Passage at Arms (12 page)

“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 understand.

“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.

“After the water is salvaged, our wastes, including the carbon from the air, get compressed and jettisoned. No room for fancy recycling gear.”

“Hang on to it,” the Old Man says. He turns to me. “Can’t you picture it? The mother plowing along in norm surrounded by a cloud of shit canisters.” He smiles, munches his apple. Just when I give up on hearing the rest, he says, “A million years from now an alien civilization will find one. It’ll be the biggest puzzle in their xenoarcheological museum. I can see them putting in fifty thousand creature hours trying to figure out its religious significance.”

“Religious significance? Is that a private joke?” The Old Man waves his apple core at the First Watch Officer. Yanevich says, “He’s laughing at me. I help poke around the pre-human sites on leave.”

The Commander says, ‘They’re old, and nonhuman, and Mr. Yanevich’s friends have an explanation for everything there. Unless you ask the wrong question. If they tell you something had ritual or magical significance, they’re really saying they don’t know what it is. That’s the way those guys work.”

My surprise must be obvious. Yanevich wears one of his delighted smiles when he looks at me. People are infinite puzzles. You put together piece after piece after piece, and you still have hunks that just don’t fit.

The battle alarm shrieks.

It makes a bong-bong-bong sound not especially irritating in itself. But you respond as if someone has dragged their nails across a blackboard, then fired a starter’s pistol beside your ear.

The wardroom explodes. I’m a little out of practice, a little slow. I try to make up the difference with enthusiasm as I pursue the more able men upward. I happen to glance down as I reach the hatch to Weapons.

The Commander is staring at a watch and grinning.

“A drill. A goddamned drill right in the middle of supper. You sadistic bastard.”

The gimp leg betrays me. The Ops-Weapons hatch slams before I get to it. So there I hang, a great embarrassed fruit dangling from the compartment ceiling.

“Come down here,” Piniaz says in a too-gentle tone. “You can’t reach your station in time, I’ll put your dead ass to work. Take that goddamned magnetic cannon board. Haesler. Energy board.”

Crafty little Ito. He covers his most useless weapon with a spare body, then shifts Leading Spacer Johannes Haesler to the system he’s supposed to be learning anyway.

The all clear comes in five minutes. Piniaz turns the compartment over to his Chief Gunner, Holtsnider. I follow him to the wardroom.

“Your buddy ain’t too nimble,” he growls at the Old Man. His attitude toward the Commander is one millimeter short of insolent. The Commander tolerates it. I don’t know why. Anyone else would find himself hamstrung.

“He’ll loosen up.” He smiles his thin, shipboard smile.

I grab a squeezie of orange juice and start nursing. Kriegshauser puts the drinks up in “baby bottles” because parasite gravity is too treacherous for normal cups. It varies according to some formula known only to the Engineering gang aboard the mother. Once Diekereide and I were playing chess when the pieces just up and roamed away.

“Damned drills,” I say, feeling no real rancor. “I forgot about that crap. Never did get used to them. Your mind says they’re necessary. Your gut keeps saying bullshit.”

“A bitching spacer is a happy spacer,” the Commander observes.

“You’ll find me a very happy-type fellow, then.” I try to laugh. It doesn’t come off. Piniaz’s snake-eyed stare makes me nervous.

The next drill comes while I’m asleep.

They put off fueling again, so I decided to grab some hammock time. No go. Wearing nothing but shorts, I give it my best go. And barely make it to Weapons. Shaking his head like a disappointed track coach, Piniaz points to the cannon board. He doesn’t say a word. Neither do I. I’m the only man aboard sleeping outside the compartment containing my duty station. Isn’t that excuse enough? No. You don’t make excuses in Navy. Not if you don’t want a crybaby reputation. “Hello, board. Looks like we’re going to be friends.”

The show of good humor is just that. A show. I rumble. I fume. I try hard to remember that I vowed that if I blew up, it wouldn’t be over something beyond my control, or because of conditions I accepted beforehand. I’ll gut it out. If my leg makes it harder for me, I’ll just try harder. My companions are gutting something out, too.

The other breed of sleep disturbance has ceased. I guess Kriegshauser passed the word.

This crew has a strong respect for the Commander. That’s how it’s supposed to be, and here it works well. It encompasses the new men as well as those who have served with him before. I suspect it has to do with survival. The Old Man brings his Climber home. That, more than anything else in this universe, impresses the men.

I’ve begun to note quirks. Fisherman, who is hyped on Christianity, brought tracts in his fifteen kilos. Chief Nicastro gets furious if anyone passes him to the left. Better you ask him to drop what he’s doing and let you by. Kriegshauser never removes his lucky underwear.

The Commander himself has a rigid ritual for rising and departing his quarters. Faithfully observed, I suppose, it guarantees the Climber another day of existence.

He wakens at exactly 0500 ship’s time, which is TerVeen standard, which in turn is Turbeyville and moon time. Kriegshauser’s helper has a squeezie of juice and another of coffee waiting. He passes them through the curtains. At 0515 the Commander emerges. He says, “Good morning, gentlemen. Another glorious day.” It’s customary for the watch to respond, “Amen.” The Commander then descends to Ship’s Services and the Admiral’s stateroom, which is never occupied. He washes up. He accepts another squeezie of coffee from the cook, along with whatever is on the breakfast menu. He then makes his way back to Ops and his quarters, where he secures his copy of Gibbon, ousts the Watch Officer from his seat, and reads till precisely 0615, when the morning reports come in, fifteen minutes before they’re technically due. Following morning reports, he goes over the previous day’s decklog, then the quartermaster’s notebook. At 0630 he lifts his eyes and surveys his kingdom. He nods once, abruptly, as if to say we villeins have pleased him.

Remarkably, the men give a collective sigh. It begins with those who can see the Old Man and spreads around the Can and into the inner circle. Our day is officially begun.

We keep our rendezvous with the CT tanker our fourth day out of TerVeen.

We begin by undertaking the long, arduous process of rigging for operational mode. A lot of the hardware, including my little nest, has to be realigned for the new gravity.

As senior vessel, by right of having survived sixteen patrols, our ship will fuel first. To do so we’ll stand off the mother a thousand kilometers. If there’s a screwup, only we, the tanker, and anyone else nursing will blow. Several ships will fuel at the same time.

The reorientation for operational mode is complete. I have fed myself and cleared my bowels. We’ll go to action stations before fueling, so I saunter on up to Ops and cunningly occupy my seat before the exterior screen. That’s a difficult task now, what with the gravity still aligned parasite. Crafty operator that I am, I’m going to be on time.