Passage at Arms (16 page)

Suddenly, we’re beyond the moment of peak tension. The sealed orders have come through. The mother is about to drop hyper. We’ll be operational soon.

The Old Man’s face is stiff and pale when he leaves his stateroom. His upper lip is lifted to the right in a faint sneer. He gathers Westhause, the First Watch Officer, our two Ops Chief Petty Officers, and myself. He whispers, “It doesn’t look good. Figure on being out a while. It’s beacon to beacon. Observation patrol. We start at Beacon Nineteen, Mr. Westhause. I’ll give you the progression data after I’ve gone over it myself.”

Well. I may get time to break the ice after all. Running beacon to beacon means there’s been no enemy contact for a while. If they’re out there, they’re slipping through unnoticed. Because nothing is happening, the squadron will roam carefully programmed patterns till a contact occurs.

I begin to comprehend the significance of our being on our own. We’ll be out of contact completely, unless we touch the rare instelled beacon. No comforting mother ship under our feet. No pretty ladies in a sister ship to taunt and tease when Throdahl isn’t using the radio more professionally. Alone! And without the slightest notion how near we are others of our kind.

This could get rough, emotionally. These men aren’t the sort I’d choose as cellmates.

Some three hundred observation/support beacons are scattered around Climber Fleet One’s operations zone. On beacon-to-beacon patrol a Climber pursues a semi-random progression, making a rendezvous each twelve hours. Ours is to be an observation patrol initially, meaning we’re supposed to watch, not shoot.

The Commander shuffles order flimsies. “I’ll tell you what we’re looking for when I get this crap straight.”

“What’re observation pauses?” I ask the First Watch Officer. The Old Man says we have to program several into our beacon progression.

“Just go norm to see who did what last week.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Okay. If we’re not looking for something specific, we’ll make equally spaced pauses. Say each four hours. If Command is looking for something, we’ll drop hyper at exact times in specified places. Usually that means double-checking a kill. Ours or theirs.”

“I see.”

The beacons are refitted hulks. They form a vast irregular three-dimensional grid. When a Climber makes rendezvous, it discharges its Mission Recorder. In turn the beacon plays back any important news left by previous callers. The progress of a patrolling squadron is calculated so no news should be more than twenty-four hours old. It doesn’t work that well in practice, though.

One in twenty beacons is instel-equipped, communing continuously with beacons elsewhere and with Climber Command. Supposedly, a vessel can receive emergency directives within a day and news from another squadron in two. On the scale of this war, that should be fast enough.

Sometimes it does work, when the human factor doesn’t intrude too much.

The other firm occasionally stumbles onto a beacon and sets an ambush. The beacons are manned but have small crews and few weapons. Climbers approach them carefully.

Fortune has smiled on us in a small way. The competition hasn’t broken our computer key codes. If ever they do, Climber Fleet Tannian is in the soup. One beacon captured and emptied of information would destroy us all.

The other firm wastes no time hunting beacons. It takes monumental luck to find one. Space is big.

We’re operational now. Past our first beacon.

Operational. Operational. I make an incantation of it, to exorcise my fear. Instead it has the opposite effect.

The web between the beacons. The spider’s game. The vastness of space can neither be described nor overstated. When there’s no known contact the Climber’s hunt becomes analogous to catching mites with a spider’s web as loosely woven as a deep-sea fishing seine. There are too many gaps, and they’re too big. Though Command keeps the holes moving, ships still slip through unnoticed. Climbers often vanish without trace.

After we leave the beacon the Commander repeats all the tests made at Fuel Point. We commence our patrol in earnest.

I watch a Climber die. Twice. Our first two observation pauses bracket the event. We drop hyper, allow the light of it to overtake us, then jump out and let the wave catch us again. Like traveling in time.

There’s little but a long, brilliant flash each time, like a small nova. The spectrum lines indicate massive CT-terrene annihilation. Ops compartment remains quiet for a long time. Laramie finally asks, “Who was it, Commander?”

“They didn’t tell me. They never tell me-----” He stops.

His role doesn’t permit bitterness before the men.

“Forty-eight souls,” Fisherman muses. “I wonder how many were saved?”

“Probably none,” I say.

“Probably not. It’s sad. Not many believers anymore, Lieutenant. Like me, they have to meet Him, and Death, face to face before they’ll be born again.”

“It’s not an age of faith.”

For four hours men not otherwise occupied help maul the data, searching for a hint that the other firm precipitated the Climber’s doom. Nothing turns up. It looks like a CT leak.

Climber Command will add our data to other reports and let it stew in the big computer.

“It doesn’t much matter anymore,” Yanevich says. “She blew three months ago. The way they bracketed us, they were rechecking something they already knew. Glad we didn’t have to take a closer look.”

“There wouldn’t be anything to see.”

“Not this tune. Sometimes there is. They don’t all blow. Ours or theirs.”

I feel cold breath blowing down the back of my neck. Firsthand studies of a gunned-out hulk aren’t my notion of fun.

There’s nothing going on in this entire universe. Beacon after beacon, there’s nothing but bored, insulting greetings from squadron mates who were in before us. Decked out in his sardonic smile, the Old Man suggests the other team has taken a month’s vacation.

He doesn’t like the quiet. His eyes get narrower and more worried every day. His reaction isn’t unique. Even the first-mission men are nervous.

First real news from outside. Climber Fleet Two says a huge, homebound convoy is gathering at Thompson’s World, the other team’s main springboard for operations against the Inner Worlds. Second Fleet hasn’t had one contact during the forty-eight hours covered by their report.

Neither have we.

“Them guys must be taking the year off,” Nicastro says. Today he’s Acting Second Watch Officer, in Piniaz’s stead. Weapons is having trouble with the graser.

I’m exhausted. I hung around past my own watch to observe Piniaz in command. Guess it’ll have to wait. The hell with it. Where’s my hammock?

Climber Fleet Two reports a brush with hunter-killers way in toward the Inner Worlds. Nothing came of it. Even the opposition’s baseworlds are quiet.

This patrol zone is dead. We’re caught in a nightmare, hunting ghosts. You don’t want action, but you don’t crave staying on patrol, either. You start feeling you’re a space-going Flying Dutchman.

Beacon after beacon slides by. Always the news is the same. No contact.

Once a day the Commander takes the ship up for an hour, to keep the feel of Climb. We spend the rest of our time cruising at economical low-hyper translation velocities. Occasionally we piddle along in norm, making lazy inherent velocity corrections against our next beacon approach. There isn’t much to do.

The men amuse themselves with card games and catch-the-eido, and weave endless and increasingly improbable variations in their exchanges on their favorite subject. To judge by their anecdotes, Throdahl and Rose have lived remarkably active lives during their brief careers. I expect they’re doing some creative borrowing from stories heard elsewhere. They have their images to maintain.

I’m making some contact with the men now. Through no artifice of my own. They’re bored. I’m the only novelty left unexplored.

The days become weeks, and the weeks pile into a month. Thirty-two days in the patrol zone. Thirty-two days without a contact anywhere. There are three squadrons out here now, and the newly commissioned unit is on its way. Another of the old squadrons will be leaving TerVeen soon. It’ll be crowded.

No contact. This promises to become the longest dry spell in recent history.

The drills never cease. The Old Man always sounds the alarm at an inconvenient time. Then he stands back to watch the ants scurry. That’s the only time we see his sickly smile.

Hell. They’re breaks in the boredom.

This is oppressive. I haven’t made a note in two weeks. If it weren’t for guilt, I’d forget my project.

I think this is our forty-third day in the patrol zone. Nobody keeps track anymore. What the hell does it matter? The ship is our whole universe now. It’s always day in here and always night outside.

If I really wanted to know, I could check the quartermaster’s notebook. I could even find out what day of the week it is.

I’m saving that for hard times, for the day when I need a really big adventure to get me going.

We’re a hairy bunch now. We look like the leavings of a prehistoric war band. Only Fisherman has bucked the trend and is keeping some order about his person. The only smooth faces I see belong to the youngest of the young.

The Engineers express their dissatisfaction by refusing to comb then” hair. I’m the only man who takes regular sponge baths. Part my fault, I suppose. I spend a lot of time in my hammock. And I won’t share my soap, which is the only bar aboard..

Curiously, these filthy beasts spend most of their free time scrubbing every accessible surface with a solution that clears the sinuses in seconds. Our paintwork gleams. It’s a paradox.

One point of luck. No lice or fleas have turned up. I expected herds of crab lice, acquired from hygienically lax girlfriends.

Fearless Fred is sulking. He’s the most bored creature aboard. No one has seen him for days. But he’s around, and in a foul mood. He expresses his displeasure by leaving odiferous little loaves everywhere. He’s as moody as the Commander.

Something is bothering the Old Man. Something of which this patrol is just part. It began before the mission, before I found him at Marie’s.

He’s no longer my friend of Academy days.

I did expect to find him weathered by the Service, changed by the war. War has to change a man. Combat is an intense experience. Comparing him to other classmates I’ve encountered recently, I can see how radical the changes are. Even Sharon wasn’t this much transformed. The Sharon of the Pregnant Dragon always existed inside the other Sharon.

A few of the changes are predictable. An increased tendency toward withdrawal, toward self-containment, toward gloominess. Those were always part of him. Pressure and age would exaggerate them. No, the real change is the stratum of bitterness he conceals behind the standard changes.

He was never a bitter person. Contrarily, there was a playful, almost elfin streak behind his reserve. A little alcohol or a lot of coaxing could summon it forth.

Something has slain the elf.

Somehow, somewhere, while we were out of touch, he took one hell of an emotional beating. He got himself destroyed, and all the king’s horses...

It’s not a career problem. He’s very successful by Navy standards. Twenty-six and already a full Commander. He’s up for brevet Captain. He may get his first Admiral’s star before he turns thirty.

It’s something internal. He’s lost a battle to something that’s part of him. Something he hates and fears more than any enemy. He now despises himself for his own weakness.

He doesn’t talk about it. He won’t. And yet I think he wants to. He wants to lay it out for someone who knew him before his surrender. Someone not now close, yet someone who might know him well enough to show him the path back home.

I admit I was surprised that my request for assignment to his Climber went through. There were a hundred hurdles to surmount. The biggest, I expected, would be getting the Ship’s Commander’s okay. What Commander wants an extra, useless body aboard? But the affirmative came back like a ricochet. Now I know why, I think. He wants a favor for a favor.

The Commander’s moods are a ship’s moods. The men mirror their god-captain. He’s aware of that and must live the role every minute. This’s been the iron law of ships since the Phoenician mariners went down to the sea.

The role makes the Old Man’s problem that much more desperate. He’s tearing himself apart trying to keep his command from going sour. And he thinks he’s failing.

So now he can’t open up at all.

I now dread the future for more than the usual reasons. This is a miserably long patrol. And it’s demonstrated repeatedly that the best Climber crew, highly motivated and well-officered, can start disintegrating.

More than once the Commander tracked me down and asked me to accompany him to the wardroom.

He makes a ritual of our visit. First he gives Kreigshauser a carefully measured bit of coffee. Just enough for two cups. There’s been no regularly brewed real coffee since we learned we’d be on beacon-to-beacon patrol. What we call coffee, and brew daily, is made with a caffeine-rich Canaan bush-twig that has a vague coffee taste. That’s what the Commander drinks during his morning ritual. After yielding his treasure, the Old Man stares into infinity and sucks the stem of his tireless pipe. He hasn’t smoked in an age. The old hands say he won’t till he decides to attack.

“You’re going to chew that stem through.”

He peers at the pipe as if surprised to find it in his hand. He turns it this way and that, studying the bowl. Finally, he takes a tiny folding knife and scrapes a fleck off the meerschaum. He then plunges it into a pocket already bulging with pens, pencils, markers, a computer stylus, a hand calculator, and his personal notebook. I’d love to see his notes. Maybe he writes revelations to himself.

He has his ritual question. “Well, what do you think so far?”

What’s to think? “I’m an observer. The fourth estate’s eido.” My response is a ritual, too. I can never think of anything flip, or anything to start him talking. We drift through these things, waiting for a change.