Passage at Arms Read online

  An hour after departure we reach point-five gee acceleration. The compensator finally muffs his adjustment. The universe tilts slightly and stays askew for two hours. The Old Man doesn’t bother complaining. They don’t notice it down in Engineering because they’re closer to the gravity generators in the mother.

  Yanevich’s prowling brings him within range. “Why are we holding hyper?” Seems to me a quick getaway is in order.

  “Waiting for the other firm. They have ships in hyper waiting to ambush us. We won’t take till they drop and show us their inherent velocities and vectors. Can’t just go charging off, you know. Got to give them the slip. If we don’t, they’ll dog us to Fuel Point and all hell will break loose.”

  I crane and look at the display tank. The mother is the focus there. Neither side looks inclined to start anything.

  Each is hoping the other will screw up.

  Reminds me of my short career as an amateur boxer. What was that kid’s name? Kenny something. They shoved us in the ring and said have at it. We circled and feinted, feinted and circled, and never did throw a real punch. Not chicken, either one of us. Just cautious, waiting for the other guy to commit, to reach and leave an opening. Coach got peeved and sarcastic. We danced while he bad-mouthed our conservative style.

  We didn’t let him get to us. We circled and waited. Then our turn in the ring was up. They never put us in again.

  The next two kids were Coach’s type. Gloves flying everywhere. Whup! Whup! Whup! Pure offense, and the winner is the last man twitching. Your basic kamikaze. Blood, spit, and snot all over the ring. Coach had to cut it off before somebody got creamed.

  Coach Tannian stays out of the way while a squadron is departing. He’s a mixer but has learned to appreciate the conservative approach. There are times when footwork is more important than punch.

  While the butterflies float, the mother keeps increasing her rate of acceleration. The relay talker says, “Coming up on time Lima Kilo Zero.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Yanevich is passing. “The point when we hit fifty klicks per second relative to TerVeen. When we throw a rock in the pond to see which way the frogs jump. We’re following a basal plan pre-programmed after an analysis of everything that’s been done before.” He pats my shoulder. “Things are going to start happening.”

  The clock indicates that Mission Day One is drawing to a close. I suppose I’ve earned my pay. I’ve stayed awake all the way round the clock, and then some.

  “Bogey Niner accelerating.”

  We’ve got nine of them now? My eyes may be open, but my brain has been sleeping.

  I watch the tank instead of trying to follow the ascensions, decimations, azimuths, and relative velocities and range rates the talker chirrups. The nearest enemy vessel, which has been tagging along slightly to relative nadir, has begun hauling ass, pushing four gravities, apparently intent on coming abreast of us at the same decimation.

  “They do their analyses, too,” Yanevich says.

  His remark becomes clear when a new green blip materializes in the tank. A parr of little green arrows part from it and course toward the point where bogey Nine would’ve been had she not accelerated. The friendly blip winks out again. Little red arrows were racing toward it from the repositioned enemy.

  “That was a Climber from Training Group. Seems he was expected.”

  The two missile flights begin seeking targets. Briefly, they chase one another like puppies chasing their tails. Then their dull brains realize that that isn’t their mission. They fling apart, searching again. The greenies locate the bogey, surge toward her.

  She takes hyper, dances a hundred thousand klicks sunward, and ceases worrying about missiles. She begins crawling up on the mother’s opposite quarter.

  “A victory of sorts,” Yanevich observes. “Made them stand back for a minute.”

  By evading rather than risking engaging the Climber’s missiles, our pursuer has complicated her inherent velocity vector with respect to her quarry. We can take hyper now and shake her easily. Unfortunately, she has a lot of friends.

  The enemy missiles head our way. We’re the biggest moving target visible. The mother’s energy batteries splatter them.

  This is a complex game, played in all the accessible dimensions and levels of reality. The Training Climbers give the home team an edge. Each of then*appearances scrapes another hunter off the mother’s trail, making her escorts more formidable against any attack.

  “We’re almost clear,” Yanevich says. “Won’t be long before we do a few false hyper takes to see what shakes.”

  The first of those comes up a half hour later. It lasts only four seconds. The mother jumps a scant four light-seconds. Her pursuers try to stay with her, but tune lags talcing and dropping hyper distort their formation. While they’re trying to adjust, the mother skips twice more, in a random program generated beforehand and made available to our escort.

  They’re not dummies over there. They react quickly and well. They have one grand advantage over us. They have instantaneous interstellar communications gear, or instel. All their ships are equipped. We only have a handful scattered throughout the Fleet. Our normal communications are limited to the velocity of light.

  Yanevich says, “Now a test fly to see if they’ve been holding anything back. And they are. They always are.”

  This tune there’s a half hour interval between the take and drop hyper alarms. In the interim the opposition throws in a pair of singleships. They bust in out of deep space almost too fast for detection. For a few seconds a lot of firepower flashes around. No one gets hurt. The singleships bounce off the escort screen.

  “Now a lot of stutter steps and mixing so they lose track of which ship is which. We hope.” The mother’s maneuvers have gained her a margin in which she can commence grander maneuvers.

  Alarms jangle almost continuously while the flotilla mixes its trails. I await the final maneuver, which I assume will be a flower, with every ship screaming off in a different direction, getting gone before the other firm decides which to chase.

  I guess right. “What now?”

  “We have lead time now,” Yanevich assures me. “Next stop, Fuel Point.”

  4 First Climb

  Christ, am I blown out. Seems like a week since I got any sleep. A couple catnaps since I left Sharon... Let’s don’t even think about that. An incident. Best forgotten. Sordid. And already looking good in retrospect.

  The sleeplessness wouldn’t be bad if it weren’t for the stress. Enemy ships out there... Maybe we see them and maybe we don’t. No wonder these men are lunatics.

  We’re in hyper now. I have to get some sleep while I can. If I don’t sleep before Fuel Point I’ll go hyper-bent when we go norm and the pressure comes on again.

  The others aren’t doing badly. But they’re accustomed to it. Most of them have been here before.

  Damn! Why did I pick such a crazy way to make a living?

  A dull day is about done. Just finished a second bout with my hammock. Sleeping there is worse than I expected. Someone is going on or coming off watch all the time. And every man of them just has to stop to use the sink. If they aren’t washing themselves or their socks, they’re using the damned thing as a urinal.

  This flying donut has only one head. Bradley says there were three in the original design. One low-grav and two universal-gravity stools. That last two went the way of the shower. Eliminated in favor of increased weaponry mass.

  The lines form before watch change. The men going on watch want to take care of their business because they’ll have no chance later. Those who need to squat line up outside the Admiral’s stateroom. The others just hose into the sink and sprite with a flash of water. Sometimes it takes a half hour to get them all by.

  Then it’s time for a repeat performance from the retiring watch. That’s good for another half hour. And all the while they’re jostling and cursing one another, banging me around, and digging into their endless in
ventories of crude jokes and improbable anecdotes.

  I’d hate to wash anything in that sink. The odor alone keeps me awake.

  I’ve been looking for a better home. And have concluded that said place doesn’t exist, though I should be admired for my persistence. Like the men looking for the eido.

  Eido. I thought the word came from eidolon when first I heard it. Ghost. Specter. Spook. Someone you don’t see, slipping around behind you, watching over your shoulder. But no, it comes from eidetic, as in eidetic memory.

  Crews have a game with which they begin each patrol. An intellectual recreation caused by, I suspect, a grave error in Psych Bureau thinking. In extended hard times the eido might become a more abused scapegoat than the creature I call the gritch.

  The eido is a human Mission Recorder, a crewman with a hypnotically augmented memory. He’s supposed to see, hear, and remember everything, including the emotional impact of events. He’s always one of the first-timers, supposedly because that maximizes objectivity.

  This is a facet of Climber life they don’t mention on the networks. A puzzling facet. When first I heard of the eido, I thought him a pointless redundancy. Then I began to wonder. He’s a tool of Psych Bureau, not Climber Command. The Mission Recorder works for Command. The distinction is critical. Psych looks out for the men. The differences between Bureau and Command often become a wide, fiery chasm.

  Psych is the only power in the universe able to overrule the Admiral, it seems.

  Command’s task is to turn the war around. Psych is supposed to put the right people in the right places so the job gets done efficiently. More importantly, Psych is supposed to minimize the damage done people’s minds.

  The point of the hunt here is to spot the eido so you know when to hold your tongue. You don’t tell anyone else when you find him. You just stand back and grin when somebody says something that might haunt him later.

  Now I understand the crew’s coolness. It’ll be a pain getting them to open up. I’m a prime suspect.

  I’ve been running with the pack in hopes I can show them that I’m not the head spy. My work would be hard enough without the eido crap. Navy men are paranoid about having their secret thoughts fall into Psych Bureau’s hands. Out here they’re equally paranoid about their illustrious supreme commander.

  A while ago I asked the First Watch Officer if he knew some way I could make the men more comfortable. He grinned that savage, sneering grin of his and said, “You sure the eido knows what he is?”

  Hell of a man, friend Yanevich. Always knows the right thing to say to send you howling off into the swamps of your mind, hunting the million-word answer to his dozen-word question.

  Fuel Point is a big patch of nothing in untenanted space within a tetrahedron of stars, the nearest of which is four light-years away. A look through my video screen shows me nothing familiar, though I know we aren’t more than ten lights out of Canaan. Captured, I could reveal nothing.

  “Has anyone ever been captured? In space?”

  “I never heard about anybody,” Fisherman replies. “Go ask the Patriot. He keeps up on that stuff.”

  Carmon says, “I don’t know, Lieutenant. Not that I’ve heard of, anyway. Have we ever captured any of them?”

  Well, yes, we have. But I can’t tell him so. I’m not supposed to know myself.

  A continuous shudder runs through the ship, transmitted from the mother. She has a lot of velocity to shed before we match courses for fueling. Throdahl has an open carrier feed into the Operations address speaker. Occasionally we hear chatter from someone aboard the mother, trying to contact the vessels we’re to meet.

  Junghaus looks concerned. “Maybe they didn’t get away.”

  Last word we had, the tanker was dodging after an accidental brush with an enemy singleship. “Maybe they called the heavies in time.” He seems genuinely stricken.

  “Then we’ll just have to go back.”

  “No we won’t. We’ll stay here till they send another tanker.”

  Aha! comes the Light.

  “Got you on the upside, Achernar,” a remote voice says. “Tone it and decline. Metis, over.”

  Fisherman visibly relaxes. “That’s the tug. Guess we were sending off the band. There’s so much security stuff sometimes, mere’s mixups in stuff like wavelengths.”

  Or that might be the competition talking, trying to lull us with that idea. That suspicion apparently occurred to no one else. Everybody is cheerful now. In a moment, Throdahl has, “Achernar, Achernar, this is SubicBay. Starsong. Go Mickey. Lincoln tau theta Beijing Bohrs. Over.”

  “Why not shibboleth?” I murmur.

  “Subic, Subic, this is Achernar. Blue light. Go gamma gamma high wind. London Heisenberg. Over.”

  “The sweet nothing of young love,” Yanevich says over my shoulder. “We found the right people.”

  “Why a Titan tug? What’s to move around out here?”

  “Ice. They built a hunk a big as the Admiral’s head, years ago. Metis will slice off a few chunks and feed them to the mother. She’ll melt and distill it and top our tanks.”

  “What about heavy water? Thought it had to be all light hydrogen.”

  “Molecular sorters. The mother will take the heavy stuff home to make warheads.”

  “Subic is the tanker?”

  “Uhm. A few hours and you can help pray us through fueling.”

  Antimatter is why we’re fueling out here. There’ll be one hell of a bang if anything goes wrong. And the CT does come from somewhere else. Somewhere very secret. Nor would it make much sense to run it in through the fleet blockading Canaan.

  “You think Climber duty sounds hairy?” Yanevich says. “Dead is the only way they’ll get me on a CT tanker. Those are some crazy people.”

  I think about it. He’s right. Sitting on a couple hundred thousand tonnes ot antimatter gas, knowing a microsecond’s failure in the containment system will kill you...

  “I guess somebody has to do it,” he says.

  The tanker must have done some heavy dodging. Our relative velocities are all wrong. It’ll take several hours to lay the ships in a common groove. I suppose I should scribble some notes while I’m waiting.

  The Old Man, First Watch Officer, and several others are with me in the wardroom. This is our third supper. The Commander tries to conduct that one meal as if we were aboard a civilized ship. It’s difficult. The fold-down table is painfully cramped. I keep banging elbows with Lieutenant Piniaz.

  The Old Man asks, “How are you sleeping?”

  “This’s no pleasure spa on The Big Rock Candy Mountain. But I’m coping. Barely. Damn!” Piniaz has his elbow in action again.

  The Weapons Officer is a remarkably tiny and skinny man, Old Earther, as dark and shiny as a polished ebony idol. He calls a city named Luanda home. I’ve never heard of it.

  This little spider of a man scaled the enlisted ranks in corvettes. He volunteered for Climbers when they offered him a Limited Duty Officer’s commission. At twenty-nine he is the oldest man aboard. Unfortunately, he isn’t the paternal sort.

  Both Ensign Bradley and his leading cook, a piratical rating named Kriegshauser, hover over the conclave, listening. Here’s where the secrets will fall, they reckon. They’ll rake them in like autumn leaves. If the cook hears anything, it’ll be all over the ship in an hour.

  “Maybe not a spa.” The Commander grins. His grin today is a ghost of that of days ago.

  He’s playing to his audience. He does a lot of that. Like he’s firmly convinced that the Commander is a rigidly defined dramatic role, subject to very limited interpretation by its players. He suspects that he’s been miscast, perhaps. His specific audience seems to be Kriegshauser. “But I think a few people are pushing. This old hulk hasn’t seen so much sock-washing and ball-scrubbing since we ran into Meryem Assad’s Climber on patrol.”

  Kriegshauser adopts the blandest, most innocent of faces. He pours us each a touch of the Commander’s coffee. I begin to under
stand.

  “Could be you’re a good influence, though. They could be worried about their image. But I doubt it. Kriegshauser hasn’t changed his underwear since he’s been in the Climbers, let alone washed it.” The Old Man doesn’t check the cook’s reaction.

  “He’d better do something about the chow if he’s worried about his image, “I say. “I’d be doing it a favor calling it reconstituted shit.”

  “That you would. That you would. And you wouldn’t hurt any feelings, either.”

  The stuff is terrible. Tubes of goo and boxes of powder yield the base ingredients. Kriegshauser and whomever gets stuck as helper of the day mix the stuff with water and a little oil of vitriol. Climber people are unanimous. They insist it looks and smells like crap, but probably lacks the flavor.

  It’s chock full of vitamins, minerals, and amino acids, though. Everything the human body needs to run well. Only the soul has been left out.

  Too much mass, of course. There’s no constituter, as on the big ships. Now I understand all those duffel bags filled with fruits and vegetables.

  I’ve been worrying about roughage. After the accident I went through a prolonged diet-freak period. I still worry sometimes. Roughage is important.

  In the old Climbers there were fresh stores. The reefers and freezers went when they increased the missile complement to its present level.

  The Commander bites into an apple. His eyes smile over top it.

  The only thing to like here is the reconstituted fruit juice. Plenty of concentrates. Plenty of water. The crew likes to mix them. Bug juice, they call the result. Sometimes it looks it.

  Water is in long supply. It serves as fuel, atmosphere reserve, emergency heat sink, and primary dietary ingredient. It keeps the belly full, the house warm or cool, the air breathable, and the fusion chamber purring.

  “Permission to jettison waste,” Bradley asks in a transparent effort to attract the Commander’s attention. If the Ensign has a weakness, it’s this wanting to be noticed by superiors. I look round to see who’ll explain what he’s talking about. He does the honors himself.