Passage at Arms (8 page)

Strange and wonderful things. I glance at the opening leading to Ship’s Services and wonder if it’s the same hole Alice tumbled down. I decide to keep an eye peeled for a talking rabbit with his nose in a wacky watch.

Diekereide has more secrets to share.

The more energy fed to the torus, the “higher” into null a Climber goes. Altitude represents a movement across a range of null wherein the physical constants change at a constant and predictable rate, for reasons as yet unknown.

“Oh, really?”

Diekereide is deep into his mysteries. He only catches the edge of my sarcasm. He gives me one puzzled glance. “Of course.”

One of my nastier habits. If I don’t understand, I tend to mock. I caution myself again: Observe and report.

Jokingly I ask, “What would happen if you threw the whole thing in reverse?”

“Reverse?”

“Sure. Sucked power out of the torus. Right out of the fabric of the universe.”

The man has no sense of humor. He fires up Engineering’s main computer and begins pecking out questions.

“I wasn’t serious. I was joking. For God’s sake, I don’t want to know. Tell me more about altitude.”

Altitude is important. I know that from my pre-reading. Altitude helps determine how difficult a Climber is to detect. The higher she goes, the smaller her “shadow” or “cross section.”

Enter the rabbit. His name is Lieutenant Varese, the Engineering Officer. He indicates that Diekereide is late for a very important date and takes over the explaining. He has a whole different style.

Our paths have never crossed before, in this life or any other. Still, Varese has decided he isn’t going to like me. He sends a clear message. It won’t help even if I save his life. Diekereide, on the other hand, will remain my comrade and champion simply because I nod and “Uh-huh” in the right places during his monologues.

Varcse’s unflattering estimate of my mental capacity is nearer the mark than his assistant’s. He gives me a quick PR handout of a lecture.

He says the Effect, by which he means the Climb phenomenon, was first detected aboard overpowered singleships of the unsyncopated rotary-drive type. “The Mark Twelve fusion drive?” I ask brightly.

One sharp nod. “Without governor or Fleet synchronization.” Scowl. Fool. You can’t buy into the club that easily.

Pilots claimed that sudden, massive applications of power caused their drives to behave strangely, as if stalling, if you think in internal combustion terms, or temporarily flaming out, if you favor jets. Something was going on. External sensors recorded brief lapses of contact with hyper, without making concomitant brushes with norm.

Those reports came out of the first few actions of the war. The problem didn’t arise earlier because in peacetime the vessels weren’t subjected to such vicious treatment. There were apparent psychological effects, too. The affected pilots claimed that their surroundings became “ghostly.”

Physicists immediately posited the existence of a state wherein fusion couldn’t take place. The overexcited pilot would jam himself into null, his drive would cease fusing hydrogen, his ship would fall back...

Frenetic research produced the mass annihilation plant. Contra-terrene hydrogen, mixing with terrene in controlled amounts, can bang out one hell of a lot of energy in any reality state.

Demand produced a CT technology almost overnight. The first combat Climber went on patrol thirteen months after the discovery of the Climb phenomenon.

End of PR statement. Thank you very much for your kind interest. Now will you please go away? We’re very busy down here.

Varese doesn’t use those exact words but makes his meaning perfectly clear. I don’t think I’m going to like him much, either.

My second hour aboard. I’ve learned a valuable lesson about serving in the Climbers. Don’t try to meet everybody and see everything right away. I’ve made myself odd man out in the hammock race.

I returned to Ops figuring I’d take whatever was left over, once everything was settled down. There isn’t anything. The enlisted men are eyeing me. I don’t know if it’s apprehension they feel, or if my response will give them some measure of me as a man.

This ship has no Officers’ Country. No Petty Officers’ Quarters. No Chiefs’ Quarters. The wardroom is a meter-long drop table in Ship’s Services. It doubles as a cook’s bench and ironing board. Everything has its round-the-clock use.

I work my way through Weapons without finding a home. Feeling foolish, I’m working my way through Ship’s Services, to continuous polite negatives, when I notice Bradley watching. “Charlie, this scow is too damned egalitarian.”

“I saw your problem coming, Lieutenant. Made you a place. Ship’s laundry.”

The ship’s laundry is a sink-and-drainboard arrangement that doubles as a wash basin and sick bay operating table. Bradley has stretched an extra hammock in the clear space overhead. I up my estimate of the man. This is his first mission. He knows little more about the ship than I, yet he has identified a problem and taken corrective action.

“I won’t get much sleep here.” Under ship’s gravity the nadir of the hammock should dip into the sink.

“Maybe not. It’s the only basin aboard. But consider the bright side. You won’t have to share with anyone else.”

“I’m tempted to throw a tantrum. Only I think I’d get damned unpopular damned fast, throwing my commission around.” A couple of Bradley’s men are watching me with stony faces, waiting for my reaction.

“True.” He’s begun whispering. “The Old Man says seeing how much the new officers will take is their favorite sport.”

“You and me against the universe, then. Thanks. If there’s a next time, I’ll know better than to play tourist.”

“It’s your time outside the Service, I guess. Dulled your instincts. I caught on right away.”

He’s skirting the edge of a painful subject. I beat the wolf down and reply, “The instincts better come back fast. I don’t want to be the poor relation at the feast forever.”

The watchers are gone. I’ve passed the first test.

“The Old Man says first impressions are critical. Half of us are outsiders.”

“We’ll all know each other better than we want before this’s over.”

“Hey, Lieutenant,” someone shouts through the hatch to Weapons. “The Old Man wants you on the Oh-one.”

O-l. That’s Operations. O-2 is Weapons. And so forth.

I dump my gear into my hammock and hand-over-hand up hooks welded to the keel. When we shift to operational mode, they will become hangers for slinging hammocks and stowing duffel bags.

Getting through the hatches is miserable in parasite mode, even under minimal gravity. The hatches are against the hull, not near the keel. You have to monkey over on bars welded to the overhead. They’ll become a ladder to the keel when the vessel goes operational.

Once at the hatch I have to hoist myself through, then repeat the process getting to Operations.

“The man who designed this monster ought to be impaled.”

“An oft-heard suggestion,” Yanevich says. “But the son of a bitch has gone over to the other firm.”

“What?”

He smiles at my expression. “That’s why we’re all so gung ho. Didn’t you know? We can’t lay hands on the bastard till we win the war. Only then we’ll have to fight over who gets to do what to him first. You want your shot, you’d better put in your paperwork now. Just don’t count on too much being left when your chit comes up.”

“There’s got to be a better setup.”

“No doubt. Actually, it’s a computer design. They say the programmers forgot to tell the idiot box there’d be people aboard.”

“The Commander sent for me.”

“Not a command performance. Just so you can watch departure if you want. We’re moving now.” He nods toward the cabin. “The Old Man is up there. Here. Take my screen. It’s on forward camera. This’ll do as your duty and battle station for now.”

“Not much to see.” The bearing and tilt on the camera tell me nothing. Forward. It should be staring at the wall of the wetdock. Instead, the screen shows me an arc of darkness and only a small amount of wall. The lighting seems brilliant by contrast with the darkness.

High on the wall, at the edge of the black arc, a tiny figure in EVA gear is semaphoring its arms. I wonder what the hell he or she is up to. I’ll probably never know. One of the mysteries of TerVeen.

A martial salvo from French horns blares through the compartment. The Old Man shouts, “Turn that crap down!” The march dwindles till it’s barely audible.

Damn! How imperceptive can one man be? We’re moving out. We’re under way already. Must have been for quite a while. That creeping arc of darkness is naked space. The mother is crawling out of TerVeen’s backassward alimentary canal. “They didn’t waste any time.”

“Excuse me, sir?” The man on my left offers a questioning look. A Tachyon-Detection Specialist, I see.

“Thinking out loud. Wondering what the devil I’m doing here.” I catch the strains of the horns. “Outward Bound,” I realize. I’ve never heard them sung, but I hear some idiot has put words to an ancient march, retitled it, and made it the official Climber battle hymn. Full of eagerness to be at the enemy. A nitwit’s delight.

Someone in the inner circle reads my mind and breaks into song. “Outward Bound,” all right. I recognize the version I beard being sung by bunny hoppers in the ruins. From somewhere else an authoritative voice says, “Stow it, Rose.” This isn’t a voice I recognize. Someone I haven’t yet met.

I close my eyes and try to imagine our departure as it would appear to an observer stationed on the wall of the great tunnel. The Climber people come hustling in, hours after the mothercrew has begun its preparations. They swarm. Soon the mother reports all Climbers manned and all hatches sealed and tested. Her people scamper over her body, releasing the holding stays, being careful not to snap them. Winches on the tunnel walls reel them in.

Small space tugs drift out from pockets in the walls and grapple magnetically to pushing spars extending beyond the mother’s clinging children.

Behind them, way behind them, a massive set of doors grinds closed. From the observer’s viewpoint they’re coming together like teeth in Brobdingnagian jaws. They meet with a subaudible thud that shakes the asteroid.

Now another set of doors closes over the first. They snuggle right up tight against the others, but they’re coming in from left and right. Very little tunnel atmosphere will leak past them. Redundancy in all things is an axiom of military technology.

There are several vessels caught in the bay with the departing mother. They have to cease outside work and button up. Their crews are cursing the departing ship for interrupting their routine. In a few days others will be cursing them.

Now the great chamber fills with groans and whines. Huge vacuum pumps are sucking the atmosphere from the tunnel. A lot will be lost anyway, but every tonne saved is a tonne that won’t have to be lifted from Canaan.

The noise of the compressors changes and dwindles as the gas pressure falls. Out in the middle of the tunnel, the tugs slow the evacuation process by using little puffs of compressed gas to move the mother up to final departure position.

Now a pair of big doors in front of the mother begins sliding away into the rock of the asteroid. These are the inner doors, the redundant doors, and they are much thicker that those that have closed behind her. Great titanium slabs, they’re fifty meters thick. The doors they back up are even thicker. They’re supposed to withstand the worst that can be thrown against them during a surprise attack. If they were breached, the air pressure in the 280 klicks of tunnel would blow ships and people out like pellets out of a scattergun.

The inner doors are open. The outer jaws follow. The observer can peer down a kilometer of tunnel at a round black disk in which diamonds sparkle. Some seem to be winking and moving around, like fireflies. The tugs puff in earnest. The mother’s motion becomes perceptible.

A great long beast with donuts stuck to her flanks, moving slowly, slowly, while “Outward Bound” rings in the observer’s ears. Great stuff. Dramatic stuff. The opening shots for a holo-show about the deathless heroes of Climber Fleet One. The mother’s norm-thrusters begin to glow. Just warming up. She won’t light off till there’s no chance her nasty wake will blast back at her tunnelmates.

The tugs are puffing furiously now. If the observer were to step aboard one, he would hear a constant roar, feel the rumble coming right up through the deckplates into his body. Mother ship’s velocity is up to thirty centimeters per second.

Thirty cps? Why, that’s hardly a kilometer per hour. This ship can race from star to star in a few hundred thousand blinks of an eye.

The tugs stop thrusting except when the mother’s main astrogational computers signal that she’s drifting off the centerline of the tunnel. A little puff here, a little one there, and she keeps sliding along, very, very slowly. They’ll play “Outward Bound” a dozen times before her nose breaks the final ragged circle and peeps cautiously into her native element. Groundhog coming up for a look around.

The tugs let go. They have thrusters on both ends. They simply throw it into reverse and scamper back up the tunnel like a pack of fugitive mice. The big doors begin to close.

The mother slides on into the night, like an infant entering the world. She hasn’t actually put weigh on but has taken it off. She’s coming out the rear end of TerVeen, relative to the asteroid’s orbit around Canaan. The difference in orbital velocities is small, but soon she’ll drift off the line of TerVeen’s orbit.

Before she does, word will come from Control telling her the great doors are sealed. Her thrusters will come to life, burning against the night, blazing off the dull, knobby surface of TerVeen. She’ll gain velocity. And up along her flanks will gather the lean black shapes of her friends, the attack destroyers. The French horns may toot a final hurrah for those who’ll never return. Outward bound.

What am I doing here? The arc of darkness has devoured the last of the light. And there’re creatures hidden in it, somewhere, eager to end my tale.

“No sweat, sir,” my neighbor informs me. “Getting to the patrol zone is a milk run. They haven’t hit a mother yet.”