Passage at Arms (2 page)

Now I can feel the earth tremors generated by departing lifters. They leave at ten-second intervals, ‘round Canaan’s! twenty-two-hour and fifty-seven-minute clock. They come in | varying sizes. Even the little ones are bigger than barns. They! are simply gift boxes packed with goodies for the Fleet.

The Commander wants me. He’s leaning toward me, wearing his mocking grin. “Three klicks to go. Think we’ll make it?”

I ask if he’s giving odds.

His blue eyes roll skyward. His colorless lips form a thin smile. The gentlemen of the other firm are playing with bigger firecrackers now. The flashes splatter his face, tattooing it with light and shadow.

He looks twice his chronological age. He’s losing hair in front. His features are cragged and lined. It’s hard to believe this came of the pink, plump cherub face I knew in Academy.!

The gyrations of the brown girl’s tracked rack bother him not at all. He seems to take some perverse pleasure in being! slung around.

Something is going on upstairs. It makes me nervous. The aerial show is picking up. This isn’t any drill. The interceptions are taking place in the troposphere now. Choirs of ground-based weapons are testing their voices. They sing in dull crackles and booms. The carrier’s roar and rumble only partially drown them.

Halos of fire brand the night.

A violin-string tautness edges Yanevich’s words as he observes, “Drop coming down.”

Magic words. Ensign Bradley, the other new fish, sheds his harness and stands, knuckles whitening as he grips the side of the carrier. Our Torquemada wheel-woman decides this is the moment to show us what her chariot will do. Bradley plunges toward the gap left by the removal of a defective rear loading ramp. He’s so startled he doesn’t yelp. Westhause and I snag fists full of jumper as he lunges past.

“Are you crazy?” Westhause demands. He sounds bewildered. I know what he’s feeling. I feel that way when I watch a parachute jump. Any damn fool ought to know better than that.

“I wanted to see...”

The Commander says, “Sit down, Mr. Bradley. You don’t want to see so bad you get your ass retired before you start your first mission.”

“Not to mention the inconvenience,” Yanevich adds. “It’s too late to come up with another Ship’s Services Officer.”

I commiserate with Bradley. I want to see, too. “How long before the dropships arrive?”

I’ve seen the tapes. My seat harness feels like a straitjacket. Caught on the ground, in the open. The enemy coming. A Navy man’s nightmare.

They don’t bother with my question. Only the enemy knows what he’s doing. That adds to my unease.

Marines, Planetary Defense soldiers, Guardsmen, they can handle the exposure. They’re trained for it. They know what to do when a raider bottoms her drop run. I don’t. We don’t. Navy people need windowless walls, control panels, display tanks, in order to face their perils calmly.

Even Westhause has run out of things to say. We watch the sky and wait for that first hint of ablation glow.

Turbeyville boasted a downed dropship. It was a hundred meters of Stygian lifting body half-buried in rubble. There is a stop frame I’ll carry a long time. A tableau. Steam escaping the cracked hull, colored by a vermilion dawn. Very picturesque.

That boat was pushing mach 2 when her crew lost her, yet she went in virtually intact. The real damage happened inside.

I decided to shoot some interiors. One look changed my mind. The shields and inertial fields that preserved the hull juiced its occupants. Couldn’t tell they had been guys pretty much like us, only a little taller and blue, with mothlike antennae instead of ears and noses. Ulantonids, from Ulant, their name for their homeworld. “Those chaps got an early out,” the Commander told me. He sounded as if he envied them.

The sight left him in a thoughtful mood. After one or two false starts, he said, “Strange things happen. Patrol before last we raised a troop transport drifting in norm. One of ours. Not a thing wrong with her. Not a soul on board, either. You never! know. Anything can happen.”

“Looks like we’ll get in ahead of them,” Yanevich says.

I check the sky. I can’t fathom the omens he’s reading.

The surface batteries stop clearing their throats and begin singing in earnest. The Commander gives Yanevich a derisive glance. “Seems to be shit flying everywhere, First Officer.”

“Make a liar out of me,” the Lieutenant growls. He flings a ferocious scowl at the sky.

Eye-searing graser flashes illuminate the rusting bones of once-mighty buildings. In one surreal, black-and-white, line-on-line instant I see an image which captures the sterile essence of this war. I swing my camera up and snap the picture, but too late to nail it.

Way up there, at least three stories, balanced on an I-beam, a couple were making it. Standing up. Holding on to nothing but each other.

The Commander saw them, too. “We’re on our way.”

I try to glimpse his facial response. He wears the same blank mask. “Is that a non sequitur, Commander?”

“That was Chief Holtsnider,” Westhause says. How the hell does he know? He’s sitting facing me. The coupling was going on over his left shoulder. “Leading Energy Gunner. Certifiable maniac. Says a good-bye up there before every mission. A quick, slick patrol if he gets his nuts off. The same for her ship if she gets hers. She’s a Second Class Fire Control Tech off Johnson’s Climber.” He gives me a sick grin. “You almost snapped a living legend of the Fleet.”

Crew segregation by sex is an unpleasantry unique to the Climbers. I haven’t been womanizing that much in integrated society, but I’m not looking forward to a period of enforced abstinence. There’s something about having somebody else cut you off that does things to your mind.

The folks back home don’t hear the disadvantages. The holonets concentrate on swaggering leave-takers and glory stuff that brings in the volunteers.

Climbers are the only Navy ship-type spacing without integrated crews. No other vessel produces pressure like a Climber. Adding the volatile complication of sex is suicidal. They found that out early.

I can understand the reasons. They don’t help me like it any better.

I met Commander Johnson and her officers in Turbeyville. They taught me that, under like pressures, women are as morally destitute as the worst of men, judged by peacetime standards.

What are peacetime standards worth these days? With them and a half-dozen Conmarks you can buy a cup of genuine Old Earth coffee. Price six Conmarks on the black market.

The first dropship whips in along the carrier’s backtrail, taking us by surprise. Her sonic wake seizes the vehicle, gives it one tremendous shake, and deafens me momentarily. Somehow the others get their hands to their ears in time. The dropper becomes a glowing deltoid moth depositing her eggs in the sea.

“There’s some new lifters that’ll need to be built,” Westhause says. “Let’s hope what we lost were Citron Fours.”

My harness is suddenly a trap. Panic hits me. How can I get away if I’m strapped down?

The Commander touches me gently. His touch has a surprisingly calming effect. “Almost there. A few hundred meters.”

The carrier stops almost immediately. “You’re a prophet.” It’s a strain, trying to sound settled. That damned open sky mocks our human vulnerability, throwing down great bolts of laughter at our puniness.

A second dropper cracks overhead and leaves her greetings. A lucky ground weapon has bitten a neat round hole from her flank. She trails smoke and glowing fragments. She wobbles. I missed covering my ears again. Yanevich and Bradley help me out of the carrier.

Bradley says, “Bad shields on that one.” He sounds about two kilometers away. Yanevich nods.

“Wonder if they’ll ever get her back up.” The First Watch! Officer commiserates with fellow professionals.

I stumble several times clambering through the ruins. The boom must have scrambled my equilibrium.

The entrance to the Pits is well hidden. It’s just another shadow among the piles, a man-sized hole leading into one of war’s middens. The rubble isn’t camouflage. Guards in full | combat gear loaf inside, waiting to clear new debris when the last dropship finishes her run, hoping there’ll be no work to do.

We trudge through the poorly lit halls of a deep subbasement. Below them lie the Pits, a mix of limestone cavern and wartime construction far beneath the old city. We have to walk down four long, dead escalators before we find one still working. The constant pounding takes its toll. A series of escalators carries us another three hundred meters into Canaan’s skin.

My duffel, all my worldly possessions, is stuffed into one canvas bag. It masses exactly twenty-five kilos. I had to moan and whine and beg to get the extra ten for cameras and notebooks. The crew, including the Old Man, are allowed only fifteen.

The last escalator dumps us on a catwalk overlooking a cavern vaster than any dozen stadia.

“This is chamber six,” Westhause says. “They call it the I Big House. There are ten all told, and two more being excavated.”

The place is as warm with frenetic activity. There are people everywhere, although most of them are doing nothing. The majority are sleeping, despite the industrial din. Housing remains a low priority in the war effort.

“I thought Luna Command was crowded.”

“Almost a million people down here. They can’t get them to move to the country.”

Half a hundred production and packaging lines chug along below us. Their operators work on a dozen tiers of steel grate. The cavern is one vast, insanely huge jungle gym, or perhaps the nest of a species of technological ant. The rattle, clatter, and clang are as dense as the ringing round the anvils of hell. Maybe it was in a place like this that the dwarfs of Norse mythology hammered out their magical weapons and armor.

Jury-rigged from salvaged machinery, ages obsolete, the plant is the least sophisticated one I’ve ever seen. Canaan became a fortress world by circumstance, not design. It suffered from a malady known as strategic location. It still hasn’t gotten the hang of the stronghold business.

“They make small metal and plastic parts here,” Westhause explains. “Machined parts, extrusion moldings, castings. Some microchip assemblies. Stuff that can’t be manufactured on TerVeen.”

“This way,” the Commander says. “We’re running late. No time for sight-seeing.”

The balcony enters a tunnel. The tunnel leads toward the sea, if I have my bearings. It debouches in a smaller, quieter cavern. “Red tape city,” Westhause says. The natives apparently don’t mind the epithet. There’s a big new sign proclaiming:

WELCOME TO

REDTAPECITY

PLEASE DO NOT

EAT THE NATIVES

There’s a list of department titles, each with its pointing arrow. The Commander heads toward Outbound Personnel Processing.

Westhause says, “The caverns you didn’t see are mainly warehouses, or lifter repair and assembly, or loading facilities. Have to replace our losses.” He grins. Why do I get the feeling he’s setting me up? “The next phase is the dangerous one. No defenses on a lifter but energy screens. Can’t even dodge. Shoots out of the silo like a bullet, right to TerVeen. The other firm always takes a couple potshots.”

“Then why have planetside leave? Why not stay on TerVeen?” The shuttling to and fro claims lives. It makes no military sense.

“Remember how crazy the Pregnant Dragon was? And that place was just for officers. TerVeen isn’t big enough to take that from three or four squadrons. It’s psychological. After a patrol people need room to wind down.”

‘To get rid of soul pollution?”

“You religious? You’ll get along with Fisherman, sure.”

“No, I’m not.” Who is, these days?

The check-in procedure is pleasantly abbreviated. The woman in charge is puzzled by me. She putzes through my orders, points with her pen. I follow the others toward our launch silo where a crowd of men and women are waiting to board the lifter. The presence of officers does nothing to soften the exchange of insults and frank propositions.

The lifter is a dismal thing. One of the old, small ones. The Citron Four type Westhause wants scrubbed. The passenger compartment is starkly functional. It contains nothing but a bio-support system and a hundred acceleration cocoons, each hanging like a sausage in some weird smoking frame, or a new variety of banana that loops between stalks. I prefer couches myself, but that luxury is not to be found aboard a troop transport.

“Go-powered coffin,” the Commander says. “That’s what ground people call the Citron Four.”

“Shitron Four,” Yanevich says.

Westhause explains. Explaining seems to be his purpose in life. Or maybe I’m the only man he knows who listens, and he’s cashing in while his chips are hot. “Planetary Defense gives all the cover they can, but losses still run one percent. They get their share of personnel lifters. Some months we lose more people here than on patrol.”

I consider the obsolete bio-support system, glance at the fitting they implanted in my forearm back in Academy, a thousand years ago. Can this antique really keep my system cleansed and healthy?

“You and the support system make prayer look attractive.”

The Commander chuckles. “The Big Man wouldn’t be listening. Why should he worry about a gimp-legged war correspondent making a scat fly from one pimple on the universe’s ass to another? He’s got a big crapshoot going on over in the Sombrero.”

“Thanks.”

“You asked for it.”

“One of these days I’ll learn to keep my balls from overloading my brain.”

For the others the launch is routine. Even the first mission people have been up this ladder before, during training. They jack in and turn off. I live out several little eternities. It doesn’t get any easier when our pilot says, “We punched up through a dropship pair, boys and girls. Should have seen them tap dancing to get out of the way.”

My laugh must sound crazy. A dozen nearby cocoons twist. Disembodied faces give me strange, almost compassionate looks. Then their eyes begin closing. What’s happening?

The bio-support system, into which we have jacked for the journey, is slipping us mickeys. Curious. Coming in to Canaan I didn’t need a thing.