Passage at Arms (11 page)

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 while 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.

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 inventories 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.