuckles at the roots of each finger. “Catch a fistful of stars...” They’ll creep along the next rank of knuckles now. A barbarous custom that’s scrupulously observed. One of the superstitions.

  Half the crew is under twenty. They’re the influx from Canaan. The older men are Regulars from the Fleet.

  The Old Man calls this the Children’s War. He seems to have forgotten his history. Most of them are.

  Fisherman thinks it over and shrugs. “We lost hull integrity in Engineering. We weren’t even in action. Just running a routine drill. Lost everybody in the compartment. Couldn’t get through to se
al the breach. All the suits were stored there. Regulations. The rest of us had to gut out twenty-two days before we were picked up. The first two weeks weren’t that bad. Then the stored power started to go...”

  A shadow crosses his almost cherubic face. He doesn’t want to remember, and can’t help it. His effort to stay here with me produces a visible strain.

  “Engineering supposedly has better protection. Guess that’s where you can get killed the quickest.”

  He startles me, using the word killed. He looks calm enough, but that betrays his turmoil. He’s talking about the traumatic experience of his life.

  I try to envision the terror, inexorably fading into hopeless resignation, aboard a vessel that’s lost power and drives. Those who survived the initial disaster would depend entirely on outside intervention. And Climber paths seldom cross.

  Give Command this: They try to find out why when a vessel stops reporting.

  “You didn’t blow the bolts?” I’m curious about those bolts. They’re a facet of the ship wholly new to me, a nifty little surprise that must have all its secrets exposed.

  “Blow them? Out there? Why? They can find a ship. They usually know where to look. But a section... They almost never find them. You don’t break up unless the ship is going to blow.” His final sentence has the ring of an Eleventh Commandment.

  “But with the power dwindling and all that unmonitored CT hanging there...”

  “The E-system functioned. We made it. Don’t think we didn’t argue about separating.” He’s becoming defensive. I’d better change my style. You can’t grill them. You have to get them to volunteer. “Really, you can’t separate unless you know they’ll pick you up right away. Only Ship’s Services can last more than a few days after separation.”

  “That’s what I call gutting it out.” How did they take the pressure? With nothing to do but watch the power levels fall and bet on when the magnetics would go. “I don’t think I could handle it.”

  “Acceleration in ten seconds,” the relay speaker tells us. “Nine. Eight...”

  The acceleration alarm yammers. Everything is supposed to be secure. Don’t want anything rocketing around, smacking people. The hatch to Weapons clunks shut. Yanevich gets down on his stomach to examine the seal.

  The Old Man glares at the compartment clock. It says we’re nineteen hours and forty-seven minutes into Mission Day One. Down on Canaan, at the Pits, it’s the heart of night again. I search with my camera, and there’s the world, immense and glorious, and very much like every other human world. Lots of blue and lots of cloud, with the boundaries between land and sea hard to discern from here. How high is TerVeen? Not so high the planet has stopped being down. I could ask, but I really don’t care. I’m headed the other way, and an unpleasant little voice keeps reminding me that a third of all missions end in the patrol zone.

  “Where’re the plug-ups?” the Commander demands. “Damn it, where the hell are the plug-ups?”

  “Oh.” The man doing the relay talking hits a switch. Little gas-filled plastic balls swarm into the compartment. They range from golf-ball to tennis-ball size.

  “Enough. Enough,” Nicastro growls. “We’ve got to be able to see.”

  A new man, I decide. He’s heard about the Commander. He’s too anxious to look good. He’s concentrating too much. Doing his job one part at a time, with such thoroughness that he muffs the whole.

  The plug-ups will drift aimlessly throughout the patrol, and will soon fade into the background environment. No one will think about them unless the hull is breached. Then our lives could depend on them. They’ll rush to the hole, carried by the escaping atmosphere. If the breach is small, they’ll break trying to get through. A quick-setting, oxygen-sensitive goo coats their insides.

  The cat scrambles after the nearest ball. He bats it around. It survives his attentions. He pretends a towering indifference.

  He’s a master of that talent of the feline breed, of adopting a regal dignity in the face of failure, just in case somebody is watching.

  Breaches too big for the plug-ups probably wouldn’t matter. We would be dead before we noticed them.

  Satisfied with the hatch, Yanevich rises and leans past me to thumb a switch. “Ship’s Services, First Watch Officer. Commence conversion to patrol atmosphere.”

  The ship is filled with the TerVeen mixture, which is nominal planetary. Ship’s atmosphere will be pure oxygen at twenty percent of normal pressure. That reduces hull stress and potential leakage and eliminates useless mass. Low-pressure oxygen is standard Fleet atmosphere.

  The convenience has its drawbacks. Care to avoid fires is needed.

  That madman, the Commander, brought a pipe and tobacco. Will he actually smoke? That’s against regs. But so is a ship’s cat.

  “Radar, you have anyone from the other firm?”

  “Nothing immediate, sir.”

  That’s a relief. I won’t get my head kicked in during the next five minutes.

  Why does Yanevich bother? In parasite mode the vessel’s only usable weapon is that silly magnetic cannon.

  Out of nowhere, Junghaus says, “The Lord carried us through. He stands by the Faithful.” It takes me a moment to realize that he’s returned to our earlier conversation.

  A trial shot, I suppose. To see how I react. It’ll build to full-scale proselytization if I don’t stop it now. “Maybe. But it seems to be he spends a lot of time buddying up with the other team.”

  “That’s ‘cause they’ve got the aged whiskey,” someone hoots. Junghaus stiffens. I glance around, can’t identify the culprit. I didn’t realize that our voices carried that well.

  It’s very quiet in here. The equipment makes almost no noise.

  Junghaus persists. I guess that’s why they call him Fisherman.

  It seems like forever since I’ve encountered a practicing

  Christian. They just don’t make them anymore. The race has no need for its old superstitions out here. New faiths are still in formative stages.

  “We’re being tried in the crucible, sir. Those who are found wanting will perish.”

  That same voice says, “And the Lord saith unto him, verily, I shall tax you sorely, and tear you a new asshole.”

  Nicastro snaps, “Can the chatter.”

  Was Fisherman a believer before his toe-to-toe with death? I doubt it. I can’t ask. The directive to silence includes myself, though the Chief would never be so insubordinate as to tell an officer to shut up.

  “Increasing acceleration to point-two gee in two minutes.”

  “Contact, by relay from tender Combat Information, desig Bogey One, bearing one four zero right azimuth, altitude twelve degrees nadir, range point-five-four million kilometers. Closing. Course...”

  Here we go. The beginning of the death dance. They’ve spotted us. They’ll throw everything but the proverbial sink. They don’t like Climbers.

  I missed something while trying not to panic. From the talker’s information Yanevich has deduced, “It’s just a picket boat. She’s staying out of our way. Carmon, warm the display tank.”

  I sneer at that toy. On the Empire Class Main Battles they have them bigger than our Ops compartment. And they have more than one. For a thrill, in null grav, you can dive in and swim among the stars. If you don’t mind standing Commander’s Mast and doing a few weeks’ extra duty.

  TerVeen slips past the terminator. Canaan is barely visible. No evidence of human occupation. Surprising how much effort it takes to make human works visible from space, considering them with the eyeball alone.

  I adjust the camera angle. Now I see nothing but stars and a fragment of mother-ship frame almost indistinguishable in the darkness. Doubling the magnification, I set a visual search pattern. I catch a remote, traveling sparkle. “Watch Officer.”

  Yanevich leans over my shoulder. “One of ours. Putting on inherent velocity. Probably going to check something out.”

  I continue searching and become engrossed in the view. A whil
e later I realize I’m daydreaming. We’ve moved up to point-four gees acceleration. Someone has a magician’s touch. His compensations have prevented inertia from vectoring any weird gravity orientations.

  We have three bogeys numbered and identified. Chief Nicastro tells me, “They don’t bother us before we clear the Planetary Defense umbrella.”

  The thin screen surrounding the planet will have sucked round our way, to help give us a running start.

  From planetside it looked like the gentlemen of the other firm were everywhere. But a sky view from a surface point makes only a tiny slice of pie. A slice studied only when it is occupied. In space the picture becomes much more vast.

  The minuteness of an artifact in space is such that you would think that searches might as well be conducted by rolling dice. Chance and luck become absurdly important. Intelligence and planning become secondary.

  Still, Command knows whence the enemy comes, and whither he is bound. A sharp watch on the fat space sausage between those points helps narrow the odds. Climbers patrol the likeliest hunting grounds.

  The passing legion of verbal reports fades, becoming so much background noise, no more noticed than the ubiquitous plug-ups. I shift my attention from the chatter to the chatterers. I can’t always see them, either because they’ve gone around the curve or because they roam. Fisherman. Monte Throdahl. Gonsalvo Carmon, who is almost worshipful as he nurtures the display tank. N’Gaio Rose and his Chief, a computerman named Canzoneri who has a diabolical look. Westhause remains fixated on his Dead Reckoning gear. The men I can’t see are Isadore Laramie, Louis Picraux, Miche Berberian, Melvin Brown, Jr. (he gets insistent about that Jr.), Lubomir Scarlatella, and Haddon Zia. I don’t know all their rates and tasks yet. I catch what I can when I hear it mentioned.

  The men I can see are serious and attentive, though they don’t resemble the heroes Admiral Tannian has created in the media. They sneer at the part, though I think they’d play it to the hilt given leave on a world where they’re not well known.

  Looks like I’ve got it made. Nothing to do but watch a screens And damned sure nothing is going to happen on it before some other system yells first. Everybody else is doing two jobs at once. While the Climber is being taken for a ride.