Passage at Arms (19 page)

“I didn’t consider the screens,” Piniaz grumbles.

“Better consider the subjective time differential, too,” I suggest.

“I thought of that. Ain’t much, but it’s to our advantage.”

“And the Doppler on your energy beams?”

“Considered. Damned toy cannon.”

“You could still try. If we’re close enough to shoot, they’ll shoot back. If they’re armed. They’ll have to break screens to do it.”

“Put a two-centimeter ball into a ten-centimeter shield gap with a point-four-second endurance on a target moving at point-four cee? From how far away? Shit. Shit and more shit. Why’re we chasing these clowns, anyway? They aren’t exactly what you’d call a major threat to the universe. Ain’t there a goddamned convoy somewhere?”

“Guess the Admiral thinks it would be a propaganda coup.”

“Shit.” Piniaz’s vocabulary is suffering. “It’ll just piss them off over there. You don’t keep kicking a guy when he’s out of it. They’ll start kicking back.”

“I’ll tell old Fred next time we take tea together.” I don’t know what it is about Piniaz. He can aggravate a stone just by standing beside it.

My antipathy is, in part, prejudice against his origins. I know it, and probably am overcompensating. Piniaz’s dark little features are tight. He can guess my thoughts. “You do that. And tell him from me... Never mind.”

The eido hasn’t been fingered.

Piniaz didn’t reach his present status by letting Outworlders get his goat. He knows how to play the game.

It’s a game in which the Outworlds’ elite have rigged the rules, though not quite enough to keep him from beating them on their own terms.

I respect the man despite disliking him. More than I respect my own kind. My people aren’t brought up being told they’re the dregs of the human race.

Still... Old Earthers have an infuriating habit of blaming the motherworld’s problems on the rest of us. And they’re disgustingly consistent in their refusal to help themselves. We Outworlders are expected to carry them simply because Old Earth is the motherworld.

We all have prejudices. Piniaz should resent me less than the others. I make an attempt to control mine.

Varese tells Old Earther stories in Piniaz’s presence. His favorite goes, “You hear about the Old Earther who comes home from the Social Insurance office and finds his woman in bed with another man?”

Someone will say, “No.”

“He runs to the closet, grabs his Teng Hua, points it at his own head. His woman starts laughing at him. He yells, ‘What’s so funny, bitch? You’re next.’”

There are several false assumptions in the story. There are in all Old Earther jokes. Welfare status. Extreme stupidity. Promiscuity. Universal possession of a Teng Hua hand laser. And so on.

Varese makes me ashamed of my breed when he does that.

After touring the ship I evict Fearless from my hammock. It’s become the cat’s favorite loafing place. He isn’t often disturbed.

I can’t sleep. The prospect of action doesn’t excite me anymore. All I want is to go home. I’m tired of the Climbers. I’m sorry I had the idea. Please, can I take it back? No? Damn.

Sleep sneaks up on me eventually. I have my best nap since coming aboard, a solid twelve hours that end only because Fearless starts a flamenco on my chest.

“You’re getting goddamned bold, cat.”

The animal places chin on paws four centimeters from my face. He closes his good eye. The warmth of him, the quick patter of his heart, leak through my grimy shirt.

“You’d better not have fleas.”

Fearless twitches disdainfully, resumes his snooze.

I don’t know why I’ve been selected main friend for the patrol. I can put up with cats, but comprehend them no better than women. This one lives like a prince. He has forty-nine lackeys keeping his castle for him.

I scratch his ears. He rewards me with a gravelly purr and a few gentle nips at my finger.

The shrill cry of the general alarm shatters our interlude.

I make Ops with time to spare, wondering how I slept through the alarm when we dropped hyper.

I didn’t. The story I get is, Westhause was whipping the ship through complex search loops as he approached the new operational area. Fishermen got something on screen.

I didn’t expect such quick results.

Glancing over Junghaus’s shoulder, I see that we have not lucked onto our quarry.

Of course not. The target would generate no tachyon disturbances running in norm. “One of ours?” I slide into the First Watch Officer’s seat.

Fisherman smiles. Yanevich grins. The Commander says, “Very good. Which one?”

I shrug. “A Climber, but I’ve only seen textbook plates. They just show the basics.”

“Johnson’s. That teensy lump on the arch of the fourth feather.”

I glance at Westhause. He’s pounding program keys like a mad organist.

Climbers have no instel. Smart operators communicate, in pidgin at close ranges, with behavior and the detection gear.

I give the Old Man a look.

“No hanky-panky, sir. Wouldn’t think of it. There’s a war on, you know. That’s serious business.”

Yanevich whispers, “We’ll drop hyper and trade search patterns. Two of us working will find where she isn’t real quick.”

“How can we learn anything without going norm?”

He looks at me oddly. “We’re norm now. Hadn’t you noticed? We’ve been norm one minute in five for the last six hours. We’re not up to the mark yet, but we thought we’d get the routine pat. Haven’t you been paying attention?”

“The alarms...” Better keep my mouth shut. I slept through one of my watches.

“Jesus. You think I’m going to bang that mother all year long? Screw the regulations. People have to sleep. Speaking of which, where were you on the eight to twelve?”

What can I say? There’s no excuse.

“Not to worry, Mr. Better-Late-Than-Never. The Recorder hears the alarm. That’s good enough for us.” Yanevich manages the grin the Commander can’t quite produce. “You learn these little tricks. The Recorder remembers what we want it to remember. They know what’s going on at Mission Review. They’ve been out here, too. As long as it doesn’t endanger the ship, and doesn’t leave out anything important, they let it slide. Got to be flexible. That’s what they told us in Academy, wasn’t it?”

“Maybe. This isn’t the Navy I knew.”

“Yeah?”

“I thought wartime would get the regs pushed harder.”

“You’re in the Climbers now.” He laughs. “What’s it matter? Long as we don’t buy you a seat on Hecate’s Horse? At least you got some sleep.” His smile grows thin. “I’ll get that back. Stand watch and stand again till you catch up.”

It’s not as bad as I expected. Piniaz is the sort of watch officer who stays out of the way. He makes his presence felt only when he joins Chief Nicastro in making sure Westhause’s pre-programmed jumps are putting the ship into the right places in the search pattern. The astrogator can’t be on the job all the tune, though he does sleep less than anyone else.

Yanevich’s shipboard title is a misnomer this patrol. The Commander himself has taken the first watch. Yanevich really has the second. Piniaz has the third. In Line ships the Astrogation Officer normally stands the third watch. In Climbers that usually falls to the Ship’s Services Officer. The Commander is kept free.

The Old Man thinks our Ensign too green. In the quiet passages, though, he brings Bradley in for a watch. He hands it to me at times, too. Sometimes Diekereide takes a turn? “just in case.” The Commander has even dragged Varese in on rare occasion. One of an officer’s unwritten duties is to learn everything possible. It may save your ship someday.

Watch schedules don’t mean much aboard a Climber, except to officers, who assume four-hour chunks of responsibility. The men come and go. In Ops Chiefs Nicastro and Canzoneri just make sure that the critical stations are manned. In Weapons Chiefs Bath and Holtsnider do the same.

In Engineering, where they stand six on and six off and most of the stations must be continuously manned, life is more structured.

Our first program, beginning at the target’s last known position, yields nothing. Westhause develops another while we wait for Johnson. It’s a waste of time. Johnson got a sniff of neutrino emissions.

The news subtly alters everyone. Within minutes the men are near their combat stations again. The banter fades to an occasional obscene remark, either too loud or too forced.

Boredom is dead. The men have a sharper edge than past appearance would suggest. The Commander has done his job well.

Westhause exchanges professional chatter with his colleague aboard the other Climber. The Old Man and First Watch Officer hover close.

Two hours later. We begin quartering the region where Johnson got her neutrino readings. She dances with us, our two radii of detection barely overlapping.

I’m alert and interested, though not in my screen. I want to catch every nuance in each man’s stance, movement, expression. I want to see the subtle alterations in speech patterns that betray emotion.

The Commander demonstrates the most marked change. It’s a matter of intensity. Some internal switch has closed. Suddenly, he has a truly commanding presence. The men respond without words being spoken. Their eyes flick to bun, then back to then” work.

The Climber has come ah’ve. The shark has caught the smell of blood.

This new Commander is the man I came to Canaan to see, the man who was usurped by a bitter, unfathomable stranger sailing without a compass. The doubts and fears and alum-flavored self-despite have been set aside.

He has his effect on me, too. My nerves settle. He will get us through.

What’s happening inside his head? Has he set it all aside and let duty take control? His thinking remains impenetrable even during his most open moments. For all I know, he’s scared shitless.

The new search program has both ships covering a tiny chunk of space in one-minute hyper translations, and closing the communications gap each half hour.

During the first half hour we get a dozen neutrino readings.

“Intensity?” the Commander demands after the last.

“High, Commander.”

“Direction? Estimated course line?” This is tricky business here. Like cutting the beam of a handflash at a kilometer, at an angle, in a microsecond, and trying to guess where the flash is and where it’s heading if it’s moving.

Rose and Canzoneri curse and mutter incantations over their thinking devil. The devil puts numbers into the Chief’s mouth.

“Put it in the tank,” the Old Man orders.

The display tank flickers to a slight adjustment. It gives a skewed view, with the Climber at one boundary. The ship casts a thin cone of red shadow across the tank.

“Got her within twenty degrees of arc,” Canzoneri says. A thin black pencil stroke lances down the heart of the red cone. “Baseline within three degrees of Rathgeber.”

“Range?”

“Indeterminate.” Of course. We’d have to know what kind of ship she is to guess her distance from the intensity of her neutrino output here.

“Very well. Mr. Westhause, let’s see what the Squadron Leader has.”

The net is closing. Johnson’s data should pull it tighter.

Time drags. I fidget. Two hunting Climbers leave a lot of tachyon traces. Those people hear us coming. They’ll be on their toes. Right now they’re filing their teeth and calling their big brothers.

The Commander grins as if reading my thoughts. “Don’t worry. Our team is sending in the best we have.”

“Waiting gracefully isn’t one of my virtues.”

The others are more patient. They’ve been schooled for this. As I should know by now, 99 percent of Climber duty consists of waiting.

Can they keep their edge till contact?

Johnson has enough data. We narrow the hunting zone to the size of a backyard garden. Time to go kick the rabbit out of the lettuce patch.

We jump knowing we’ll meet the other firm within hours.

We drop hot on the trail. The neutrino gear sings and pops. We can’t be more than a few light hours behind. Westhause and his co-conspirator confer only briefly. The computers commune. We translate again.

We almost bracket her this time. On infrared I can pick out the long, wild rapier of ions blowing behind her. Even on max enhancement I can get no image of the ship. She has her black warpaint on and is moving too damned fast.

“Jesus God in a canoe!” Berberian murmurs. “Commander! Check the size of this blip.”

The target is millions of kilometers away already.

“Commander, she’s started a turn,” Berberian adds.

At her velocity it’ll be a vast, lazy arc, and the best evasive maneuver available, especially if she keeps it irregular. There’s no way we can keep her in radar range for more than a few seconds.

“Chasing after wind, eh?” The Commander is whispering to Fisherman. I barely catch it. The TD operator nods. The Old Man notes my interest. “Silly pastime, eh?”

“We’ll need luck. Or they’ll have to do something stupid.”

“They won’t. They don’t anymore. We’ve taught them too well.”

“Here she comes!”

Startled, I look round wildly, then glare at my screen. Westhause has translated us into the fugitive’s path. For an instant I catch a glimmer that must be Johnson firing.

“That the Squadron Leader?”

“It is,” the Commander replies. “She’ll attack. We’ll observe.”

“Commander!” Chief Canzoneri shouts. “That’s no logistic hull. That’s a goddamned Leviathan Main Battle.”

Bright spider’s silk spins across the black satin backdrop from spinnerets on the black widow that is Johnson’s Climber. I stare, enthralled, though it lasts but an instant. We skip again. For a moment I forget to roll my visual tapes.

Skip-fire-skip-fire-skip-fire. How can we do any damage this way? Maybe we’re just getting her measure.... Canzoneri says the Squadron Leader is tickling her round her bows. I’ll have to take his word for it.

A nova takes life at the lase-fire’s source.

The next few minutes get lost. My stomach falls out from under me. My mind goes numb. Somebody is groaning. I don’t know if it’s me or someone else.

Throdahl is saying, over and over, “Oh, shit. Oh, holy fuck. Brenda.” His voice is soft, his words are quick. He speaks without inflection.