Passage at Arms (6 page)

“You’re fucking full of shit, Steve,” she shouted at Yanevich. “Ninety-two A’s the best, and you fucking well know it.”

Yanevich lunged like a bear in rut. “Shit. I didn’t know you guys were in.”

“Come down off your goddamned mountain once in a while, graverobber.” She laughed and wriggled as he mauled her. “Can you still get it up, Donkey Dick? Or did it fall off out there in the ruins? We just got in. I could use an all-night hosing.”

“We’re headed out, Little Bits. Tell you what. You have any doubts, I’ll stick a wad of gum on the end. You let me know when you’re chewing.”

I was too startled to be disgusted. A mouth like that on an Academy man?

For no sane reason whatsoever, it being none of my concern, the woman told me, “This crud has got the longest hanger I ever saw.” She licked her lips. “Nice. But maybe I’ll want a little variety tonight.”

“Sorry.” I thought she was propositioning me. I didn’t want to trample Yanevich’s territory.

“Variety? Mao, I’d end up chasing crabs through my beard the whole patrol.” He winked at me, oblivious to my pallor and rictus of a smile. I found the girl more baffling than he. She couldn’t be more than twenty. He asked, “You learn to move your ass yet?”

“No thanks to you.” She told me, “This crud got my cherry.

Caught me in a weak moment, way back my first night in after my first patrol. Pounded away all night, and never did tell me I was supposed to do anything besides lie there.”

Surely I turned from pale ivory to infrared. Bradley was equally appalled. “Maybe they’re putting us on, sir.” This assault on the sensibilities had forced him to retreat into the ancient and trusted fastnesses of military ritual.

“I don’t think so.”

“I guess not.” I thought he would lose his supper.

“I think we’re seeing Climber people in their feral state, Mr. Bradley. I suspect the news people have misinformed us.” I grinned at my own sarcasm.

“Yes sir.” He was developing an advanced case of culture shock.

The Commander seized my elbow. “Over here. I see some seats.” We marched through a fusillade of derisive remarks about our ship and squadron. Other officers, apparently from our squadron, made room for us at their table. I gutted out a barrage of introductions, doubting I’d remember anyone in the morning. Bradley suffered it with glazed eyes and limp hand.

Reality had come stampeding through the mists of myth and propaganda and had trampled us both with all the delicacy of a mastodon treading on a gnat’s toe. We couldn’t acknowledge it. Not till something more personal drove the lesson home.

Yanevich disappeared with his friend. I didn’t understand. He didn’t seem the type. He had changed at the door.

Eat, drink, and be merry?

Westhause vanished, too, before I got to learn much more than his name. Then Bradley, eyes still glazed, was spirited away by a matronly Staff Captain. “What the fuck is she doing here?” someone muttered, then plopped her face into the spilled beer on the table before her, muttering that the Dragon was a private preserve.

“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.